[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOIV00zGJGM&w=500]

Now, you can compare his version to the original version from my solo album (you can play it in the mp3 player on the right column).  It’s quite different.  Bob made my song his own.  And then it was made even more different by his freestylin’ guest, Tou Saiko Lee.

One of the measures of impactfulness of your song is when your song goes out of your hands and starts having its own life.  This is both exhilarating and scary from the original artist’s point of view.  It’s a bit like letting your kid go out to school or camp, where you can’t protect him/her no longer — you hope and trust that your kid will be OK.  The same thing happens when your song has any impact.  It’ll go off on its own, creating a journey or an evolution that perhaps even the original creator can’t see.

Listening to Bob’s version of my song, I can’t help but notice all the differences.  His phrasing is different, his tempo, the way he emphasizes different words — the song has a very different impression, one that’s not what I intended.  That’s a bit jarring on the first listen — but at the same time, I’m just filled with immense pride.  Sure, Bob’s my singer and partner, but I didn’t ask him to go play my songs for his solo gigs.  He liked it enough to learn it and make it his own without being asked to.  And he thought it was good enough to even include it in his own performance.  And he made something out of it that I couldn’t have.

All right, I’m getting a bit gushy, huh?  But you get the point.  Impactful songs will walk out of your little hands and have lives of their own.  And that’s a good thing.  Let them go, and celebrate the fact that your little creation was good enough to get out of your hands.

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.

It was a bitter disappointment for a young, naive mind.

But then, later on I realized I was completely wrong about the notion of “everyone likes it.”  There is no piece of music that is liked by everyone.  Even Mozart or the Beatles.  Ask two Beatles fans what their top 10 favorite songs are, and their lists will not be identical.

But if a song is truly impactful, it doesn’t stop there.  An impactful song elicits an emotional reaction from listeners.  Some people will think listening to the song is an engaging, pleasurable experience — it’s because the emotion they receive from the song matches an emotion they have inside.

What happens, though, when you receive a strong feeling from a song yet you really don’t have it yourself, you really can’t relate to it in anyway?

You’ll feel turned off.  You may even hate listening to the song.

I had such an experience the other day.  I was listening to Apocalyptica’s Worlds Collide album, and there’s a song called “I’m Not Jesus” featuring a chorus that goes:

I’m not Jesus
I won’t forgive

with SlipKnot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor singing rather gruffly.

Now, I love Apocalyptica.  I adore their fusion of cellos and metal, how the stark beauty of classically influenced melodies merge with the aggression and heaviness.  But this song really got on my nerves, because forgiveness is a value I uphold highly and listening to someone make the above proclamation over and over in a song’s chorus really grated on me.

So I went on to remove the song from my iTunes — in fact I deleted the file from my computer.  Now that’s a strong reaction to a song, wouldn’t you say?

But then I realized that others probably strongly relate to the song, just as intensely as I was turned off by it.  If I were an angst-ridden young man, feeling betrayed by church and religion, mad as hell and in no mood to forgive someone — I may really get into this song.

So you can see that an impactful song creates a strong emotional reaction in a listener.  If your listener relate to it, they’ll love it.  If they don’t, they may hate it.  Ordinary, safe, unimpactful songs don’t turn people off — they just bore them.  When it’s truly delivering something, people are more likely to have love/hate reaction.

Trying to write songs that everyone loves is a folly.  But know that strong songs elicit strong reactions — good and bad.  Keep in mind that if someone hates your song, then there’s bound to be others who will love it just as strongly as others hating it.  Haters are indicators of your potential.  You won’t get haters until you write songs of some potential.

So embrace your song’s haters, thank them for telling you that your song is impactful — and then move on to find someone who loves it.

Words from Accomplished Creators

Steven Pressfield and Elizabeth Gilbert come to mind when I think of creative people who tout the idea of “showing up everyday” approach to creative process.  No, neither of them are songwriters — if you need a songwriter example, look no further than Diane Warren (half way through the interview, she talks about her routines.  Did her routines come as the result of the success, or is it the other way?  I think the latter).

Pressfield looks at his craft — writing — sort of like an employment.  You show up everyday, rain or shine.  You do it even when you don’t feel like it.  You don’t over-identify with it (it’s just a job).  Your work is evaluated by your real-world customers/clients.  Gilbert discusses how you can’t control when the inspiration strikes — so the best practice is to just show up regularly, make yourself available to Muse.

Does the comparison to a day job/employment rub you the wrong way?  It certainly did with me, for a long time.  I read rock-star interviews where artists claim “I’ll quit if it starts to feel like a job.”

