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Break My Heart:: How To Dial Up The Emotional Appeal of Your Songs
Break My Heart:: How To Dial Up The Emotional Appeal of Your Songs
Songs can make people jump up and dance… or shut up and listen.
They can make people start belting in the car with their friends… or
curate a wedding playlist.
The audience’s reaction can be immediate. Listeners may not be
able to tell you exactly why they love a particular song. Just that they
love how it makes them feel.
Everyone feels emotion, but not everyone knows how to express it.
Here’s where you come in: writing songs. S ongs are all about
emotion, and good songs elicit strong emotional responses. They
can literally make people feel – up, down, mellow, angry, sexy, in love,
sorrowful, and everything in between.
Writing a song that your audience can instantly relate to is a
two-stage journey. There’s what you express and how your audience
responds to it. The things that move people are not always obvious.
There’s good news. It’s possible for you to deliberately ramp up
the level of emotion in your songs, regardless of the actual
emotion you're going for or the genre you're working in.
By combining subtle techniques and broad brushstrokes, you can
amplify a song’s emotion. Here are three things that influence the
listener’s emotional response: the words you use, the chords you
choose, a nd the melody you make.
#1: The Words You Use
Lyrics are meant to be heard rather than read. They have to be
impactful and easily remembered. But most of all, they should evoke
an emotional response. Emotive language makes an audience f eel
something. The words you choose at every level of your song
contribute to the emotions your audience will feel.
Here are two great examples:
This is the first part of verse 1 of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse.
He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
For sure, she’s using rhyme and alliteration. But most of all, she’s
being uncompromisingly direct with sexually explicit language. The
message she’s sending is both upset and angry. She’s gutted. It
confronts and enthralls an audience right away. Provocative, possibly
shocking, but you can’t wait to hear more.
Look at Hozier’s chorus of T ake Me to Church.
Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life
Think about the nouns and v erbs he chooses – church, worship, dog,
shrine, sharpen, knife, death, God. They a ll act as emotional triggers
in the song’s challenge to religious hypocrisy and sexual orientation,
using language of sacrifice: l et me give you my life!
In both these examples, there are no wasted words. N o fillers.
Both lyrics express large and vulnerable emotions concisely.
Finding the right emotional intensity in your lyrics depends on how
you want us to feel. Remember, we (your audience) love to listen to
emotional songs with high impact! Review your draft lyrics. Move
them from conceptual, complex, or strictly factual to emotive and
powerful by hitting the synonym switch.
Try substituting words that are “just ok” for words that slap you in
the face. Use an o nline thesaurus to open up the possibilities.
Use it on your nouns – is this new love or is it like a virgin?
Use it on your adjectives and nouns – is it a car or a little red
Corvette?
Use it on your verbs – do I go to you or am I r unning up that hill?
Use a whole phrase – m y momma don’t like you and she likes
everyone.
Then, there’s the music.
#2: The Chords You Choose
The harmony in your song provides an emotional canvas that creates
movement, tension, a
nd resolution. Your audience doesn’t often
realize this. But you should, because you can use harmony to embed
emotion into your song.
At a basic level, major keys tend to create a positive, “happier” mood.
While a minor key can set up a more downbeat, “cooler” feeling. But
you can build tension and release – smaller “push-pull” moments –
within your chord progression.
A very well-known one is where the f ifth or V -chord (dominant)
resolves to the I -chord (tonic). Let’s take the major chord progression
I-IV-V-I, e.g., C-F-G-C. The fifth chord (V) – G major in this case –
creates a short moment of tension. That tension is relieved by
playing the I chord when you finish with C major.
You can heighten this uneasy feeling by adding a s eventh t o your
fifth chord. G major is a triad made up of 3 notes: G, B, and D. If you
add the seventh note of the scale, you make G7 – G, B, D, and F.
This gives an even more unstable edge to the progression C-F-G7-C.
And you could make it longer as C -F-G-G7-C. It makes hitting the
final C major even more satisfying. The resolution will feel even more
satisfying to your listeners, even if they don’t realize it’s happening.
You can add small elements of tension into your songs by using
chord extensions. E
xtended chords have added (extended) notes
beyond the seventh. Commonly, they use the second, fourth, and
sixth notes of a scale but an octave up. So they’re called ninths,
elevenths, and thirteenths.
Sounds complicated, but it can be very simple. For example, check
out America’s A Horse With No Name‘s Em9 – D6/9 progression.
Suspended chords are a great source of emotion. They work by
removing the third of the chord (the note that tells us if a chord is
major or minor). It’s replaced with the fourth (e.g., C
sus4 = C F G) or
the second (e.g., C
sus2 – C D G). They give a sense of space and
motion.
Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ runs entirely between F, Fsus4, and Fsus2.
But you can also throw a suspended chord in just once in your
progression, e.g., C
-Csus2-F-G-G7-C.
Use non-diatonic, or “out of scale” c
hords that aren’t found in the
key you’ve picked. They can bring surprise and intrigue to your song.
Usually this means substituting a chord that’s normally major for a
minor or vice versa.
Radiohead d id both with two non-diatonic chords in C reep.
Diatonic chords used in their chosen key of G major are:
Creep’s progression should be G major - B
minor - C
major - C major
again. But instead, they decided to mix it up and create a creepy
feeling: G major - B major (r ather than B minor) - C
major - C minor
(rather than just C major).
Using these non-diatonic chords creates that fantastic “unexpected”
feeling.
Now let’s move on to the catchiest part of the song: the melody.
Melodies are made from small groups of notes, called motifs, that
are r epeated in patterns.
And it’s Goldilocks time! Too much repetition, we get bored. Not
enough repetition, we get lost. It’s gotta be just right, and definitely
singable.
We need contrast and surprises too. But the whole thing has to hang
together so we hear it as a tune in its entirety rather than unrelated
chunks of music.
Sometimes lyrics will dictate the r hythm of the melody and,
therefore, its emotional color. Slow, descending long notes come
across as calming, while short staccato or rapidly repeating notes
tend to add excitement to the song.
But melody can also change how we deliver words. A famous
example is the way Whitney Houston sang Dolly Parton’s song, I Will
Always Love You. Extra time on each syllable emphasizes the
emotional weight.
Melodies can ascend or descend note by note in steps, in short
jumps or skips, and larger distances or l eaps.
The relative distance in pitch between notes is called an interval.
Intervals can charge a melody with so much feeling that the interval
can be a song’s “signature.” Listen to the octave jump in S omewhere
Over the Rainbow.
Here are some more examples of songs’ signature intervals to wrap
your ears around.
We can cope with big leaps if there’s repetition and a stepwise
resolution after a leap. Or after a drop like in Michael Jackson’s
chorus for M an in the Mirror. B
ut add too many leaps or falls, and
you start to mess with singability.
Starting and ending n otes contribute to how emotionally settled
your song is. Starting every note on the first beat of the bar on the
tonic (I) quickly becomes static and, well... boring. However, hitting
the tonic or root note in your chorus can land your song back at
home base.
Great songs have the ability to stir our emotions instantly with a
heady combination of powerful lyrics, well chosen chords, and
memorable melodies.
To truly reveal the emotional core of your song, focus on each of
these crucial components when you’re writing. Try out some of the
steps above in your songwriting process. Think about what changes
you could make, big or small, to turn the ‘feelings dial’ up another
notch. We’ll love you for it!