Category / Language

by Keppie

Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up with Great Song Lyric Ideas—#2: Metaphor Collisions

This exercise is one of my all-time favorites. It is the fastest way to show yourself that you are capable of coming up with totally original, unique ideas and ways to express yourself that no one has ever uttered before.

More importantly, this exercise trains your brain to see the world like a songwriter—to make novel combinations between seemingly unexpected things; to refract the familiar through a prism of new light.

Let’s get to it.

What is a Metaphor Collision?

Metaphor Collisions is an exercise that takes two small lists of random nouns; we then make random collisions between a noun from List 1 and a noun from List 2, and then very quickly spend 2-3 minutes expanding on the collision, developing the new idea that emerges when we compare one thing to another (that has never been compared before!). 

How it works.

Step 1. 

Create 2 lists of random nouns, each with 5 nouns in it. [Remember, a noun is a person/place/object/thing. We know it’s a noun because we can put the words ‘the’, ‘an’, or ‘a’ before it: The ocean. An idea. A collision.]

List 1 can contain any noun at all, concrete or abstract—and works well when there is a smattering of both!

List 2 should exclusively contain concrete nouns—tangible things or objects that you could actually hold, touch, smell, see or hear (as distinct from abstract nouns, which are concepts or ideas. For example: a conversation, personality, freedom). 

Why? Metaphors come alive with imagery, and concrete nouns are the stuff of imagery. When one side of the metaphor is guaranteed to contain imagery, your efforts will generate great rewards.

Here’s an example of 2 lists:

List 1: hospital, haircut, conversation, history, cancer

List 2: river, canyon, ferrari, church, violin

This is a brilliant random word generator. It has a concrete noun generator, as well as a general noun generator (as well as all sorts of other categories which are extremely fun to play with once you’ve got the hand of the basic form of Metaphor Collisions). 

Step 2.

Make a ‘THIS is THAT’ collision, by picking one word from List 1 and one word from List 2. 

For example: “His history was a canyon.”

Note that I’ve added in the pronoun ‘his’, and also picked a tense, ‘was’. This gives the metaphor a sense of character and story. You can pick your pronouns, and experiment with tense. The essence here is the metaphor collision between ‘history’ and ‘canyon.’

Here comes the important bit, where all of the action happens. You’re now going to spend 2 minutes expanding on the metaphor that you have just created. Write a sentence or two that explain and describe how one thing is like the other. 

For example: His history was a canyon—As we got closer, I started to get dizzy at the edge of everything I didn’t know about him.

Tip: remember that a metaphor is when we say ‘x IS y’; a simile is when we say ‘x is LIKE y’. Metaphor is a much more potent and intense kind of language. For the moment, stick with metaphor. 

Step 3.

Continue making random collisions and expanding them for 10 minutes. See how many you can do. Aim for at least 3. 

More examples from these lists:

Her haircut was a church; her natural joy became burdened by the weight of its seriousness.

The conversation was a river; and I was drowning in the undertow of the private jokes I didn’t understand.

The hospital was a violin; a cacophony of high-pitched sounds, but with a highly composed orchestration of doctors, nurses, and machines, every component coming together in the end. 

A few things to notice.

  1. Notice that I am using novel combinations. I am deliberately avoiding any combinations that I have heard before. It’s possible you might get the word ‘love’ in List 1, and the word ‘flame’ in List 2…for the moment, avoid those tropes. 
  2. Notice how I am using words and phrases in the sentences that relate back to the original metaphor image. With ‘river’, I am very deliberately using the words ‘drowning’ and ‘undertow’. With ‘violin’, we have ‘cacophony’, ‘high-pitched’, and ‘composed orchestration’. Using words related to your metaphor is where a metaphor really comes to life. 
  3. Notice that I am not mixing metaphors. When I am expanding the metaphor collision using language related to the metaphor image, I am deliberately avoiding dipping into other metaphors. Mixing metaphor tends to feel chaotic, and ultimately dilutes the power of a single, strong, well-developed metaphor.
  4. Notice in the sentences that I am always coming back to the ‘target idea’—what the sentence is really about. When I say ‘the conversation was a river’, this sentence is really about the conversation. That’s the target idea. The ‘river’ is my metaphor, which is to say, it’s the color that I am using to paint the sentence, but ultimately the most important idea is to describe the ‘conversation’. With the last example, I have deliberately referenced ‘doctors, nurses, and machines’ to make sure that the target idea is never lost inside the metaphor. 

