I recently finished one of the best books on Songwriting I’ve ever read: ‘Decoded’ by Jay-Z. It combines autobiography, thought-provoking observations, and a lot of deep-dive analysis of his own lyrics – which themselves contain a lot of autobiographical and observational elements.

The forensics he does on his lyrics are fascinating. On one level he’s just telling stories based on his own experiences. But he sees his approach as going deeper and wider than that. And this is what got me thinking.

Jay-Z grew up in a very rough area of Brooklyn. As many people do, he became a hustler. In his case, he hustled drugs, he hustled as a young rapper, he hustled in the music business. He worked hard, inside and outside the law, to make it in America… and, clearly, he did.

He doesn’t justify what he did as a young man – it’s just his story; how he dealt with where he came from and where he wanted to go.

When you think about it (and he does), that’s a truly classic American story – the striver, the hustler who’ll do whatever he has to do to get ahead. He loves some people, he hates some, he uses them, he helps and hurts them – and himself.

We’ve been reading, hearing, and seeing this story since before Horatio Alger, through James Cagney in ‘The Roaring Twenties’ to both ‘Scarfaces’, to The Godfather, and on and on. (Only Jay-Z hasn’t crashed and burned – to put it mildly. Unlike the Corleone family, he really did go legit.)

Jay-Z and other rappers of his generation came from a different background from those other gangster characters though, one that was not, pre-Rap and Hip Hop, nearly as well-documented. So he and his peers had a different striver’s story to tell, with its own particular details.  And Jay-Z correctly understood that many people, from all backgrounds, could potentially relate to a new twist on a familiar archetype.

This ‘character’ became the foundation of his writing.

Bruce Springsteen did something similar. Not so much crime, loose women, and drugs in Bruce’s songs, but he did see, in his own autobiographical story, an archetypal tale of a kid breaking away from a difficult father, finding salvation in rock and roll, and saving himself from his father’s unhappy fate, which could have been his.

Of course in their songs Jay-Z and Bruce go way beyond autobiography. But the flexible ‘character’ they each created in their tunes, based on themselves and their own life stories, became the center and basis of their songwriting world.

So I think, ‘How does this apply to me?’ I certainly don’t see myself in mythological terms! But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are elements in my story that might be worth exploring more deeply.

Not to make my songs more ‘personal’ in a navel-gazing way, but actually to make them more relatable and even useful for listeners.

There are things about my story that are the same, in essence, as many others’ stories. This is true for almost everyone. So I don’t think I’m the only songwriter who might benefit from thinking of their songs with this dimension added. Some of you probably thought of this long ago anyway!

This ‘archetypal’ element isn’t something that’s taken over my songwriting or become foundational to it. At this point it’s just a slightly different way of looking at my own experiences and life story as material for what I write. It adds another strand to the rope. We’ll see where it leads.

Please let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below:

And please share on facebook etc. by clicking these tabs –