Spilling Your Guts
There are writers who seem to let you peek into their most innermost thoughts and feelings, those who tap into their own angst and let it all hang out. Many of these are hacks, but some are great at it. What makes those who are great at it ‘great’? Are they being totally honest with their listener? Is that the ‘trick’? There’s no ‘trick’, but usually there’s a lot of technique.
The beauty of songwriting, and for that matter writing in general, is that it lets us listen in on someone else’s internal dialogue. We all have these conversations going on in our head as we weigh the plusses and the minuses of everything from the most mundane to the most important. “Should I merge over to the left? My exit is coming up”, to “Should I marry her? She seems great, but does anyone really know someone?”
When we edit and analyze our work we have to once again attempt to listen to our work with ‘fresh ears’. We need to express our emotional experiences in ways that others can identify with, and more importantly, we need to express these experiences in ways that sound convincing. I think it’s important to bring a certain emotional honesty to our work. It’s difficult for some, but the listener will sense when lyrics are less than emotionally honest. Notice that I didn’t just say ‘honest’. The lyricist can take liberties with the truth and in some ways get closer to it. In speaking about novels, the novelist George Sand said, “Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life”, and I think the same can be said for well-crafted songs. The important thing is to remain true to the emotional message you’re trying to convey.
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Jim Bruno's Songwriting Class 