What does your audience want to hear?

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What does your audience want to hear?
 
Here are some questions to answer when you want to improve your material. Why do people like to listen to songs? What do they need from songs?  What will make an audience listen to your song? How do you capture their attention and hold it?
 
When many of us start writing songs, much of it is totally unconscious and self-expression is the name of the game. Rightly so! Sometimes, our songwriting is profoundly imitative, heavily influenced by our favourite artists.  No surprises there! The audience is often the last thing on our minds. As a consequence, some songs might connect but others are way off the mark and we don’t always know why.
 
While we have yet to identify a specific ‘music centre’ in the brain, there’s plenty of neural science that shows when we listen to music, there is increased blood flow to the areas in the brain associated with reward, emotion and arousal.
 
Songs work when an audience is moved. When an audience feels something they care about deeply, you’ve made a real connection.  Creating a strong and clear emotion with your song is a top priority for any songwriter.  It doesn’t particularly matter what the emotion is – angst, joy, disillusionment, anger, sorrow, regret –we love them all, and at an intense level.  Just don’t be boring! 
 
Choices you make about the chords you use, the trajectory of the melody, the groove and the lyrical content all contribute to the development of your song’s emotional appeal.  Quite small shifts in a song’s construction can have a huge effect on the song’s impact. Anything from a slight tempo shift to changing just one of the intervals in the melody or simplifying the chord progression or adding that unexpected chord can heighten emotion.  Of course, major surgery can help your song hit home too. Shifting the chorus to the front of the song for a change, dramatically increasing contrast in the melody between the verse and the chorus and adding (or deleting) a bridge can really spice things up.
 
Substituting stronger words in your lyrics can up the ante in a song too.  While erring on the side of simplicity, you can spot check your verbs – should you go or should you walk/stride/run/stagger/stumble? And your nouns – is she wearing a dress or a gown/skirt/bikini/shorts/jeans? Is she a Spanish lady/ a virgin/ a queen/ the girl next door? And adjectives can colour your world  - is it a car or a little red Corvette, a big yellow taxi or your daddy’s Thunderbird?
 
Once you start consciously trying to develop the emotional impact of your songs, test them on an audience who have never heard them before – open mic or your songwriting circle. You’ll soon know if your listeners are feeling it. 

Talk more soon.

Charlotte Yates

ps if you want to really deep dive into improving the emotional impact of your songs, join us in Akaroa for our Songwriting Retreat Feb 5-9.