Well, if songwriting is your hobby, then by all means, stick with that approach.  If it’s your life-long passion, though, I highly recommend you institute diligence to it.

Making Yourself Available to Inspiration

Indeed, my personal experience is that inspiration strikes often after I take a few stabs at getting something going, such as a chord progression, a lyrical hook, or a bridge idea.  It goes like this:

1. I sit down with an intention to write a song, or put it more accurately, to start or make progress on a song.
2. I start poking around with existing ideas or fiddling around on my guitar, just trying to catch something interesting
3. There’s a magic period — perhaps somewhere between 5-15 minutes — when I enter The Zone.  Once in The Zone, I’m really creative, and things come together quickly.

Of course, I’ve had a number of occasions where an inspiration strikes unexpectedly (listen to Gilbert talk about Tom Waits example) and I scramble around trying to capture it.  But often my songs are born out of, then polished, minutes after I start my writing session.  And that act of starting has nothing to do with inspiration or “feeling like it.”   So inspiration doesn’t come first — my showing-up invites inspiration to come to me.

How to Enter The Zone

It’s elusive and tricky, but I find that there are definitely best practices in terms of maximizing my chances of entering The Zone.  Some that come to my mind are:

• Be frustration-free.
• Do it early in the day: by early, I mean before I do other things.  The sooner I get to songwriting, the better, so that I can approach it with my mind less clattered.
• Leave judgment and critics at the door: Just play – as in, fool around.
• Be of general good health: a good night’s sleep, exercised, plenty of rest, good food in my tummy.

To me, perhaps the first item is the most critical.  If I have any frustration in mind, it makes it much harder to put that away in a drawer somewhere in my mind and then make the trip to The Zone.

Practice Makes Perfect

And even with the best intentions or setup, sometimes I don’t get into The Zone.  And that’s OK — I just pat myself on the back for showing up and taking a stab nevertheless.  But more often than not, I do hit it and make good progress.  And I get better at entering The Zone the older I get, or I should say, the longer I’ve been at this craft of songwriting.

So, if you are serious about developing and improving your songwriting, I highly recommend you make it a regular routine to just engage in songwriting.  We all tend to look for tips, tricks and other shortcuts to writing good songs, but in reality, diligence is the most reliable ingredient in improving our craft.  Even if  you sought no teacher/mentor, read no books/interviews, did nothing otherwise to try to get better — just by showing up to do it more often, you can’t help but grow and improve as a songwriter.  That’s just how it works for most things in life, and songwriting is no exception.

So, want to write great songs, hit songs, impactful songs?  Show up regularly.  If you don’t hit it today, that’s OK.  That’s not the important part — or in Gilbert’s words, that’s not our part.  Our part is just to show up, to make ourselves available.

And that’s the single most impactful ingredient to writing good songs.

If that sounds abstract and lofty, here’s a much more concrete way of thinking about it: write a song that tells a personal story.

Once again, we have to remember that we are all unique.  There is no need to try to be unique, because there are no two humans with the same background, same life experience, same thoughts and opinions.  Even a pair of twins growing up in pretty much the same environment on their lives, end up being different.

Since each of our own life story is unique, we just have to start there, to write unique songs.

For example, one of my songs “Out of the Ocean” is literally my own story.  I happen to be a Japanese living in US, and this sentiment of being so far from home, and the longing that comes with it, is a feeling that I don’t often find among my American friends.  It’s not that unique, though, as I’m sure many of us immigrants carry it to some extent.  I just put my own feelings into my own music and words, so that I can listen to it and get that feeling.

Now, literally making a song out of your own personal story isn’t the only way.  ”Rusty Clipper” is an example of a song that was inspired by somebody else’s story — but yet, in interpreting, filling the holes and making up my own meaning, I made a song that is my own fable, containing my own feelings.  You don’t have to use your own story, to tell your story. Novelists, playwrights and screenwriters all do this.  They make up fiction that express something of themselves, in a way that perhaps real life stories can’t.

But words are not the only place where you can reflect your own identity — impactful songwriting is the marriage of words and music.   If the music packs an emotional punch, then words alone don’t have to carry all the weight, having to explain and express everything.

In my more recent song “Bleeding Redwood” I’ve been able to pack more articulated uniqueness than my earlier efforts.  It’s a song that contain strong emotions, so the music is dramatic, complex and long, yet it also contains a lot of momentum and urgency.  The big contrasts take you from intimacy/fragility to intensity and desperation, both an integral aspects of sharing a personal feeling.  Here the lyrics don’t tell a very concrete story, because the music contain a lot of drama.  To my sensibility, dramatic music and more abstract lyrics match better, because if they were both dramatic they can come across as heavy-handed.

