The human mind instinctively looks for patterns. It will even make up patterns when none are there.  Given, say, a few lyric lines or sections of music that seem at first disconnected from each other, the listener will work hard to make a song or a story out of them.  Listeners (and viewers) want to do some of the work.  Having everything laid out is uninvolving.

This is a great advantage to us, the writers, if we can use it.  We make educated guesses about what to put in and what to leave out – knowing that the listener will ‘connect the dots’… which the listener will do until they get bored – we don’t want to bore them – or until they decide that what the writer has given them doesn’t make enough sense to them or isn’t worth the work they have to put in to understand it.

Listeners are willing to do a lot of dot-connecting if they’re interested – they like doing it (I like it!).  They will do the work of finding patterns as long as they know that the trail of breadcrumbs the writer is leaving has a pattern.  They have to trust us – or, more specifically, trust our song.

So a big part of our job as writers is to figure out what listeners ‘need to know’.  What do they need to know to get the point, to ‘feel the thought’?  How much can we leave out? This is important in any kind of storytelling, but songwriting is a particularly compressed form, so it’s absolutely critical for us.

It’s like getting directions.  When getting directions to drive from one location to another, too much information is overwhelming.  You don’t need to know every street and landmark that you pass; just the ones that help you find the turns you need, to get where you’re going.

Too little information and pretty soon we’re lost… and want to turn around and go home.  A good set of directions is ‘just enough’ – not too little, not too much.

We need to hone our ability to put in enough ‘pattern’ and information, musically and lyrically, so that the listener knows they’re listening to a song – this is where knowledge and feeling for song structure really helps – and not just to a more-or-less-random sequence of sounds or series of lyric events or images.

I’m not suggesting that it’s better to be a ‘minimalist’.  For some songs, ‘just enough’ means a lot of words or notes.  But the same principles apply, I think, even in ‘maximalist’ songs – choices of what to put in (and where to put it) and what to leave out are still being made, based upon the flow of ‘information’ to the listener.

And even if one takes a non-literal or non-linear or collage-like approach to lyrics and/or music, the pattern-making mind of the listener will still be at work.

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