If I had instead written something like:

The hospital was a violin; a cacophony of high-pitched sounds, but with a highly composed orchestration of melodies and rhythms, every component coming together in the end…

…we would lose sight of what the target idea is. We get so tangled up in the metaphor that it starts to sound like we are simply describing a musical performance, not a hospital. Metaphor collisions (and metaphor is general) works best when we apply the metaphor language back to specific elements of the target idea.

How to Use Metaphor Collisions in Your Lyrics

  1. You will find that you come up with ideas and expressions that translate very quickly into lines of lyric. Just like with Sense Writing, you can collect the gems in a separate document, and use them later. You don’t need to take the whole collision, either. Often I like to jettison the actual ‘x is y’ statement, and just keep parts of the expansion; ‘drowning in the undertow of the private jokes’; ‘burdened by the weight of seriousness.’
  2. This is a brilliant brain training exercise, that attunes your perception to see and develop novel combinations in unexpected ways. Even when the individual collisions don’t yield specific lyric ideas, sometimes the most ridiculous ones are the ones that have strengthened this ability the most! ‘The burrito was an aeroplane’. Figuring out the connection creates incredibly strong neural pathways!
  3. Once you have practiced Metaphor Collisions with truly random inputs, you can also start to lightly curate your lists, to direct the results to more emotion-based ideas. The random word generator also has an ‘emotion’ filter. If you fill List 1 entirely with emotions, then you get something like this:

List 1: sorrow, remorse, disappointment, love, anticipation

List 2 (random concrete): sweater, bulb, desktop, flower, hair

Love is a sweater.

Sorrow is a bulb.

Disappointment is a flower.

It truly makes the mind hum with possibility.

Many thanks to my teacher, friend, and mentor Pat Pattison for introducing me to this exercise.

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by Keppie

Writing better lyrics with metaphor magic

In this video, I show you how to write songs—and specifically lyrics—like Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and John Mayer. There is a particular type of song and songwriting that these three songwriters have in common—it’s a way to write songs that lots of songwriters use: metaphor songs. I start by defining metaphor, and share the principles and methods for creating original ideas, and furnishing them with great lyrics, just like these songwriters.

Want to write your own original lyrics? AUGUST 25/26 2022 – LIVE ONLINE METAPHOR WRITING WORKSHOP. Join in here!

by Keppie

Mastering the Elements of Lyric Writing

Studying and understanding the tools that go into making a song can help anyone learn how to write a song more effectively. I hope these conversations give you ideas for your own songs and songwriting.

We were lucky enough to have a long conversation with Berklee Professor Pat Pattison. But was my teacher and mentor at Berklee, and eventually my colleague and friend. Studying Pat’s material transformed my songwriting practice – it gave me a tools and techniques to draw on to develop ideas into full songs, to understand the relationship of sections, and most importantly, to understand how structure can amplify meaning.

In this video series, Pat takes us through the elements of lyric writing – and demonstrates how making decisions about the structure and placement of lyrics can amplify the meaning and emotions we are trying to convey. Motion creates emotion.

Enjoy!

by Keppie

Examples of Sense Writing

The first exercise I run in any lyric writing class is called ‘Sense Writing,’ which is essentially the same as Pat Pattison’s Object Writing (which you can find out more about here). I’ve written before about Sense Writing, and recently put out a YouTube video that explains it, which you can watch here:

It’s one of my top ‘go to’ methods for getting a song idea going, for finding out what I have to write about (even when I’m not starting out with any specific ideas), and also one of my go-to ways of fleshing out ideas for lyrics when I DO have an idea on the go.

I thought it would be a useful reference to also post some examples of what my Sense Writes look like (though there is no stylistic requirement here—the only parameter is to stay sense-bound, and push yourself to turn the dial up on the level of detail), and then to show you how one of the Sense Writes might then translate into lyrics. Here we go!

Sense Writing Examples

Prompt: ESTATE

"Destitute funeral", the woman's voice over the phone had a quiver in it as she said the words. I could suddenly feel the sweat of my ear moistening the plastic screen protector of my phone. I didn't realise that ears sweat. A small baby fist of tension opened and shut at my larynx, a trigger of righteous outrage flared somewhere in my stomach. That word, 'destitute'. t conjured images of grey dread locks with rat shit in them, and urine-soaked cardboard boxes. Or perhaps of wailing orphans, or dustbowl leather-skinned cowboys and grey-wood furniture piled onto the front of yellow grassed lawn, rusty nails sticking out. Of nameless locals driving by in their pickups, narrowing their eyes to a slit, glaring at you with sharp shadows, one hand on the wheel, the other hand on the car door, window rolled down, a lop-sided cigarette precariously leaning of the cliff of their lip. Destitute was curled lips, snarling facial gestures, stuck in an ice-wall of silence."Oh ok, that's what they call it then. A 'destitute funeral," I murmured back to the social work woman on the other end of my iPhone. "Yes, sorry. I don't know why they call it that..." Well, I do. They call it that so that you feel this barrage of guilt and shame, and social knuckle to the solar plexus, because they don't want just everybody to know that it's not actually necessary to pay a company the extortion of $5000 to simply burn a body.


