Your Music Doesn’t Have Any Impact, And Here’s Why!
Do you feel frustrated because you released a song and no one even noticed?
Do you feel misunderstood because no one “gets” what your music is about?
Do you feel depressed because you can’t create the music you feel inside?
Tell me if this has ever happened to you:
You had a rough day and feel drained. Your fed up with the world and want to shout this anger out loud. As you get back home, you grab your instrument and start to write. Energized, you pour yourself out and the song writes itself. This is the greatest song you ever wrote, you say to yourself. After you're done, you go to bed with a relieved feeling. But as you wake up, and you listen back to the song you created yesterday. You feel a deep disappointment inside. The song you recorded is a mere outline of what you felt yesterday. Like dream, you know what happens but can recognize any features. In other terms: Your song feels bland!
Recognize that feeling?
Today I want to give you a guideline of what makes a song impactful. How to distil the emotions inside you and inject them into the songs you're writing.
The Impact Of Music And Your Role In It.
Music is our way to connect with the world. With music, we can bridge the landscape of feelings inside ourselves and share it with our community. It tries to capture a moment in time, a strong emotion that don’t want to be forgotten. As listeners, we consume it to alter the emotional landscape inside us. Some do it to dig deeper into their feelings and to experience them more intensely. Others seek to be distracted. And some want to lift up their spirit.
There are so many ways you can use music, but their all have one thing in common. It’s all about emotion and an inner connection. You and your music have the power to change how someone feels. Your music can help them deal with this reality of existence. Thus, it is your mission to create the most impactful music possible. Putting in only 20 % of your energy is a disservice of your abilities and the impact you're capable of.
How To Make Your Music More Impactful
As I said, it all comes down to EMOTIONS.
The emotions that your song creates will determine how your audience will receive your message. If you feel frustrated because no one listens to your releases, it’s because your music doesn’t have any strong emotional charge. But this charge is important to build a relationship with the listener. It grabs their attention and entices them to go deeper.
Experienced songwriters know how to write songs that ooze out emotional charge. They’ve mastered their craft and know which buttons to push and which lever to pull. If you lack experience with this, you lack the abilities to fulfill a songs potential.
To create the most impact and emotional charge in your song, you need to focus on these 4 areas.:
Topic, Song Structure, Harmony & Melody and Lyrics.
Topic
Every song got one. Some are simpler, some are more elaborate. The topic of a song is one of the most important parts. If you know what topic you write about, you have a framework for every creative decision you’ll need to make. When you want to write a song about a tragic love story, you need to ask yourself: Does the pumping House-Beat you produced really fit the topic? Determine the songs' topic as soon as possible. Like a map, it will guide your song into the direction you want. It will save you from getting lost in a labyrinth of endless choices.
Furthermore, it will help you to avoid creative road blocks on the way. Sometimes we write ourselves into a corner. We wrote music that doesn’t fit our narrative, but are too afraid to let it go. For every move you make, every breath you take…. (wait a minute….) Ask yourself these questions for every creative decision you make:
Does this help me create the story I want to tell?
How does this section feel and is it inline with the emotion I want to express?
If the answer is no, then throw this part out and save it for use in a different song.
Song Structure
After you established a topic, it’s a good idea not to start the writing process immediately. Think about the Song Structure you can choose to support your topic. The underlying structure of a song moves the song forward. It creates an optimal environment for its growth. Like a citrus fruit which can’t survive the winter and needs to be placed inside a green house. A ballad won’t thrive if you put it into a song structure suited for punk songs.
Same as before, if you think about this beforehand you’ll have a guideline to base creative choices on. We’ll often face writers block when we stare on a blank recording session. It helps to map out the structure and the topics of each section. This will limit the endless possibilities that overwhelm us.
Learn about different song structures and sections in songs. Learn how they are constructed and what function they serve. As for our example: If you want to write a ballad, it’s best to choose a strophic song structure. This mean the song is made up with only verses and with a refrain-line at each end to create some repetition. But there are many other from you can use and sections you can mix as you like. Dive into this topic and explore the possibilities.
Melody & Harmony
The riffs you write and chord progressions you’ll use will determent how your song will feel. We all know that major chord feel happy and minor chord feel sad. But what if you can't place your emotion inside one of these boxes? That’s where music theory can help. There are a lot of techniques you can use to create the mood you want to express. Like creating an uneven rhythm to express the inner doubt of the singer.
