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On a recent road gig, a friend and I were talking songwriting, and he made an interesting comment, “A lot of writers confuse a hook with an idea. The idea is so much more important.” And that writer instinct in me kicked in. I thought that would be good to examine a little further this month.
By common practice, a “hook” is often the title of a song, is also a phrase or element that repeats, but it’s mainly something that “hooks” the listener and keeps them interested. Songwriters often start with a hook or title when they write, and then they can focus the song toward that hook/title. I’m sure we can all come up with a list of some of our favorite hooks. What are 5 of your favorite hooks?
An “idea” is more than just the title or simply “what this song is about.” In Jimmy Webb’s book, Tunesmith, he refers to the idea as something you can write in a complete sentence, almost like a “thesis statement” (see, I remember something from school) in that it’s one or two sentence statement that tells you what your entire research paper, or in this case, song, is about. Saying “I want to write a song about a homeless man” is not an idea. It’s incomplete. Saying “I want to write a song called “Moments” is also not an idea. It’s more of a concept at that point. Once you dig for more detail about the homeless man and what happens, then you can formulate your idea. If you said “This is about a homeless man who stops another man from killing himself by discussing different “Moments” he’s overcome.” Or another example, if you said, “I want to write a song about a man who finds a homeless man and the homeless man is dreaming about scenes from his youth like he was “Almost Home”. Or another example,
My last article was about digging deeper and looking for different angles and meanings of your hooks. Let’s look at “Moments”. The word itself or the phrase “I’ve had my moments” obviously lends itself to a list of moments, but it could be written in many different ways. You could list moments of success (winning touchdown, graduation, etc.) but when you take the angle of the homeless man and another character and then a thwarted suicide, that “idea” then makes the hook stronger and more powerful.
Same thing if we examine “Almost Home”. The title itself could have been first person about someone going home, literally. But expounding on the idea of a homeless man who could have possibly been recollecting his life (was he dreaming or was he dying? The writers won’t say) makes for an intriguing and emotional story.
How do you come up with these ideas? Well, that’s really the crux of the whole thing, isn’t it? It only happens in “doing”. Let’s run through one together. Maybe we have the title, “Let It Go”. Well, the first thing we would look at is the literal angle. “It” refers to something that we have to discard so we can list physical things that we have to let go. And what could be so important to have to let go of it? Maybe an heirloom, or a car, or a person. Maybe it’s more of an emotional letting go: a loved one (dying) or letting go of a lover, letting go of inhibitions, or an event that happened in the past, etc.
Just one example, I wrote a song a while ago with this title, and the idea we used was “A song about a man who has emotional baggage from his past that he must ‘let go’ in order for him to ‘let go’ with his wife for the future”
Dig for ideas that stand out to make your songs as interesting and intriguing as possible.
Article: © SongwriterPro.com Kelly Dunn - All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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