When I’m writing, arranging or recording, the question of gesture comes to my mind often.  What is a gesture in a song?  My Mac’s dictionary define gesture as “an action performed to convey one’s feelings or intentions.” So a gesture in songwriting can be defined as ways in which the song conveys a feeling.

If you want to write impactful songs, you need to be mindful of your song’s gestures. Otherwise, it’s very easy to put together songs that have incoherent gestures, a song that either sounds confused or really doesn’t leave any impression on your listener.  So below I’m going to outline some fundamental concepts about songwriting gestures — how your song delivers a particular feeling to your listeners.

You Can’t Deliver a Feeling Your Audience Doesn’t Have

The first thing to note is that when a song triggers a feeling in a listener, it’s triggering a feeling s/he already was carrying inside.  This is true for movies, books, TV shows.  We relate to and appreciate stories that resonate with us, that connects to a feeling we have inside.  Otherwise you’re just not engaged.  A piece of art can be interesting on intellectual level — perhaps the technique used to put it together or it incorporates an innovative approach — but it really won’t make a lasting impression unless it touches the person emotionally.  But this can’t happen without the listener already carrying a feeling that the song is conveying.

Why am I talking about this first?  It’s because it’s important to know that it takes two to make an emotional connection: the artist and the audience.  You can’t gauge the impactfulness of your song unless you have the right audience.

So you get a feeling from your own song — it’s because you had the feeling to begin with, and you think you’re channeling that feeling through your song.  But your audience may not share your feeling — then s/he won’t get it.  Or your song is lacking sufficient gestures to convey feelings to someone other than yourself.  You get the feeling you were hoping to express from your song, because you know that’s the feeling behind your song.  But your audience won’t know the backstory or your motivation behind your song — the song has to deliver the feeling on its own.

On a side note, sometimes you think you’re expressing a particular feeling with your song, while your audience gets an entirely different feeling from it.  This is a sign of mixed gestures — your expression isn’t entirely effectively at delivering the intended feeling, though it’s not valueless, either.

Successful Gestures Begin with a Shared Feeling

Can you describe the feeling you get from a song?  If a song has cohesive and focused gestures, then you should be able to describe the feeling in a single phrase, or even one word.  Sad, happy, uplifting, melancholic, morose, quirky, and so on.  That being said, some feelings are hard to describe — being able to describe it verbally isn’t really the point, the point is that you get a certain, well-articulated feeling from a song.

If you want the widest audience possible for your song, you can maximize your chances by focusing on feelings that are universally shared, and are easy/safe to feel.  For me, I look at songwriting as a self-expression, so I use it to convey feelings that are personal and not easily shared in other contexts.  My sense of humor and playfulness, I expres it in my everyday life.  My longing for healing, on the other hand, is a feeling I pour out through my songs.

Regardless of your goal of songwriting, we all begin from the same place: a feeling we carry inside.  The question is this: does the audience get a feeling from the song?  And is it the same feeling as the one that the songwriter was trying to convey?

Fundamental Gestures: Chords, Rhythm, Tempo, Melody

Obviously, it starts with the basic songwriting.  A song has a strong foundation if the basic elements themselves convey feelings.  Generally speaking, a minor chord sounds sad, a major chord sounds happy.  You add more notes to the chord and the sense of feelings get sharper: add F# to Em chord (makes an Em9 without 7th) and the chord has more intensity — I’d call that a tragic chord — or a major chord with major 7th sounds soft and gentle, less direct than a major triad.

Similarly, an upward motion in a melody has an uplifting quality to it, a downward motion conveys dropping of energy — to relax, to depress, to settle down, and so on.  Step-wise motions feel smooth, even more so when they are half-step.  Big intervals feel dramatic or jagged.

Tempo and rhythm plays a big part, too.  Fast songs tend to feel energetic, slow songs can be languid.  It’s harder to convey urgency with a slow tempo, but you can still hint at it by incorporating dotted rhythm, which makes the song feel faster and more energetic, even when you don’t speed up the tempo itself.

So it begins with the music itself, but obviously music is made up of many parts, and you can’t expect every single element to convey the exact same feeling.  It can be done, but that can easily be one-dimensional and heavy-handed.  A very slow tempo, constant downward motion in melody, strong minor-chord dominance, and static rhythm — and you’ll have a recipe for one depressing, morose song that you may get tired of listening to it after a single listen.

Rather, the trick is to combine various elements to concoct a gesture that is well-tempered: a good mix that conveys non-shallow feeling, has a right intensity so that it is engaging yet not tiring to listeners. Just as it’s nearly impossible to write a whole song based on nothing but minor chords, so it is to pack a song with single-minded gestures.

