Songwriting Sunday: Picture-Inspired Songwriting

I am a person who enjoys writing songs. They are never really deep - most of the songs that I have written are of the "social-emotional learning" or "task analysis" types, but I enjoy the process of composition from start to performance. I haven't always enjoyed this process, but I find that this is one of the creative things that I enjoy about the job that I have at this point.

In my various roles around the music therapy world, I have taught others how to write songs, and that is a part I enjoy playing. There is something quite nice about watching others be creative within boundaries that I set up. I enjoy seeing what someone else thinks about the prompts that I provide versus what I think and create during the same exact process. This is part of the reason that I am writing about composition on Sundays right now.

I enjoy the process.

One of the techniques that I recently shared for inspiration for composition is picture-inspired songwriting. There are times that I just do not have any idea what I want to write about, so using pictures as inspiration is one way into creativity.

I have a book of old magazine ads and pictures that I have saved over the years just for this specific purpose. I cut them out and glued them to copy paper so I could put them into a binder. These are things that interest me, so the book always makes me feel happy when I flip through it. It is my inspiration book. I have tried the same sort of thing in Pinterest and other types of visual social media sources, but nothing is better to me than the paper copy that I have in my library.

To do some picture-inspired songwriting, I flip through the book until a page catches my eye. I then come up with lyrics. I tend to start with lyrics when I compose - it's just the way I do things. There are times when the lyrics arrive with a full melody and accompaniment, but not always. Most of the songs that I write this way are not goal-based, so I do not often compose them for specific clients, but there are times when one of my songs written this way becomes a client-based song. I can always add in goals when I have some musical structure.

This past week, I was able to talk to some students about this type of composition. I was able to present some pictures and then hear what they composed. The variety was amazing and touched on some themes that were silly and others that were pretty deep. One partner pair stated at the end, "we need to record this!" I was thrilled to hear that level of enthusiasm for songwriting after my time with them. My own song was not very complicated, but it was something that I think about often.

The prompt for my song was a set of dirty silverware - a spoon, knife, and fork - all covered in a tomato sauce of some sort. The song that I wrote included the following lyrics:

Dirty silverware in the sink right there. Piling up, up so high. Why oh why can't I do my dishes? Why oh why can't I do my dishes?

Nothing fancy here, but it encapsulates the feelings that I have about the dirty silverware that is currently piling up in my sink. There is nothing deep about these lyrics, but there are many opportunities for expansion of this song into a deeper exploration of my reasons for avoiding dish cleaning and my feelings about my environment. With a bit more time, this will end up being a full composition with an accompaniment pattern and chord progression, but for the moment when it was arranged, it was enough.

That's one of the things that I like about this type of composition - there are no wrong ways to proceed. Anything that comes out of this type of exploration is good and right and valuable to me in some way. It does not have to be something that has value through my clients - it is part of my creativity and my experience as a human being. I can choose to share that with others or not. It is mine.

In the past, I have used this technique with different clients, but I usually use it more for my own compositions than with the students at my job. The clients that I work with who are drawn to composing tend to have their own themes in mind and do not need picture inspiration. That's fine. There are so many ways into songwriting, so I do not force anyone to do things "my" way. Clients bring their own interests and needs into songwriting and composition, so I simply clear a path and follow where they lead.

My next steps for this simple composition is to transfer it to my composition software so I can develop it. I also want to explore some of the feelings expressed in the moment of creation that still make me a bit uneasy. After that, who knows?

Let me know if this way of songwriting is something that you do in your life as a music therapist. See you tomorrow.