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One Word
October 11th, 2006Songs are short stories set to music. Aside from the rubbish once known as disco, most songs have a very compact story.
- * The average novel starts at 80,000 words
- * A novella is around 30,000
- * Short fiction starts at 1,000
- * Most three stanza, one chorus songs … 200
A songwriter must struggle with almost every word to paint the most vivid picture possible, in the shortest space available. Without care, lyrics and the story being sung are lifeless. And people don’t buy lifeless songs (well, if you ignore anything recorded recently by Karen Carpenter).
Let me illustrate with a single line I once stole from Tom Waits. The line was describing someone drinking. If the line had been written:
He’s drinking whiskey every night
You would have a mental picture of a man who doesn’t have much of a life, but is otherwise harmless and unharmed. Had it been written:
He’s sippin’ whiskey every night
You envision a fellow, perhaps a southern gent, happily indulging in a five o’clock ritual at the tennis club. Had it been:
He’s slurpin’ whiskey every night
Well, that could be anybody down at the corner sports bar … at ten in the morning.
What Waits wrote painted a very different portrait by selecting one specific word. The original line was:
He’s spillin’ whiskey every night
This one word, that omitted anything resembling drinking except in the past tense (i.e., he’s already bombed beyond quick recovery) sold the stanza. It painted a story of a man who every night gets drunk to the point of losing physical control and emotional responsibility. And all because of one word.
Longer phrases apply as well. When James McMurtry wrote about the Lights of Cheyenne, he described them as broken glass on the road into town. But that phrasing does not bring the song to life as it is not descriptive. McMurtry wrote instead:
Like windshield glass on the shoulder at night
This puts the listener outside of Cheyenne city limits, on a lone highway in the dead of dark.
Now that’s a short story!
