The Vocabulary Trick | Songwriting Advice

 

An idea for a song is one thing; having a lot to say about it is another thing and it can be the reason a song stays unfinished as a verse and a chorus without anywhere else to go.

I present The Vocabulary Trick or the catagory compilation. This is something I've noticed in artists who actually write their own songs. They may leak a few lyrical themes across their work, and it shows the very human instinct or consiquence of being one person- your vocabulary can become recognisable. While I like to think I use all the possible words becuase I've been speaking this language for my whole life; I certianly don't know nor feel the need to use every word invented.

Our vocabularies reflect the world we live in. Sometimes we want to write a song that isn't from our own world. Therefore before you begin, it's a really good idea to collect more words that will help to build up that world and to better express the ideas you wan the song to carry.

I'm going to begin an on going word bank that'll be searchable by topic. I could at least construct a vocab list before jumping into any new song, but this tags on to another great songwriting tip; writing the ideas down for a while before you start. For example, Ed Sheeran said he was able to write A Team in 20 minutes because he had been collecting things that rhymed for a month or so "Johnny’s in the class A team," then "face crumbeling like pastry" and so on. What I'll be doing is similar but I'll be more ongoing and not so much about the rhyme.

I think one of the strongest exapmles of this kind of thinking or preplanning is Royals by Lorde. In that song there is a lot of obvious references to stuff that together paint a dynamic picture to play with and a world where the idea of the song exsists. And actually some easily connected words that are all used to futher support the ideas after they're introduced:

Town - Address - postcode

Royal - blood - ruler - queen

Hotel - bathroom - cocktails - Luxe - dimonds - jet planes - ball gowns - timepiece - cars

Fantasy - dream - tripping - buzz

From here we could easily extend these groups of words and write completly different song even if we web out from these assosiated words some more. If there is a song you want to write that involves an idea or feeling, you can absolutely utilise the objects that are often associated with that idea in order to get your idea across faster. Relying on exsiting connections is how everyone from advertising, to costume designers, to songwriters and other art styles use the world around them.

And hey, this may already seem obvious to you. For someone like me with a very abstract style of thinking creating a word bank, especially one dominated by nouns, is a necessary exercise in redirected efforts to round out my skill set. It's normally my intuation that reads the sensory world and translates it into an idea- but when you're songwriting you're meant to translate an idea back to other people through stuff they will recognise.