One thing I like to do shortly after a Sense Write is to mine it for interesting lines and ideas, and put them in a separate document. Here’s what I extracted from this:

LINES:

sharp shadows

leather-skinned cowboys

a lop-sided cigarettes

snarling

Prompt: POWERFUL

The sand beneath her toes makes a squeak like a mouse, like rubber, hot wheels on tarmac. It is warm but only on the surface. As her toes displace the upper crust, beneath is moist, darker sand, cooler, more secretive; earth's clay, more maleable, shapable, building castles and caves and channels for water to run, for worlds to emerge, for princes and princesses and dragons to suddenly burst into life, for the all powerful narrator to dictate outcomes, controlling tiny imaginary lives. Small, frail, hapless characters wrapped up in a fiction they don't even know exists; one swipe and the castle explodes, shards of sand hurling through the air, walls collapsing, the moat imploding, the water channel driven to chaos, spreading back into the dark sand beneath, joining with the waves that lick the shoreline and then sigh back into the vast glittering sapphire of sea. Salt and seaweed and hot chip fry. She abandons the narrative, and looks out into the blue, where the blue gradient gets almost black as it reaches for the horizon. Out at the edge of the water world, the line is not straight, but it's hard to even get a hold on. The horizon line quivers out there, a nervous distance, the arc of the earth actually visible if your imagination comes to stand next to you. The line out there shimmers, a magic portal, another world at the drop off, where gravity might make a mistake and flick you into space, or drag you down.The water imitates the sand. The top inch is warm, but as the sand slimes upward of the ankle, the water becomes cold, bracing, sticking to the surface of the skin, gripping goose flesh. The body responds with a frantic reciprocity, shifting its temperature to meet the embrace, trying to match the strength of the handshake.Her chest contracts, heart a little mouse in a cage suddenly submerged, quick gasp for air as the cold vice surrounds the shoulders, but the body somehow knows the water, and within mere seconds the borderline between skin and sea is gone.

Here I’ve just bolded the lines and ideas I was immediately drawn to afterwards.

Prompt: BIRTHPLACE

You just don't know how good what you have is as a kid.2 storey art deco house. Caramel coloured carpet, but for two kids, it was a place to roll around in, to lie down laughing, grasping at our bellies, wheezing laughter through tears. It was a place for me to put on my parents' records: Janis Joplin, Muddy Waters, Donovan, Chuck Berry, turn on the gas heater in the winter - tick tick floooommmff! - and thrash my limbs around, spin my body til my mind entered the music and the music fused with my blood and we were one swirling whirl, one smoke curl burning,one small house on fire, dancing like there was nothing else.My room painted sky blue, then layered over in lilac. My room ha da door leading out to the top deck vernadah. On summer night, I would straddle my dad, and he would tell me stories. I could feel his voice in my legs, I could feel the bass rumbling in his guts. The Corkscrew Ballerina! His belly button was the animation of her legs leaping, until her own pirouhette overtook her, She spun and spun until she burned a hole in the ground and fell straight through the floor!I would squeal in anticipation and delight, somehow still ravaged by the tension, even though I'd heard the story 10 times before.Until one telling - some fuse in my brain rewired itself away from childhood delight, and simply short-circuited. The tension blinked out in an instant, and the story no longer had the same power over me. I knew it was a story, could not suspend the disbelief any more. AS if cynicism just blooms one day like an algae that takes over the whole river in a day. As if knowledge (becomes understanding) somehow means defeat. The defeat of delight.Our backyard was big enough to build speed on a bike. We would pick lilipillies in late winter, and catch stink bugs in summer. I would watch the bees praying at each purple jacaranda bell, their religiosity habitual and efficient, each prayer finished with thanks.

Turning a Sense Write into Lyrics

Here is a Sense Write, followed by a lyric idea I have drawn out of it. Notice how I am pulling together words and sounds that have a sense of sonic connection, and obviously adding in structural elements that help something sound like a lyric: rhythm, rhyme, a consistent number of lines per section, etc.