This song is a stew that pack elements that are not often seen in this particular combination — rawness of modern rock, complexity of progressive rock, sensitive & poetic lyrics, and diverse stylistic influence (jazz chords, Latin-infused instrumental section, etc.).  In short, it’s unique because it reflects my uniqueness, both in its words and music.

So, use your own personal story, your personal feeling as the starting point of your songs.  Use your own words and bring in liberally your own influences and idiosyncrasies.  Pay attention to combinations of elements that seem more unusual, and do more of that.  That’s how you develop your unique songwriting style.

You aren’t alone.

I recently read Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art and agreed with him about this: the more gifted you are, the more Resistance you feel to that activity. The more important something is to you, the more vulnerable and insecure you feel, and you’ll find bigger excuses and stronger obstacles that prevent you from doing it.

When I first began writing songs around age 18, at first I was so excited.  At the time I was heavily influenced by Michael W. Smith.  He wrote an entire album about issues and struggles that teenagers go through (The Big Picture) and I thought it was the best thing in the world.  And to be able to offer the same kind of thing was positively exciting.  So I eagerly showed my songs to anybody who’d care to listen.

At first, I was so surprised to receive mixed reactions.  I expected everybody to like my songs, just the same way I loved MWS.  I was crushed when I realized that some people really didn’t like it (and were saying nice things just to be nice) or weren’t that interested.  It was particularly disappointing when my family and close friends didn’t react in a way I wanted them to.

But soon I realized that music was a subjective art and that my family and friends liking me, unfortunately, had nothing to do with liking my music.  Not to mention, I never realized how poor of a singer I am — that, people pointed out all the time — and it’s hard to appreciate a song when the singer’s not very good.

So at first I felt like I could conquer the world because I could write songs.  Then I quickly tumbled off that mountain top and have never been able to get up there.  I still think the world of my songs, but I constantly fear that I am not as good as I believe, that I am wrong about myself.

And to be truthful, the bigger our gift is, perhaps the greater the difference there lies between the quality of your output at the beginning and where you can go.  And I believe that deep down, we know about the potential.  And the greater that potential is, also the greater the distance between where you are and where you could be, and that overwhelms you.

I don’t really know how to ease your pain.  Except to say that, if it scares you and overwhelms you, yet you still have the undying desire to do it — you must do it, it’s something you need to do in your life.  Don’t expect to be good from the get-go.  Songwriting is a craft like any other — the longer you do it, the more songs you write, the better you get at it.  You don’t run out of ideas.  In fact, the more you write, the more you learn to tap into that creative zone where you are more likely to unearth quality stuff.  The only way to close that gap between where you are and where you could be is to do it. There is no other way.

If you bother to write songs, then you know how much songs can mean to people.  Songs can touch and change people’s lives.  They can spend a lifetime with people, like a close friend or a guardian angel, staying with them through thick and thin.  It’s such a gift to come across a great song.  When you can relate to it, then all the sudden you know that you are not alone with that feeling you have.  Songs can connect people, build communities, in ways that few other things can.

So it’s understandable that it overwhelms and scares you.  And disappointments can feel bitter and penetrating.  Just remember that the greater the gift, the greater its goodness, the greater its importance — the greater also the Resistance. If you feel scared, if you feel that the world around you is conspiring to prevent you from doing it — then that’s something you must do.

You’ll feel proud, every time you do it.  Keep writing.

OK, so I state the obvious here.  We all know this.  Yet, many of us also rely on feedback from others to determine if our music is any good.  Songwriting groups give feedback to each other, and there are services that have established pros from the music industry listening and giving you feedback.

Songwriting is a craft like any other, and while it’s hard to quantify, there are definitely some skills you have to master in order to write decent songs.  Feedback is useful, especially when you’re getting started, because your songs probably come across like something a beginner writes.  It leaves a listener with a sense of awkwardness or boredom.  An experienced songwriter and music listener can discern why a song isn’t working, and sometimes there are mechanical reasons.  Perhaps the verse and chorus are in different keys and there’s no transition in-between that really hold them together.  Perhaps the melody is too monotonous and the lyrics doesn’t have anything engaging to keep interest.   But if you can tell that your song isn’t very good but yet you can’t tell why, then going to others for feedback and pointers can help you grow in your craft.

But beyond learning the basic mechanics of how to write a cohesive song, the idea of relying on someone else’s feedback needs to be approached cautiously.  Why?

It’s because that person’s idea of good music is not the same as yours.

If you are trying to write a metal song and you let your grandma, an accomplished opera singer in her day, hear your song and ask for a feedback.  Useful?  Perhaps, but probably not.

