How to write songs - part 1

I have a confession to make.

Even though I see myself as a songwriter, I low-key avoid teaching others how to write songs. I have thought long and hard about why that is, and I think an aspect of that is not wanting to pick apart the ‘magic’ of it - I rarely write with an intentional formula, just something laying heavy on my spirit.

To be even more honest, I even go as far as not to analyse or ‘learn’ a lot of my favourite songs, in case the joy of listening to them dissipates. 

But something I’ve learned along this teaching journey is the importance of steps, examples and frameworks. They make the seemingly impossible possible. And that brings me to today. Someone posted a few days ago on a music Discord I am part of, and no one had answered the question yet. I thought I’d share my response here. 

On writing ambiguous love songs: 

It might sound really cheesy but I would say to write from the heart initially. You don’t know what you don’t know, so starting from actual experiences and emotions might be a good place to start. 

Perhaps before writing, you can think about what it feels like, and start to create some metaphors around the experiences. It could even be an exercise in writing a poem before lyrics? I’ve really enjoyed writing songs to a friend’s poetry before; their writing style was a lot more vague than mine. I think doing this over time had an impact on my own lyric writing If you journal, you could review the times other people impacted you enough to reflect on that, and find ways to incorporate into your lyrics, e.g. “wise men say only fools rush in” or “I heard there was a secret chord”.  

After writing if it feels too literal you can run an exercise where you omit / exchange selected 1st, 2nd or 3rd person narratives. That being said, clever use of those narratives can still have a song feel ambitious but be about love (listen to All I Need by Radiohead). Analysing a playlist of some of your favourite songs that achieve the lyric style you are aiming for might be useful as well. 

Lastly, I wouldn’t worry about it not seeming ambiguous enough - there are tons of (IMO) great love songs that people connect to even though they are so literal/personal. ‘Blueberry Pancakes’ and ‘Lover you should have come over’ and ‘I will always love you’ come to mind. I remember playing a song to a colleague once, which I thought was literal and personal and they told me they were making connections to their experiences whilst listening to it and could see others doing the same.

Bringing this back to a primary school level, there was an interesting twitter thread discussion started by fellow music educator Kate Miner on year 6 songwriting- you can check that out here.