Journaling to mine your own experiences for lyric ideas is a staple of the songwriting craft. Keeping a daily record is a great practice, but if you’re like me and you’ve had some major lapses in that record, don’t let that stop you from starting again, or starting for the first time.

Journals can take many forms, but are commonly a record of the places you’ve been, the experiences you’ve had, the people you’ve met, the tasks you’ve accomplished and so on. For the purpose of writing powerful, emotion-based songs, you may have to go deeper than that, with a particular focus on exploring how you feel about events and why (this can include your reactions to what is going on the world).

The practice of using concrete imagery to express the emotions you felt during an encounter can bring your journal a step closer to making your experiences relatable to others. Let’s say you are tempted to write something like “I felt sad.” Labeled emotions like ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ tend to fall flat in poetry and lyrics. Although they state an emotion, they rarely invoke an emotion.

“I felt sad” could easily be expressed in a myriad of different ways that invoke the senses through which we feel and interpret the world. That sadness could feel like being ‘cut off,’ ‘punched in the gut,’ ‘drowned,’ or ‘loaded down.’ These expressions, though commonplace, invoke feelings more poignaintly than simply saying, “I’m sad.” Of course, coming up with a novel expression that is easily relatable is even better (some examples to follow).

The same is true for happiness. Would you rather sing about “I’m so happy” (Pharrell Williams) or “I’m walking on sunshine” (Katrina And The Waves)? Both songs were smash international hits, but which title has more emotional punch? What helps Pharrell’s song out of this pitfall is that much of the rest of the lyric translates the phrase “I’m so happy” into more concrete expressions: “like a room without a roof,” “sunshine, she’s here,” “hot air balloon that could go to space,” etc. … lots of repetition, a catchy groove, and ironic pairing with a hit film certainly help as well.

Of course, Elton John and Bernie Taupin sidestep this issue entirely by pairing ‘sad’ with ‘song’ to make it concrete in “Sad Songs (Say So Much).” This is a cool trick that could be applied to many emotions. “Angry Young Man,” “Shiny Happy People,” “Bleeding Love,” and “Creature Fear” are all titles that mix basic emotions with concrete imagery to help conjure feelings in us.

Once you have written a journal entry or two as a springboard, you can get started on your new song. One approach is to use this material from your life to tell a story in song form. Another is to mine your journal for highly-charged, emotional phrases and images and base a song around that. For the first, you’ll want to read the coming article on storytelling. For the latter, you’ll want to read the coming article on media mining (yes, your journal is now ‘media’).

Note: This is an excerpt from the book I’m currently writing, “The Songwriting Adventure.”

Post filed under All UkulelePlay! Blog Posts, Songwriting Adventures.