One of the skills we develop extensively in THE ROOTS involves applying the insight we’ve gained as experts in one area of our lives to our growing expertise as songwriters.  In that spirit, then, we initiate a series of reading selections in the hopes that some of these books might further oil your writerly machinery.  While not songwriting books per se, these books help fill out our toolbox as songwriters.

In Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, brothers Chip and Dan Heath borrow a central concept of  “stickiness” from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and attempt to understand what makes some ideas memorable.  Stickiness describes an idea’s power to be understood and remembered and its capacity to change something else.  As songwriters, we are surely in the business of creating sticky things—hooks the listener will catch herself singing at all hours of the day, lines that wind up as Senior Quotes in high school yearbooks or as status updates on Facebook or MySpace. 

 

The Brothers Heath name six properties of stickiness and arrange them into a clever acronym that spells SUCCESs: Simple - Unexpected - Concrete - Credible - Emotional - Story.  The last “s” goes unused and strikes me as a missed opportunity to make the acronym an acrostic with the last “s” standing for “stick”:  Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories Stick.  (If only that co-write involved a royalty check.)  It also strikes me that these basic principles connect meaningfully to the work we do as songwriters.  The Heaths skillfully and anecdotally note that not all sticky ideas utilize all six properties.  Songs need not either.  But as you read the following descriptions, consider how some of your own songs do or do not make use of each component, and how further calculated use might make your songs stick.

SIMPLE. Simplicity doesn’t imply simple-mindedness. “ Simple” means boiling language down to an idea’s essence.  Perhaps the greatest challenge for us vocabulary-rich songwriters occurs when we attempt to assemble the complex emotional and intellectual insights of our lives and distill them to a simple, memorable phrase or line.  The closer we can get to the core of an idea, the closer we move toward coining phrases that enrich our listeners’ lives. 
•    Exercise: Here in Hollywood, movies are pitched with simple one-line descriptions.  If you can boil your song down to a pitch, or what tv and film people refer to as a logline, you may have just gotten to the essence of your song.  Now, what would be the most interesting way to express that line?  You may have just written your lyrical hook.  And since I used the cliché of “coining a phrase,” consider how we create value in our language.  The bigger the idea, the more value it has.  Express a big idea directly and you increase its value.  Imagine your best lines as large, shiny gold coins, precious and rare. 

UNEXPECTED. In The Roots we discuss the idea that songs rely upon a dynamic relationship between familiarity and surprise.  We then learn how to manipulate that relationship in order to create energy in our songs.  When a song can introduce an unexpected element—from a compelling plotline to a trippy beat to an uncommon structure—that song has the chance to stand out among the wash of the norm.
•    Exercise: Can you add one more element of surprise to the song?  A musical turnaround?  A lyrical twist at the bridge?  A fresh sound in the production?

CONCRETE. “Show, don’t tell,” we are taught as writers, meaning the more concrete, sensory details we reveal in our lyrics (imagery), the more we allow our audience to participate in the act of discovery in our songs.  Describe a sunset as “beautiful, amazing, wonderful…” and you have told us about a sunset.  We can’t see a thing.  Sing of how the light shrinks from the western sky until only the dying embers of the day burn orange and red at the horizon, and you begin to show us that sunset.  Details invite us into the world of the song and engage our imagination.  Once engaged we are more likely to remember the experience and thus have it stick.
•    Exercise: Does you song contain more abstractions (concepts like lonely, beautiful, frightened, etc.) than sensory details (descriptions like broken or rusted, or objects like the props of a movie set)?  For every abstraction that isn’t essential to your hook lyric, see if you can replace that concept with a detail that shows that emotion and, ideally, helps us feel it.

CREDIBLE. Credibility in business refers to earning the trust of the consumer.  For songwriters I believe this point speaks to less to your credibility as an established artist and rather to the voice of the song itself.  Do we believe her when she sings, “Maybe he’ll think before he cheats”?  Whether we create a character as in the Carrie Underwood song or the voice of the song acts more like a narrator, the words we choose and the way we assemble them establish the song’s voice.  The more believable that voice, the more willing to identify with it our audience grows. 
•    Exercise: Who is telling the story of your song?  What would their voice sound like?  Can you picture that voice saying every word in this song?  If you hit the part that sounds inconsistent, like a bad voice-over in a foreign film, replace the writer’s line with a line that would naturally fall out of the voice of the song.  Then, if you are the singer of your song, work at delivering those lines believably, as an actor connects herself to the script to bring her character to life.

EMOTIONAL. Cry me a river, babe.  The Russian playwright Chekhov once remarked, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”  If our song doesn’t matter to us, if it doesn’t strike a chord deep within us, how in the world will it move our audience?  But we don’t access emotion by using emotion words.  We access emotion by helping the audience feel what we feel.  We enlist their empathy through sensory detail.  Don’t write that you’re lonely.  Show them the empty space on his side of the bed.  Don’t sing that you’re sad.  Let them watch her pull away in the train for the last time, you breathless as the rails bend into the forever and far away.
•    Exercise: Does the song move you?  If you weren’t singing these words, would you care?  About the characters?  About what happens?  About the message?  If not, how might you move the camera lens so that as listeners we’ll connect more deeply to the story?  Make the move.

STORIES. Not all songs tell stories.  But if you aspire to tell a story in your song, make sure that it plays like a great movie.  All stories involve some sort of conflict.  And stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Since we can think of songs as Three Act Plays, the first act establishes the situation, the second deepens the conflict, and the third presents the resolution.  But the most interesting parts of the stories often take place in the middle, in the dramatic moments that lead up to the climax.  Your story may truly begin as Navin Johnson's, “I was born a poor…” but that doesn’t make that the best starting point for the re-telling.  The first line of the song extends to your listener like a handshake.  Pick a compelling starting point and you firmly engage us in the relationship. 
•    Exercise: What would happen if you began the story at the end and unfolded the details in a non-linear fashion, through flashbacks and memories?  What would happen if you switched the point of view of the story?  How would its emotional impact heighten? 

The Heaths arrived at their notion of stickiness by reverse-engineering sticky ideas like urban myths.  (Reverse-engineering great songs is another skill we utilize in The Roots, Part 2.)  So in some ways their contribution is less to have created something and rather to have organized memorably (with stickiness) skills and techniques that others have previously developed and mastered.  As they point out, it is far easier to spot a great idea than to create one.  As songwriters, cultivating the skills of both spotter and creator seems necessary.  How we arrange what we spot or create dictates our listeners' experience.  I am reminded of the words of songwriter Ralph Murphy, who notes that as songwriters we too often “think like the fisherman and not like the fish.”  In other words, at times when we write we think like songwriters and not like listeners.  We write things we would never listen to.  Remembering how ideas stick with us can help us give our own ideas similar stickiness.  Here’s to your success.

© Rob Seals, 2009,for The Songwriting School of Los Angeles

For more about Dan and Chip Heath and the book Made to Stick, visit their website full of numerous free teaching materials.  Buy the book here.