Prompt: RADIO

wicker baskets, bric a brac, nick knacks, garage sale. old paperbacks, dog-eared, year yellowed, brown framed pages blending to cream. old bits of metal, nails, screws, rust sprinkled, once useful, now objects without a purpose. old toys wrapped up in plastic bags. a once-pink teddy, now sun bleached and frayed. an old woman sitting under a hawaiian umbrella, smoking a cigarette like it's the 80s, with cigarette smoke curling around her fingers, snaking through her hair, and shrouding the air just above her in tufts of white. the crackle of the nicotine between her lips. lip stick seeping into the small cracks and canyons of her old lips. the radio on next to her, an old black and tan wireless, the antenna cocked at an uncanny angle, leaning hard to the left like an old man leaning on a wall. the fire crackle of an AM station. edith piaf warbling, beach boys crooning. i can't find what i'm looking for, as if you come to a garage sale with a purpose...and a small but laden grey cloud suddenly sprouts above us. it starts to rain lightly, but the old smoking lady is still sun-bathed, her smoke now overlaid by a romantic sparkle of silver rain, glittering in the sunshine. i can now see that she was once a total babe. the sinews of her arms were once smooth surfaces curving gracefully at angles - clean elbow, the precipitous shelf of a collar bone. those lips once drew attention to themselves, when the smoke would cascade out like a slow-exposure waterfall. and i see her dancing, by herself, holding a glass of wine, standing at a window, the reflection of herself superimposed onto a night dotted by the candles of light from the town below. her reflection adding beauty to the scene, as music filled the room, traced over her shoulders, brushed her hair, and laid its fingers on her collarbones. now she is selling everything. 

Lyric idea:

Wicker baskets and old paperbacks

Nick knacks and bric a brac

She’s selling off her memories

She doesn’t need them anymore

Her cigarette smoke is curling through her hair

She leans back in an old wicker chair

On request she slides off her wedding ring

She’s selling everything

Turn your inspiration into beautiful songs with step-by-step guidance through two professional songwriting methods.

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by Keppie

Drunk in the day – and other tips on writing well

Writes William Zinsser in, “On Writing Well”:

…you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. But you can never forget that you are practising a craft that’s based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

For songwriters, we are tasked with building mansions in the mind of a listener on limited real estate. Each word must be necessary, otherwise it’s a loose nail. Often the right choice of an image, expressed simply and clearly, is so much more charged with emotion than verbal ornament.

As Jeff Tweedy says in “How to Write One Song”,

An “impatient red fiery orb loomed in the whiskey-blurred, cottony-blue sky” is rarely going to hit me anywhere near as hard as “I was drunk in the day.”

Banner image: Fionn McCabe

by Keppie

This is Your Brain on Metaphor

When I teach lyric writing, the first concept I introduce in any class is the power and impact of sense-based language. I usually start with a sort of psychological magic trick: I read a list of words, then ask people to recall as many as they can. Without mentioning this to the class, I have deliberately made half the words concrete and sense-based—koala, tomato, thunder—and the other half are abstract or conceptual—task, idea, sound, for example. 

Here is the magic part: without fail, the vast majority of people (about 90%) recall more of the sense-based words. 

How is this possible? Why isn’t it more random? Why don’t we see, over a large sample, that it’s more like 50%? I randomise the words; I make sure the words are not more complex in one category versus the other…the magic (and science) here is that there is something special about sense-based language. Our brains wrap themselves differently around it. In the field of psychology, this has a name: “The Concreteness Effect”. People’s memories (and here we’re talking at a population level) stick like glue to things we can attach our senses to. 

As lyric writers, we are tasked with creating mansions in the mind of a listener with very limited real estate, so anything in language that comes pre-loaded with emotion, impact, and connection is gold.

Here’s a dirty little secret though. I have, for years, been a bit tripped up by the logic of this. Just saying “cinnamon” is not the same thing as actually smelling cinnamon…a word is a concept, even if it’s describing a sensory thing…isn’t it? Why should we expect that sensory language isn’t actually just another kind of concept? Why believe (even in spite of the hundreds of mini-experiments I’ve run, yielding the same result, and even all the experiments done by psychologists) that sensory language should have a different emotional impact than any kind of language?

Well! I am very thrilled that science has once again come to the party, gotten tipsy, had a snog with art, and the two are now dirty dancing, showing us how one moves the other. 