You let an industry pro with credentials in modern rock hear your electronica song.  Useful?  Maybe.

My point is this: since everybody’s idea of good music is different, you can’t keep relying on others’ opinion to gauge the quality of your song. If you seek such tutorage, make sure that the person you’re seeking feedback from agree with you about what makes a good song.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether a song is good enough or not. Because music is so subjective, even if a well-established veteran doesn’t like your music, that doesn’t mean that it’s not good. That doesn’t mean that your music doesn’t deserve any fans.

Sit down and honestly ask yourself.  Does your music turn you on, like the best you heard from your heros? Can you sincerely and wholeheartedly go out and stand behind your songs, telling everybody that they are as good as those who are among the best in your genre?

If not, then your music isn’t good enough.  It’s that simple.  If you can’t get behind your own songs, if it doesn’t create the same kind of impact that your favorite artists’ material does, then you need to practice more before you start sharing your songs with the world.

Once you get to a point where you think the world of your own songs, then you’re ready to go out and start seeking audience/demands for your music.  Why?  Because if you honestly think it’s really good, then the chances are, there are others who agree with you. The matter is to simply find them.   And that enthusiasm you have about your own material is a key ingredient in attracting your fans.  After all, how can you convince others that you have the goods, when you don’t believe so yourself?

If you are writing punk rock songs and let 10 punk rock heros of yours hear your stuff, and all 10 of them say it sucks — then there’s something mechanically wrong with your song.  It’s not put together well.  But when you’re still at that level as a writer, I’m sure you can detect that yourself.  A song at that level can’t be capable of the same impact that you get from your heros.

If your song does excite you, then someone else will agree with you.  They and you agree on what makes a good song, and you have met it, in your own eyes as well as theirs.

So, trust your own judgments about your songs. Be honest, but don’t be over-critical, either.  If a piece of music has left a huge mark on you and you can analyze the songwriting/composition to figure out why, then you have the capacity to write the music of the same quality. You may not be able to, yet, but with practice you will be able to.

Don’t judge your value as a songwriter by what others say.  You are a writer and lover of music.  You have an inner scale that’s accurate enough to judge a piece of music.

So, is it any good?  If not, keep at it.  You’ll get there.  If it is, then I sure hope you share it with others.  There can never be enough good music in the world.

Music has power.  It has tremendous power.  It’s existed since the dawn of humanity.  Every function in our physical bodies has rhythm.  It’s critical, essential, necessary.

If you are bothering to write songs, you know this already, don’t you?  Yet, I fear that so many songs are written without really realizing how much power and potential it contains.

This is a famous speech by Karl Paulnack, a director at Boston Conservatory.  He’s a classical musician, but that’s really not the matter.  Here’s an excerpt:

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

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I don’t know why you write songs and really, that doesn’t matter.  But what matters is that you realize our craft has the potential to make this kind of impact.  Sure, writers and painters and actors do, too, but music is perhaps the most primal, most raw, most nakedly emotional of arts.  We are given access to a channel that connect directly and deeply into people’s hearts.  If we don’t wield this power, and wield it correctly, we are doing a great disservice.  It’s a missed opportunity.

I’m not saying you have to write some corny feel-good songs.  In fact, any intentions to produce or conjure any results are manipulative and futile.  What we can do, though, is to heighten our craft to such a level so that we are effectively articulating, expressing our deep and true authentic voices.  We all have stories to tell, no two people have identical lives.  By putting our blood and guts into our songs, we create a chance to make a connection.  Someone out there may be feeling the way you do, too.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the sense of community you feel from listening to a song that contains that very feeling you feel.

From upbeat to downbeat, from elation to heartbreak, we need to craft songs that reflect who we are, because therein lies the power, the potential to create an impact.   If you’re not aiming for that, then you’re making yourself to be smaller than you are.  Your songs may not reach many ears, but an impactful song has the power to really touch those who do hear it. Songwriting is a craft, a skill like any other, so we all have develop it.  But it’s a very worthy pursuit.  Music has touched us in a profound way, and we may just end up taking part in someone else’s life being changed, too.

I find that thought very inspiring.  It gives me a reason to live for.  Really.

Really, some songs seem to do all the wrong things, and still end up affecting me in a powerful way.

What I’ve gathered is that it’s not a set of rules and formulas you can follow.  It is more art than science.  Sometimes it feels like a gift — it’s simply given to you.  Other times, you work and work and work at it, and somewhere in the process the song goes from mediocre to good.

All that being said, I do know some key factors that maximizes the chance of a song being impactful.  It’s not a guarantee, but the likelihood increases.

It all comes down to one critical quality, and a number of smaller elements that serve to create that one quality.

