The Authentic Songwriter: 5 Methods to Writing Confessional Lyrics

At its best, lyric writing is a magical mixture of creativity and storytelling that can draw your listener into a world you’ve created. The greatest artists know how to draw from their lives and the world around them, to tell stories that evoke powerful emotions. Your message in your music is what makes listeners fall in love with you.

What is your writing style? Do you write songs from your life, about other people or make-believe?

Writing for the industry is one thing. Writing for your soul is another.

One is generally for profit, the other is for purpose. You don’t have to choose, you can do both. But one is more rewarding than the other.

Songwriting is a fine art composed of a high level of craft and many finely tuned skills. Professional songwriters write every day. Sometimes multiple songs in a day. They know that their writing improves from a large volume of work. To write, a LOT.

But writing a powerful song takes more than just skill and technique. Songs must make an emotional impact on their listener.

You can write about fact or fiction. You can write about others or about yourself. There are many different perspectives and techniques when it comes to writing songs and lyrics.

But the truth is, either way, your fans want to know you – they want to hear about who you are, how you feel, and what you think. So you might as well thread your songs with YOU to connect more with them.

Even if your song is crafted from fiction (or one-part fiction, one-part fact), finding a way to connect it to your personal experience and emotions supercharges the emotional barometer. If you connect deeply with your song as you write it, if written well, it will deeply connect with your listener. It’s like a ripple effect.

Have you ever sat down to write and experienced an emotional release in the process? ❤️ Those of us who write songs, we know how they forge battles and win wars for us on the inside.

Write from your core, from the depths of your soul. Awaken something beautiful, tender, and therapeutic inside of you – it will also make your songs more meaningful.

My encouragement to you is to make your songs your epiphanies, your victory laps, your hard-won truths. Ask your questions…say things that are screaming inside of you to be said…things that are hard to say…things maybe you’ve never said…

You can’t write about what you don’t know about, intimately. You also can’t write about what you don’t have a perspective on (i.e. when something is too raw). If you are going through something you may need to just get through it first before you can really write about it.

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.

The great writers have their fingers on their pulse.

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” ― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Great writing risks telling the truth. Songwriting is therapy. The more cathartic, the better. When you write what’s real and true, you free yourself and breathe life into others experiences.

Speak your truth. Only you can.

This is where the importance of lyric writing comes in.

We know – and I will demonstrate in this differentiator in a song’s success. And how often the opposite advice given to artists — which is misleading them in their own songwriting.

1. Conversational

Fix You by Coldplay

She Used to Be Mine by Sara Bareilles

• The third tip for writing song lyrics is to write like you speak. We speak English, we write English, we tell stories from our lives, and have meaningful conversations with friends. But for some reason as soon as we start lyric writing, we get in our HEADS and start LITERALLY WRITING instead of speaking.
• We get abstract and poetic; we contort the language to get our rhymes to fall at the ends of the lines even when the content no longer makes sense.
• We forget what we’re really trying to say in the first place, Why? Because we are
  • trying to rhyme
  • make it sound cool or get attached to cool words
• But keep in mind that the most important quality of a great lyric is authenticity. Write like you would if you were relaying the story to a small group of people who care about you and what you have to say.
• The LITMUS TEST to see if your lyric is conversational is to speak the lyric out loud. Does it flow easily as if you were speaking?

2. Poetic

• Poetic lyrics add the element of what the eye sees.
• Poetry is delivered mainly to the eye. Lyrics are delivered mainly to the ear.
• Poetry and song lyrics both benefit from well-applied poetic devices, such as metaphor, simile, alliteration, hy-per-bo-le, personification, onomatopoeia (the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (such as buzz, hiss).

Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah, 1:21 KDLang

David Gray – The One I Love

3. Confessional

One of my favorite styles of lyric writing – the one that is the most therapeutic and heals the most. I want to point out the first four lines of these songs – in some – the first 2. You have 15 seconds to hook the listener into what you are saying. Your first 4 lines need to foreshadow what’s coming – and the chorus. Make them count.

Examples:

Patty Griffin – Rain – conversational storytelling – personal
John Moreland – You Don’t Care For Me Enough to Cry – conversational storytelling – personal
Adele – Someone Like You
– the typical lyric would have been to say “nevermind I’ll find someone NEW” – but they took it a step further to say “I’ll find someone LIKE YOU” – EVIDENCE of taking a deeper dive into the experience to locate the EMOTIONAL CONFLICT or PAIN POINT – which then the listener can experience a more powerful emotion and something NEW not yet said yet – which is the hallmark of a powerful song.

Exercise: Pick one of these approaches that you haven’t written from before and give it a try.

Pick one of these styles you haven’t used before to write your next song with:

• conversational
• poetic
• storyline
• confessional
• political – social commentary

While there is much more to examine and we go much more in-depth into this when you come to work with us this is really good overview to start with.

Here are 5 Tips to Write More Authentic Lyrics:

1. Write a letter to the younger you.
2. Write a song to someone you love telling them something you’ve always meant to say but haven’t yet.
3. Write a song to someone who you lost.
4. Write a song to someone who misunderstood you.
5. Write a song to a future love, dream or wish.

To deepen your emotional connection to your songs:

❤️ Try writing from real-life experiences for an entire month as an experiment.
❤️ Focus on writing things that are close to your heart.
❤️ Write from your perspective and use a strong backstory.
❤️ You may need a little time to pass after a traumatic experience before you can write about it.

You can learn more about our method and other proven songwriting techniques in our upcoming Signature Songwriting Circle opening up again Fall 2022.