Songs That Tell a Story and How to Write Them
By Astrid Carlson // Photo from Pexels
Some of the very best songs tell you a story. It might be about unrequited love, of yearning and wanting, or of an event that happened in real life.
Like books, a song with a story can be truth or fiction, or even a blurred narrative containing bits of both. The difference is in a song, you don’t have 300 pages to build characters, suspense and plots – you have three or four minutes to get it all out. Writing stories within songs is a talent few possess.
Bruce Springsteen is a master of the art, telling stories to introduce his songs, and doing the same when he fires up the six string. Much of his music is fictional with some fact woven into the narrative. Born in the USA, used as an anthem for all things American, is an anti-war song, mixing the experiences of real life Vietnamese veterans with his own fictional character.
Johnny Cash has also been known to tell stories through his songs, and has covered Springsteen in the past. Some of his are historically accurate, such as The Ballad of Ira Hayes, focusing on the US war hero who raised the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945. Folk, as well as country, is a genre often associated with storytelling, and the UK band Ferocious Dog do it better than most. Their songs cover historical figures and events few know about, like the Pentrich Revolution of 1817 and Bill Sykes, a man famously transported to Australia in 1865 who left a series of letters documenting his fate. Some artists, such as Taylor Swift, write their own stories. An example of this is her track Fifteen, written as a letter to her friend after a tough breakup. At the other end of the scale, N.W.A wrote Straight Outta Compton about their experiences coming through the tough city. Stories; all different, all told through the medium of song.
How do these writers, from different genres, telling different types of stories, hone their craft? How can you hope to write songs that keep listeners hooked in the same way? We’ve got some handy tips here that might just help.
Keep the tune in mind
One thing to keep in mind when writing your lyrical story is the music – first and foremost, you’re writing a song. You might have a great story to tell, fictional or factual, but if the music is bad then nobody will want to listen to it. Singer-songwriter Bacon James explains how keeping a song catchy with an instrumental-led melody should do the trick, and this can be seen in some of the best storytelling songs of all time. Think back to Born in the USA by Springsteen – that hook and intro is enough to have patriotism running through your vein before you hear a lyric sung in anger. That makes the song memorable, perhaps more so than the message! The same goes for Stan by Eminem, although it uses a sample to hit home. Dido’s Thank You wasn’t a huge hit, but it was a great tune, and Eminem leveraged that to tell his story.
Know where you’re going
In his book ‘On Writing,’ Stephen King suggested a good writer doesn’t set out with an end game in mind; he (or she) sees where the story takes the protagonist. When you’re writing a song, you can’t do that, even if you’re writing fiction. You need to know where to start, and where you’re going. The constraints of time mean you need to plot your story succinctly and understand where the middle and end will be.
Of course, if you’re writing about the Pentrich Revolution, for example, you know the story and can therefore plot accordingly. The problem would come when you wrote fiction, as with Kenny Rogers' Coward of the County. In that, a protagonist branded a coward turns vigilante after a crime is committed against his partner. To tell that story at the right pace, you need to know where it starts and ends.
Tick the key features boxes
To write a good song, you must have certain key features, just as you would writing a book. Make sure when you come to your story, you must the following.
a core premise
a plot
one (or more) characters
tension or conflict
a turning point
a conclusion
If we’re to look at “Coward of the County” by Kenny Rogers, we’ll see how it has all of these things. Its premise is never to judge a book by its cover, the plot is about the so-called coward, Tommy sees his partner attacked and him exacting revenge. There are several characters, including Tommy, Becky, the Gatling Brothers and the man telling the tale, Tommy’s uncle. There’s tension with her being attacked, and the turning point where Tommy ‘stops, and locks the door’. The conclusion? Listen for yourself!