Arrangements

Arrangements play a huge role in the success of a song.  Everything from chord voicing to instrumentations impact the song’s gestures.  Heavily distorted guitars can sound rough, even violent, while a celeste is a good instrument for conveying child-likeness, innocence or eerieness.  Again, you can line up arrangements that drive a single feeling or mix them up to create more complex picture.  The happy medium is often what we need.

Performance

Performance is such a powerful gesture that you can easily override or disrupt the gestures built into the songwriting and arrangements.  Imagine taking a comforting, soothing lullaby and singing it with such a force, over-enunciating every word with lots of heavy chest resonance.  It’s no longer soothing or comforting.  An effective performance brings and builds upon the gestures built into the songwriting and arrangements.

But the fascinating thing here is that a performance can either build upon the gestures or sidestep it, choosing to add a different dimension to the song.  I was listening to Porcupine Tree and realized how subtle of a singer Steven Wilson is — he has a light and somewhat wispy voice for a frontman of a sometimes-heavy rock band.  His singing by itself is too lyrical to convey aggression in his music — so he doesn’t even try.  His singing remains light and pretty (some parts can take more ominous, spooky turns) but he relies on arrangements and instrumental performance to deliver much of his feelings.  It really works, but his songs’ emotional impacts are somewhat subtle — even when parts of it are brutally heavy — and only upon repeated listening the feelings seem to seep through.  In the beginning you don’t always get what the music is about, though its complexity and density makes it fascinating and engaging.

Similarly, I’m currently working on a song called “Bleeding Redwood” which contains chorus that is rather distressed and desperate.  But both my collaborator and I tried singing it with a strong feeling to match the strong words — and the result sounds over-the-top, even melodramatic.  A lighter, lyrical approach seems to work better, just like Steven Wilson above, and let the intensity of the words carry the underlying feeling, without explicitly expressing them through singing.

So performance seems to act as the balancing element in the big picture. If your chords are fairly plain and predictable and arrangements pretty traditional, perhaps you can play the song with intensity and drama, incorporating a big range from soft to loud in dynamics, to make it interesting and listenable.  If there’s a lot going on already with the songwriting/arrangement, maybe the performance should be somewhat flat or otherwise it can be heavy-handed.  In the other words, performance is a very powerful factor that can be scene-stealing in the context of a song’s gesture. You’ll want to match it up carefully with what else is going on.

(Recording) Production

After the songwritng, arrangement and performance, production also plays a part in a song’s gesture.  Highly compressed recording can seem slick and loud-for-its-volume, but can be detrimental to a song’s sense of drama, because it robs the recording of any dynamics.  If you don’t have enough compression, the recording can give raw, jagged or cheap impression, which may or may not work for your song.  Once again, it all depends on the context — if you’re talking classical music, obviously you don’t want to any compression, or anything artificial for that matter, like reverb or chorus.  With pop music though, production does play a role — everything from mic placement to mix affects the gesture.

Everything Affects the Song’s Gesture

If you made it this far, you obviously realized that while I started out talking about ways in which a song conveys a feeling, a discussion of a song’s gesture is pretty much synonymous to talking about the song itself.  A song is a gesture. Many factors going into delivering a feeling through the medium which is a song, and you have to make appropriate choices along the way to build a song that has a well-tempered gesture.

Two Questions to Gauge the Well-Temperedness of a Song

To see if your song has a well-tempered gesture, ask yourself the following two questions:

1. Do you get a particular feeling from listening to your song? Sometimes it’s verbally describable and other times it’s not, but you should always get a feeling, otherwise your song just isn’t expressing it articulately enough.
2. Do you get tired of that feeling during or after a single listen? If so, then you’re saying it too strongly and it’s become a turn-off.  You’ll want to mix it up, add contrasting gestures, so that the overall expression doesn’t come out quite so shallow and heavy-handed.

Somewhere between those two questions lies the zone in which you want your song to live.  It varies from song to song, emotion to emotion, listener to listener.   For example, for my heavy rock songs I favor a vague lyrics, even when the underlying feeling is intense and heavy, because more explicitly emotional words tend to be too much.  On a rootsy, understated and less dramatic music, I need to hear words that are more clearly emotional, otherwise it ends up sounding plain and boring.

Say Something

A song’s gesture is more art than science, and ultimately you just have to create something that works for you and hope that your can find audience who agrees with you. The more songs you put together, the better you become at the art of conveying a feeling through it.  One-hit wonders notwithstanding, I really believe that if you consciously work on improving the craft of songwriting, it’s an art-form that you get better at it, the longer you work at it.

So, we keep at it.  Sooner or later you’ll start writings songs whose gestures really work for you.  And then, the chances are, others will agree with you.