When I think of singer-songwriters I have met and those I have never met, I am moved by their veracity in disclosing personal vulnerabilities that relate to the people around them. What is most specific is what is most relatable. What is hidden is gently revealed: a struggle with discrimination; a challenge with poverty; a curiosity with one’s multilayered identity; a grief unresolved; a paralyzing fear running the show of one’s life; a loss of direction; an enchantment of first love; a discovery of hope and meaning; a humorous situation; a man in a bar whose eyes catch a glimpse of a magnetic woman.
When Jim Croce begins a song with the line “Gonna tell you a story that you won’t believe, but I fell in love last Friday evenin,’ with a girl I saw on a bar room TV screen,” he hooks the listener immediately. In this song, he reveals so much about his infatuation with a woman he has never met, and describes her as a “five-foot six and two fifteen, a bleached-blonde mamma with a streak of mean.” I invite you to read through this lyric, listen to the song, bounce along with the addictive rhythm and then use this song as a model to make a captured moment in your life into a song lyric that is wonderfully relatable, making what was completely unknown into a gift that is magnetically, musically and meaningful revealed.
Make it a spiritual discipline to listen to the songs of artists you both admire and those you know nothing about. Read the lyrics, read them again and then again. As you read the lyrics, highlight what images, emotions and situations and life opportunities and challenges hook you. Take five minutes to write about what you highlighted and then pen your own lyric based on a sliver of one of your memorable life experiences. What you discover specifically in your captured moment will most certainly relate emotionally to those who are privileged to hear what you have created and receive what you are sharing so intimately and unabashedly.
Happy creating and writing!
Blessings to all.
Michael
