Titles are one of the most powerful tools in songwriting. They don’t just help listeners remember the song – though that’s important. When placed and used well, the Title builds a resonance over the course of the song; it gathers force partly through repetition, but also because of what’s placed around it, which can give it added layers of meaning as the song proceeds.

But I notice, with some writers I work with, that sticking with the exact same Title through the whole song can be a challenge. Your Title’s a taskmaster – when you get to that Title spot in the song for the third or fourth time, it still has to work, to make sense… ideally, even more sense!

And it’s tempting to want to change that Title a little – maybe just a word or two – as the song goes on, to move it with the progress of the story or situation in the lyric. That can be OK sometimes, of course. But it also can be a way to avoid the hard but often worthwhile task of making the same Title work through the entire song.

I always say this is a trade-off. You may get something interesting from partially altering the Title, but in return you give up a lot by losing its exact repetition.

I was thinking of this the other day while listening to one of Hank William’s masterpieces, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’. Written in 1949, it takes a fascinating approach to its Title – it’s full of sad and evocative images, taken mostly from nature, to present the singer’s state of mind, which is summarized by the Title.

One of its interesting aspects is how it trusts the listener to ‘connect the dots’ to the Title. There are 4 Verses. The 1st Verse:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry

The 3rd line could’ve been something like, ‘That little bird sounds like I feel/I’m So Lonesome etc.’. He could’ve connected the dots for us. But it’s so much more powerful the way he did it, with the low whine of the midnight train. Listeners got the connection back then, and we still get it now.

In the 2nd Verse, he goes completely away from the Title (only to return to it for Verses 3 and 4).

I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry

Again nature images, but much less reality-based, more surreal… in the singer’s emotional state, time is slowing down, the moon is hiding its face…

Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die?
Like me, he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry

Here in the 3rd Verse the song makes its first direct connection between the narrator and all the images of a nature that’s out of whack and in mourning – stretching reality even further, everything is losing its will to live.

And then there’s the last Verse, which contains what may be one of the most strikingly poetic moments in all of popular song:

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry

(Those first two lines!)

The singer doesn’t bring up ‘you’ until the song’s second-to-last line, and then just to ‘wonder where you are’. The song is all the more potent for understating the emotion throughout, by holding it in and pointing at other scenes and sounds that evoke the feeling, rather than the singer spilling his guts.

Note that even though the song almost never specifically addresses the singer’s situation, it’s full of very specific detail that evokes his emotional state. Though several times the song moves away from being strictly reality-based, there is no vagueness in the writing – it’s all specifics.

The song is a clinic in taking a relatively simple Title, surrounding it with detailed images that create a mood, and using the Title to personalize and unify all of these sounds and images into a feeling that almost everyone can relate to (As Bob Dylan said, “I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never heard a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad.”).

These 4 musically identical sections (Verses) are almost like Verses (the first 3 lines) followed by a Chorus (last line).

Sometimes having a strong polarity, a difference, between the Verse and Title line (as in much of ‘I’m So Lonesome’) – or the Verse and the Chorus – can be even more effective than directly connecting the two in the lyric. If you set it up right, it’s powerful, and the listener will take the leap.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGI6EBV0xCQ