In Fiona Murphy’s gorgeous book, ‘The Shape of Sound”, she talks about a piece of research that,

“demonstrated how words can rub and burn just as much as they can soothe. Test subjects lying in an MRI machine were read metaphorical and literal descriptions—the operation went smoothly (the operation went successfully), his manners are coarse (his manners are rude), she is a bit edgy (she is a bit nervous)…The results were conclusive: textured metaphors caused the brain to react as if it were being touched.”

Our brains aren’t just processing these words as language—mere concepts, solely representations of the thing; the brain actually responds as if that sense is being activated!

The power and complexity of language never ceases to astonish me. There is magic in there too. To quote, perhaps, the leading authority on words and magic:

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.

Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2)

by Keppie

Writing Tips from George Orwell

One of the most incisive essays I have ever read on the art of writing is the short and stunning piece, ‘Politics and the English Language‘, written by George Orwell in 1947. Here, Orwell described a cliche as a ‘dying metaphor’. Orwell follows up with a succinct list of guides to follow:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

If it hasn’t crossed your desk yet, I highly recommend it. You can access it here.

by Keppie

I Have a Confession to Make

I have a public confession to make. I have a serious problem—a profound weakness, and it only gets worse with age.

I am completely, totally, helplessly in love with reading. But not just one book. I find myself embroiled, entangled, enmeshed, ensnared, and ensnarled in reading sometimes more than 10 books at a time. It’s not healthy. If I read one at a time, I could probably read more in a year. But I can’t. It doesn’t work like that.

IMG_8498 (1)

I now play mental tricks with myself to justify the habit, creating different ‘categories’ of books. It started out simple: Fiction and Non-Fiction. And then I started reading books about writing. Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Writing. And then I picked up a few on interesting psychology research: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Writing, and Psychology (sub-category, Non-Fiction). Next came books not just on writing, but on specific grammar and style. Fiction, Non-Fiction (sub-category: Psychology, and also Science snuck in there somehow), Writing (sub-category, grammar and style). And then Poetry. And then Short Stories. And, um, Krista Tippett (maybe, Books by Podcasters?).

I feel good now, though. I feel lighter that I’ve let you know about my problem. Maybe I can add a few more books now that I’ve shed the weight of this secret…

In the spirit of National Book Week, I am going to post the 5th sentence on page 56 of each of the books I’m currently reading:

If you ask someone to recall a seemingly random assortment of words verbatim, starting with the first word— “was smelled front that his the peanuts he good hunger eating barely woman of so in could that him contain”—the average person will remember only the first six of those words. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.

“When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not in the story.” On Writing, Stephen King.

I have never felt so terrible. Tenth of December, George Saunders.

“I’ve recently been thinking more and more that it’s so astonishing that the Old Testament prophets hardly ever discuss an “issue.”” Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Krista Tippett.

I could settle on nothing. House of Light, Mary Oliver.

That man was Tycho Brahe. Cosmos, Carl Sagan.

From the people comes political support or opposition; from the public comes artistic appreciation or commercial patronage. The Elements of Style, Stunk and White.

Better yet, the genetic sequences could be recorded by feeding samples into machines, taking the DNA strands apart one base pair at a time, and preserving them as strings of data that could easily be archived and replicated. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson.

 

by Keppie

What Can Business Learn from Songwriters?

I was kindly invited by Soren Trampedach and Work Club Global, in collaboration with the Sydney-based organisation Affectors, to present an information session on some of the Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 4.13.55 pmcraft and process of a songwriter and musician. The audience were entrepreneurs and culture creators. The discussion that came about found fascinating interplays between language in song and language in all types of communication.

An excerpt is provided below, but you can read the whole article and listen to the discussion by clicking HERE.

Keppie played with language, testing us all on our ability to recall certain words, she shared the theory and the practice of song craft and she played some beautiful indie folk tunes that were open to interpretation.

And in the space of 2 hours, relaxing on a lounge enjoying wine and cheese, I learned three business relevant insights:

1. We must show people what we mean, rather than tell them, even if it’s with their imagination. We can do this by painting a picture with words that our audience can relate to.

2. Sense based language is far more memorable than task orientated words. When I talk about a strategy and use words like ‘approach’ and ‘task’ they don’t stay in the mind as easily as nouns (Keppie proved this with an audience participation experiment). So I’m going to re-evaluate my language and look to bring more colour to ‘strategic dialogue’ in future.

3. Evocative words, memorable language, losing yourself in the music – all of these create an experience in music that’s carefully crafted around notes, but also silences, pauses and spaces. We can be afraid of silence and so keen to fill it – but what if we don’t? What if we allow people to create meaning and to connect with us in the same way they connect with a piece of music. Wouldn’t this allow us to have far more interesting relationships?