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In this free songwriting lesson, Berklee College of Music Assistant Professor and Berklee Online instructor Caroline Harvey offers tips for keeping lyrics vague.
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About Caroline Harvey
Caroline Harvey is an assistant professor in the Liberal Arts department at Berklee College of Music, in addition to being a writer, performer, and somatic therapist. She teaches and performs poetry nationwide, and is the creator of two original voice curricula, Free Your Voice™ and Embodied Poetics™. She was featured in two documentaries and appeared on Season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry. A past member and coach of multiple Poetry Slam Teams, Harvey has been a part of victories on both national and regional stages. Most recently, she helped the Berklee College of Music Slam Team win the “Spirit of Slam” award at the 2010 Collegiate National Poetry Slam. She has performed with Alicia Keys, Mos Def, John Legend, Reggie Gibson, Joshua Bennett, Donna De Lory, and others, and is honored to have been featured at schools and organizations such as YouthSpeaks, The Esalen Institute, Bristol Community College, Northeastern University, University of California at Berkeley, and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
Harvey was awarded a BFA in Theater from Boston University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and won the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence. Her stage directorial debut dealt with the work of poet Anne Sexton and was chosen for review by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She later earned a Master’s degree in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. Harvey’s writing, which explores ideas of the sacred and tracks her belief that even the fiercest traumas contain within them the capacity for profound healing and beauty, has been published in various literary journals and anthologies including the 2005 National Poetry Slam Anthology High Desert Voices and the Harvard publication The Charles River Review. She is currently working on a new collection of poems based on the women Salvador Dali painted and a book about her most recent travels in Asia and Central America.
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Poems are not lyrics. A lyric is only about music. It exists to be a companion for music. Poetry stands by itself. Some songwriters would try to be vague, but most want to send either an emotion, or an image. A story song won't be vague, it will be direct. A song about feelings can be any approach. Trying to seem profound is a mistake, and the artist will do a lot of growing up in public. Stick to thoughts and feelings that inspired you at the start, then you have maximum power to get across…?
The Pixies, to me, are the ultimate masters of keeping things lyrically very vague, but nonetheless convincing you that without a doubt that they're singing about something profound. Nirvana would be another. Very rarely do the lyrics of either band parse out to very sensible text, and yet, we love the songs, draw powerful images from them and never question the lyrics.
It's very hard to do without sounding pretentious and affected or even just plain silly, but when it's penned and delivered well, ambiguity can be much more powerful than a song that broadcasts its message in plain text. Our minds fill in the gaps with our own meaning, which makes it personal, rather than simply hear and agreeing (or disagreeing) with someone else's message, however passionately it may be delivered.
Then again, Robyn Hitchcock is a writer who can be totally vague, pretentious and silly, and make you love every moment!
The sense of mystery, depth and discovery may in fact be an absolute sham (or an unintentional bit of genius from the writers subconscious) but if it's a good sham, beautiful even, no one will care and the song will be a success. Again, very hard to do!?
This woman is awesome.?
The way I look at it. The more vague on verses. The clearer you should be on the chorus. Provide the mystery first. Then resolve it. I'm finding that tension/resolution works for lyrics. Not just tone and cadence.
Thanks for the video.?
I Like VagueLyrics…I Was Listening To The Killers – Read My Mind And I Didn't Understand The Lyrics… But While Listening I Had My Own Idea's Of What The Lyrics Meant In Real Time. Its Hard For Me To Explain It But I Really Love Vague Music. Sometimes I Want To Create My Own Emotion
Joni Michelle kept saying something in a recent interview, quoting from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche something about muddying the waters so they seem deep. Very cool.
'On the Poets'
They [the poets] also aren't clean enough for me, they cloud all their waters, so it seems deep.
very well put! thanks! vague lyrics sometimes drive me crazy!!! the grunge band Bush, for example…or 311…you start listening and it's like, these guys aren't deep, they're pot-smoking 8th graders, pretending to be deep… hehe…