When songwriters create their music, it’s often based on their life experiences. In this situation, it should be quite for songwriters to jump into a proper mindset and emotional state. Again, it would be quite easy for them to make the song sounds really emotional for players. However, we may have excellent song idea, but we never experience the situation in the song. This will make it challenging to create an emotional song and we may not be able to infuse the appropriate emotion in the music and lyric. If we want our song to be successful, we need to make sure that listeners who experienced the situation could relive the situation when they hear our song. In order to make the song production more successful, we need to create a “listener avatar”. It is the closest way of getting inside the mind of a person who experiences the situation in the song. It’s a good way to step in others’ shoes and see from their eyes, to know what they think and do at this situation.
When we create a listener avatar for our song, it is important to be very specific about the identity of the character down to the smallest detail. It is important to have repeated brainstorming sessions so the listener avatar can become as real as possible. By correlating these details with the music and lyric of our song, we can make them become much more realistic. As an example, we may want to create a song about a guy who has been cheated by his girlfriend. We could start by creating his basic information:
Name: Jake
Gender: Male
Hometown: Phoenix, Arizona
Age: 22
Education: College
Occupation: Ordinary office employee
Annual salary: $55.000/year
Marital status: Single
Hobby: Football, Baseball, Rock song, Climbing
Personality: Easy Going, Happy, Logical and Slightly introvert
Lifestyle traits: Blue collar, urban
Jake isn’t a real person, but as an imaginary individual, he makes it much easier for us to create an accurate, realistic and emotional song. We may add further details to the imaginary person later to make him or her more believable and realistic. Also, instead of calling the imaginary person as “that guy”, we should call him “Jake”, so the person become more real to us.
The amount of salary and eye color may not be relevant, but these details can be quite useful if the character becomes more realistic. As an example, the salary could affect the imaginary person’s lifestyle, behavior and the type of assets owned. These three factors could be mentioned in the lyric and make the person feels more realistic. In some songs, the color of the eyes and other physical details could also be included in the lyric. Without an imaginary object, it is possible that we will have emotional disconnect in our song. We won’t be tap into the listeners’ emotions, especially if they have experienced similar situations. When people can feel the emotion, they will be able to respond better.
