Simon Hawkins | Songwriter | Author
“Titles are not copyright protected. So if you were to run down your iTunes songs, they are all up for grabs. If you can think of a systematic way of developing new ideas around those same titles, then you have an unlimited source of inspiration just by looking down your iTunes catalog. Wonderful.”
- Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, Chapter 2 - Five Reasons to Use Song Maps
“The listing and ordering of ideas are what we do with Song Maps. It is particularly potent for lyric writing because we have the opportunity to paint different sections in different colors (dark and light), which have the impact of maximizing the emotion impact of what we are trying to say.”
- Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, Chapter 3 - What is Song Mapping?
“Drafting a writable idea is simply the process of assigning elements of a plot to specific sections of your song.”
- Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, Chapter 4 - How to Use Song Maps
“So where we place ideas in our lyrics counts. If we place them in a way that shows love in the face of adversity is count big time. This is why writing in 3D is so powerful. This is why we only develop titles to their full potential if we organize ideas into their most powerful order (a writable idea) and then turn them into amazing lyrics that genuinely tech people when they hear the finished song. This is what we do with Song Maps.”
- Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, Chapter 3 - What is Song Mapping?
“THE MORE YOU HONOR YOUR SONG IDEAS, THE MORE IDEAS WILL ARRIVE.
What I mean by “honor” is, when an idea arrives, whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whoever you’re with, capture it and put it somewhere safe.”
- Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, Chapter 3 - What is Song Mapping?
For songwriting, why is prosody so important? And what is it, anyway?
Here’s a story: Some time ago, I walked along the most beautiful part of this country, along the South Downs. It was spectacular - on the right: sea, miles away - on the left: English countryside at its best. On the way home, I walked close to the station at Amberley, where there was still an old signal box that housed a mechanical set of levers to make sure each train went on the right line. And it reminded me of something about our own beautiful craft: Prosody.
I’ve always thought prosody is a lovely moment when we craft a song with a perfect combination of lyrics and music. And prosody is great, mostly because it enables us to paint a particular emotion with our song, which ultimately is what we try to achieve as songwriters.
But, taking this more in-depth, there are more things we have at our availability when we write a song than thinking about just the words and music. Prosody has two parts:
Phonology
Cognitive
Now, if you’re like me, this is probably too deep to spend too much time talking about anything with an ‘ology’ at the end of a word like that. But, for me as a songwriter, there are some things it can interest me in: my seven levers of prosody.
Looking at the two parts of prosody, there are seven different levers we can use as songwriters (and poets) like the signalman used to pull and push in his signal box:
Chunking - this is whether the syllables are in the right place at the right time in the music. Here’s the rule for stresses (“DUM”) and unstressed (“da”) syllables in a 4/4 staff:
DUM goes on beat 1 or 3
da goes on beat 2 or 4.
Emotion - what’s the emotion in the lyric - well, that’s where the melody needs to go (high or low)
Intonation - 3 T’s - tonality, tonicity, and tone. This is all about sub-syllable parts in threes - a beginning, a middle and an end - then match to the melody, the emotion, as the chucking in 1.
Loudness/stress - production should fix this, often kept to the chorus.
Pitch - higher notes are normally for higher emotion and vice versa. Maybe keep some for the chorus too.
Rhythm (and rhyme) - similar to 1 above for rhythm. Rhyme keeps with the established rhyme scheme, except if there’s no rhymes. Always choose emotion above a sucky rhyme.
Tempo - unless we’re in classical or musical songs, it might be worth keeping to the beats per minute (BPM) constant. But there're no rules, just tools.
There are, in reality, more levers we can pull or push, we can talk about. But for me, these are the major ones.
Am I saying, to be a GRAMMY winner, we have to get a Ph.D. in linguistics? No! In reality, it’s more about the craft than the science of how this works - it’s about the art and emotion matching between our lyrics and music together.
For me, this is what I do:
Find the bumps - having drafted a song - both the lyric and the music - I listen to the complete song to see if there are any “bumps” in there, where the emotions don’t seem to fit together.
Decide which to fix - listen to the bump zone and decide what would be better to fix - the lyric or the music. For me, it’s a lot easier to fix the music because, for me, music is always there.
Fix and review - having fixed it, I listen to it now again with the new lyric or music, asking does it still cause a bump in the song? Do the music and lyric now match perfectly? If not, I go back and have another go.
This is normally not a re-write - just minor things. Things that make all the difference to make it a more powerful song. And, to be honest, if it needs a re-write, that would be fine by me because it’s a lot cheaper to fix something in the writing room than in the studio where it’s demoing.
Here are a few questions for you:
Could there be a bump somewhere in one of your songs?
If you found one and you’ve fixed it, what does it sound like without the bump now?
Is it more powerful because of it ironed out?
This is all about having a song that is packed with emotion the way you intended. Ultimately, it could mean the difference between getting your song cut rather than left unheard.
I hope this helps. And stay safe!
Simon Hawkins
www.simonhawkins.com
Many years ago, when I finally left my corporate day job to become a full-time songwriter, I realized a truth about myself:
The more I knew, the more I knew how much I didn’t know.
It was fun but, to be honest, a little scarier than I was expecting.
It’s a little like when I first started driving. I remember as a child, I used to watch my father driving, and he made it look easy. Safe and secure. But when I started driving myself, it wasn’t quite as simple as I thought.
Well, being a full-time songwriter was also way more difficult than I thought. So, just like I needed a course of driving lessons, I had to go back to school to write songs. Berklee College of Music.
Sure, before I left my day job, there were many years I’d already enjoyed: the incredible journey of harmony, melody, bass, and rhythm. This was one of the most beautiful journeys ever. But for me, there was another journey I needed to embark on - lyrics. And becoming a full-time songwriter, I had to figure out how to write lyrics. This was the onion.
Here’s what happened:
When I started on day 1 of my songwriting career, I thought I needed to learn the skills the size of an onion, one I thought I could hold in my hand.
Right now, as I look at the size of the world of songwriting, it’s the size of a giant onion I can’t even get my arms around. And I continue to learn more things every time I co-write with my wonderful co-writing friends.
To give you a feel of what it looks like, in terms of the world of onions, day 1 of my journey with Song Maps looked like this. And it’s still growing now:
Even now, it’s humbling when I still realize how much I don’t know about my craft, but it’s lovely to still be on a journey.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
There are many layers to learn how to write songs. Just when you feel like you’ve found the top layer, there’s another, more significant layer out there. Each book I consume or course I finish, there is still yet another layer that I needed to understand.
Sometimes, when you get to the core of your writing, it can be a painful process to find out what you are writing about. Just like cutting up an onion.
For me, songwriting has given my life so much greater richness. Imagine how bland life would be without songs! Imagine how bland life would be like without onions!!
Here are a few questions: Where are you on your journey? How big is your onion? Is it still a bigger onion than you thought?
Berklee Music Online courses are generally 12 weeks. Just sayin’.
Simon Hawkins