Two very different songwriters I’ve discussed before – Chuck Berry and Sam Beam (of Iron & Wine) – both use in their lyrics what I’d call cinematic storytelling.

(I’m going to excerpt, combine, edit, and add to some previous posts of mine to make my point.)

The 1st Verse of songwriting immortal Chuck Berry’s classic and exemplary ‘Johnny B Goode’ (listen below):

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
Who never ever learned to read or write so well
But he could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell

Note the storytelling… This verse is like a camera starting with a shot from the sky and ending on a tight close up – in 6 lines (shots):

1) The state and the nearest big city
2) The woods/the evergreens
3) The log cabin (made of earth and wood)
4) Johnny, the country boy, living in it
5) Can’t read and write but…
6) The crucial thing we need to know about Johnny: He can play a guitar just as natural as can be

Where ‘Johnny B Goode’ opens with an aerial wide shot and closes in, the 1st Verse of Sam Beam’s ‘Boy With A Coin’ (listen below) takes the opposite approach – it starts with a close-up and expands out, shot-by-shot:

A boy with a coin he found in the weeds
With bullets and pages of trade magazines
Close to a car that flipped on the turn
When God left the ground to circle the world

The story expands cinematically – first a boy holding a coin he found… out to the bullets and trade magazines scattered around him… out to the car that flipped over on the turn of the road (great verb here – flipped… also note the ‘bullets and trade magazines’… makes you wonder what’s going on?…).

That’s a lot in three lines, and a great example of starting tight on a visual image and opening out from there. The fourth line ends the verse in a way we don’t yet understand (it’s echoed later)… except God left when the car crashed opens up a whole other, cosmic dimension to the story of the boy.

The best films tell much of their story with a carefully chosen progression of images. Song lyrics can do the same.

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