But in the end it all comes down to your taste. Every tool and technique you use flows through your filter. If you're not keen on music theory, go with your intuition. Write a song part, but then listen back to it. Determent if it fits the narrative you want to tell. The music you wrote is not set in stone. Don't shy away from experimenting with it. You need to learn to let things go.
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.” - Stephen King (author)
The worst thing you can do is to drag an idea with you, that won’t fit in. It will create endless problems and harm your song's potential. It’s a dead end in your journaey through the labrynth. If you don’t know if a change will benefit a section, then make a copy and test it out. Listen to both drafts and make a choice what to keep. Explore every idea but keep your topic in mind.
Lyrics
I already mentioned that the topic is the most important area that you need to establish. Every thing builds off from it, especially your lyrics. Your lyrics are the most significant way your listeners can engage with a song. It’s the most direct way to share the emotion that you want to create. As with harmony & melody, they are sometimes subtle in the way they create emotion. Lyrics are the area where you go all out and drive the point home.
Most of the amateur musician write down the first few lines that they can come up with. They make sure they rhyme and…. that’s it.
It’s not the best strategy to follow and leaves so much potential on the table. It’s especially sad that they often spend so much time on the music and then slap some lyrics on it and call it done. Answer me this question: Why do you stop here?
Lyric writing is a complex topic with many approaches and techniques. For today, I want to give you some guiding principle that you should keep in mind. (This is like a lesson in a lesson. LESSON-CEPTION!!!!)
1) Dig deeper
As you settle on a topic. Stop and think about what you feel. Often we just grab the overarching emotion, but fail to dig deeper. We fail unearth the underlying message that created the emotions in the first place. This underlying message is what you need to focus on when writing lyrics.
Your last brake-up song where you tell that you are angry/sad is so surface level that no one want to listen to it.
Go further! Take your shovel and DIG DEEPER! Tell us why you're mad. What did your ex do? What led to the break-up? Why do you feel the emotions you feel? Do you feel furious?
There is more than sadness, anger and happyness!
2) Paint a picture
There is a universal rule in creating a vivid and convincing piece of art.
Show first than tell!
It’s simple but effective. Inexperienced musicians only tell you how they feel, but never manage to show it to the listener.
Don’t say: “I’m so angry, I hate everybody!”
Cool, we get that you're angry but can't connect with that.
But if you phrase it differently: “hands clenched into fist, ripping streaks of hair out of my skull”
Now that paints a picture and a movie start to roll in side our head. We better understand how angry you feel. Use your words to describe a picture, motion, action instead of stating facts.
3) Be Bold
This point is more of a mindset thing. Music is an art form that is an extension of the reality we live in. Emotions in art work differnt than in reality. When your neighbor house explodes, that a big deal, but when a small house explodes in a movie that’s nothing new. We’ve all seen that, it’s not a big deal.
If you express your emotions in the most basic and boring form, you can’t expect listeners to form a strong connection with your music. In songwriting, you need to charge your emotion to 150 % even 200 % to drive the point home. You need to go above and beyond to get your point across.
Instead of: “I’m so angry I want to punch the wall”
say: “in my blood shot eyes reflect the flames of your burning childhood memories”
This phrase drive home that I’m really, really angry. Be vivid, be expressive with the language you use.
Conclusion
To make your music more impactful, focus on conveying strong emotions in your songs.
Establish a topic early on to guide creative decisions.
Choose a song structure that supports the topic.
Use melody and harmony to create the desired mood.
Write lyrics that dig deeper, paint a vivid picture, and are bold in expression.
By mastering these areas, you can create songs that resonate with your audience.
E-mail me if you're interested in diving further is these areas. I can go into more detail and give you some exercises to train this.
Bonus: What happens after you finished a song?
Your work isn’t done with the release. You can’t expect that your audience will understand every word in your song. They don’t have the knowledge that you have. They don’t see the world like you do.
Music is an art-form that can be interpreted with the listener how they see fit. That is technical a good thing, but if you want to leave a mark, if you want to show the world what you're feeling, you need to do more. Don't throw a song at them and hope they will get it.
Talk to them!
After you released your song, talk to your audience and tell them what it is all about. How you felt, while creating, how you feel now. Is there a story linked to this song? Your audience will appreciate that more. They will build a deeper connection and maybe get a small glimpse of what you feel when you listen to your song.
If you got something out of this, share this with someone who you think can benefit from this advice. We all need to watch out for another.
BECOME A SONGWRITING MACHINE!
— Max of Current Mindset
