Don’t Stop At Self-Expression

In songwriting there’s a lot of emphasis on self-expression. That’s understandable, and certainly it’s hard to imagine a good song without the writer(s) expressing themselves in some way.

This emphasis on self-expression started in the 1960s and blossomed in the ‘70s, when singer/songwriters ruled the roost, as a reaction to decades of songs written not by the artists who sang them but by professional songwriters.

These songwriters, of the Tin Pan Alley/Great American Songbook era, and later of the Brill Building era, were thinking less about expressing themselves than about expressing something that people could relate to, that vocalists would want to sing, and that listeners would want to buy.

But for any song to work, it has to be infused with feeling, with talent, so of course those writers were expressing themselves too (whether they thought about it that way or not).

In the ‘60s and ‘70s everything changed. Things got rough for the professional songwriter. Listeners craved ‘authenticity’ and so did many songwriters. They wanted to go deeper into the areas that writers like Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, and Ray Davies, followed by writers like (for example) James Taylor, Marvin Gaye, and Neil Young, were exploring, At that time songwriters were rewarded, both by listeners and financially, for writing more personal songs.

As time went on it became clear that just writing a song that was personal and true to oneself (especially in the lyric) didn’t in itself make a song good. It also became clearer that many of the best of those ‘professional songwriter’ songs were, with their listener-focused and exquisitely crafted melodies and words, easily as expressive in their own way as the more ‘authentic’ modern songs.

The bottom line is that a good song, a song that ‘works’ – though it might or might not be personal – is going to be expressive. What counts is that it feel personal to the performers and the listener. The good songs endure, no matter what their motivation – a cry from the soul or a cry for the rent money; it doesn’t matter. ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

Were Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg thinking about ‘expressing themselves’ when they wrote ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’? I doubt it. They were thinking about writing a song that would be perfect for Judy Garland to sing in a certain scene in The Wizard Of Oz. But they were great artists and awesome craftsmen, deeply talented, so they could hardly help expressing something powerful, particularly on a good day (and the day they wrote ‘Over The Rainbow’ was a very good day).

When later writers, such as those mentioned above, wrote some of their masterpieces, they probably were often thinking about expressing something more personal – it was a different time.

I often find myself urging songwriters I work with not to be limited by their autobiography, their own story and opinions. You can write other people’s stories too. That’s also what writers do.

You can put yourself in someone else’s shoes…. your song’s narrator, or even in the shoes of a listener who’s in a very different situation from the writer… Though I might be very different from someone whose point of view I’m writing from, or about, some of the feelings are always the same. That’s the point of entry for a writer.

Even in the realm of classic singer/songwriters, think of John Prine, who just died from the Corona Virus at age 73. When he was just 25 years old, he wrote ‘Hello In There’:

We had an apartment in the city
Me and Loretta liked living there 
Well, it’d been years since the kids had grown 
A life of their own left us alone
 John and Linda live in Omaha
And Joe is somewhere on the road 
We lost Davy in the Korean war 
And I still don’t know what for
Don’t matter anymore

Chorus:
Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger 
And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day 
Old people just grow lonesome 
Waiting for someone to say
“Hello in there, hello”

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