Matching the Feelings Between Words and Music

And that most critical quality is this: music and words work together to convey the same feeling.

In the other words, the feelings you get from listening to the music without words, and reading the lyrics without music, closely resemble each other.

You’d think that it’s obvious, but I find that surprisingly many songs have words and music that really don’t match each other, in terms of the feelings they convey.

80′s Hair Metal is littered with such examples.  Like “You Give Love a Bad Name” is a rousing rock anthem about heart breaks of love gone awry. Don’t get me wrong, Bon Jovi was one of the first bands that really affected me in a deep way, and I love that song.  (again, some songs are impactful even when they ignore all rules)  But when I close my eyes and tune in to the feeling I get just from the music, the feeling I get can be described as jubilant, uplifting, defiant. But if I tune in to what the words are saying, it’s downright resentful and accusatory (if tongue-in-cheek).  These words sound fun and rousing, only in the context of this fist-pumping rock anthem.

But I can’t help but imagine: how much more powerful had it been, if the song had jubilant, uplifting and defiant lyrics?

You don’t have to look far to see such an example, the next song on the same album is “Living on a Prayer,” perhaps among the very biggest and lasting hits of Bon Jovi’s mindblowingly successful catalog.  And in that song, the words and music do convey feelings that are more compatible.  When you sing along to those soaring choruses, chanting “take my hand, we’ll make it I swear” the experience can be transcending.

Alining Everything for a Single Impact

When you realize that you can maximize your song’s chance for creating impacts by matching the emotional content, you start to see opportunities for aligning various elements within the music to that singular focus.

Think about these elements:

• Chords can be altered to pack more emotional punch: for example, you can add 9th, or F#, to an Em chord, which sounds more intense, tragic, and tension-filled.
• Groove can lay the foundation for your song: forward-leaning momentum makes a song move, while backward-leaning pocket (playing a hair behind beats) can settle things down.  Which serves your song’s impact?
• Sounds contained in words and languages: you can choose words not just for their meaning but also for the sounds they contain.  Lots of hard consonants make a line sound aggressive or in-your-face, while smooth-sounding words can feel intimate and easy-going.
• Structure can help create drama, or lack thereof, in your song.  Saving a powerful revelation/turn of events in the story to a dramatic and unexpected bridge section can maximize its impact.  Or you build verses and choruses based on similar chords and melodies, to create a sense of comforting reassurance.
• Tones and timbre are powerful tools in eliciting raw emotions.   Harsh, obtrusive noises can aid your angry and disturbing song, or serene tones of pan pipes create a peaceful atmosphere.
• Performance is another powerful factor: you can give an entirely different emotional content, just in the manner you sing your lines.  Belt it out and you can convey passion.   Whisper it and you can convey intimacy.
• Production is a major contributor, both in recordings and amplified live performances.  Lots of compression and reverb, when used expertly, can give a professional and slick sound.  Leave things more unprocessed, and it can sound raw and unrefined.

So you see, there are so many elements that make up a single piece of music.  And the more they work together to convey a focused and well-defined feeling, the greater the chance of your song becoming impactful.

Impactful songs don’t necessarily make hits.  You may compose music whose emotional content may be so dark and disturbing, that listeners may not be able to listen to it often and radio won’t play it. But yet, such a song is still powerfully impactful. When a listener wants to channel their darkness, they’ll turn to that song to connect and express such feelings.

Conclusion

When songwriting is a sum of all parts, then its power stems from all those parts working together for a single goal.  When your goal is to create impact, then you can align everything within your song to maximize the possibility.

A song, as I define it, is a marriage of words and music.  Each in itself is an incredibly powerful medium.  Combined, its might is profound.  When you become aware of this potential, then you can begin to line everything up to deliver a deep and strong impression to yourself and your listeners.

So, whether you start with music or lyrics, pay attention to the possible impacts your material can make.  Then seek to match it up with other elements that are cohesive and compatible with the kind of impacts the song wants to create.

As you begin to master this art of creating impactful songs, I believe you’ll notice a difference in your audience’s reactions.  It may not reach more people, but people who do “get” your songs, may be affected in a deeper way.

And that leads to a stronger, more powerful connection between you, your songs, and your audience.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like an ideal to me.  I don’t know what can be more satisfying to an artist.

For example, do you have some instruments in the background that’s just playing chords?  Like some static string patch?

Get rid of that.  The reason is because spoonfeeding gets tiring fast.  When the music doesn’t require you to hear between notes, it becomes boring.

Most of the times, basslines suggest chord structure.  And that’s quite enough.   No need to reinstate the obvious.

Don’t put parts in, unless you absolutely have to.  Make each part count.