How to Write a Love Song (That Doesn't Suck)

There are three things Valentines Day gets me thinking about. One of them is LA traffic. Three hours in a car for a two-hour dinner on February 14th sucked the magic right out one year. The second is free chocolate. No explanation needed. The third, though, is canned love. Canned because once a year, we pop open a serving of romance scrounged from the back of the pantry next to last Thanksgiving’s cranberries. Sorry, Hallmark, I’ve got the trademark on that greeting card.

My friends adore the holiday. They look forward to the primping and the wine, the dinner, and the romance. And I adore them for it. But part of me just can’t quite get into it. Turning love on like a faucet one day and closing it right back up the next always feels like a lot of work for too little payoff. Maybe my profession is to blame.

As a songwriter and teacher, I spend my days coaxing out the truth as the artist sees it. And often, the truth is tangled in pain, regret, loss, disappointment, failure, doubt, and sadness. “Life is pain,” says Wesley of the Princess Bride, “and anyone who tries to tell you differently is selling something.” So true, Wesley, so true.

But does that mean we have to limit our writing to misery alone? After all, our human experience encompasses joy, hope, love, excitement, elation, and happiness. Surely these themes can’t be off limits to the songwriter dedicated to authentic expression?

The quick answer is of course not, and we can all think of plenty of timeless songs to prove it. But what makes uplifting songs difficult to write is also what makes them interesting from a craft perspective. Where does honesty in song come from, and how can we harness it?

Hallmark makes a killing off sentiments that contain truth while omitting important details. Prose like “we belong together” takes on a different hue when followed by “except for those three years before when I was convinced I belonged to Sally.” The sweeping language can easily bend towards cliche, a word in songwriting we use to define a moment that promises much, but delivers little. As the writer, we know the feeling. It’s that blank page where we scribble something, scratch it out, and scribble again. Each line feels like it bites off more than it can chew. We swing between language that is either too specific or too general. In the end, it feels nearly impossible to strike an authentic chord.

The best way to learn the craft we need for our own writing is to find it in other songs. Hall and Oates have a song “You Make My Dreams,” and it’s a positively bubbly little number with a chorus about as cliche as they come. I’m not knocking the tune or the quality of songwriting here. I’m trying to determine whether my sensors are off for when I’m writing my own uptempo tune. Keep scratching out language that’s perfectly acceptable for legendary bands and artists, and I should start to wonder why none of it is good enough for me.

Well, well, well, you

You make my dreams come true

You (you, you, ooh ooh ooh, you)

Well, well, well, you

Oh yeah you make my dreams come true

You (you, you, ooh ooh ooh, you)

Sometimes cliche does deliver, it seems. At least, delivers when the musical bed works for it. In songs in which there’s no inherent problem, no pain and no glory, the groove and chord progression have got to succeed in taking us there. Flip that idea on its head, and its no wonder why we ballad-loving piano players or finger-picking storytellers never board the happy-song bandwagon. We’re just not laying down music that calls for that kind of language.

Happy songs may use broad brush strokes when it comes to chorus language, but a lot of their authenticity is hard-earned through a few specific lines in the other sections of the song. Hall and Oates give us a little substance with a few nouns for imagery in the first verse lines:

like a flame that burns the candle

the candle feeds the flame

We get more visual language later in the song, in the second verse:

On a night when bad dreams become a screamer

When they’re messing with the dreamer, I can laugh it in the face

Twist and shout my way out and wrap yourself around me

Cause I ain’t the way you found me and I’ll never be the same

But wait, why are they talking about bad dreams in a love song? Because, Hallmark, every rose has its thorn. And the second verse is usually where the thorn pokes out. Pharrell Williams’ song ‘Happy’ uses the same technique, beginning the second verse with a look at the dark side that gives the light its contrast:

Here come bad news, talking this and that

Well, give me all you got, and don’t hold it back

These songs teach us some important tools about writing love songs, but just like with real love, the magic tends to happen in the everyday practice instead of the one day a year set aside to celebrate it. Sitting down for 10 minutes each day and doing some sensory writing?helps us see the full breadth of language available to us. Looking within this sensory writing for the lyric lines it offers helps us avoid canned language with an inauthentic voice. We can also drag rhymed words from our sensory writing, trying them out in the lyric and avoiding the tendency to drum up lines that serve rhyming words we’ve plucked from the air rather than say what is true to us. Making sure to include a few believable images in the verse helps our universal message in the chorus feel substantial and true. And when it comes to writing the music, spending an hour or so listening to the grooves other songs use to carry a lighter or more affirming message gives us a vocabulary we can draw from for our own song beds.?

Real love is made in the day-to-day, so that come Valentines, the card and flowers couldn’t be more true. This Valentines, write a song from the heart, knowing that the truth is in the details, universal is personal, and your first instincts are trustworthy. Then if you’re like me, come February 15th, you can relax and go back to writing about pain. Or maybe, you’ll find a little lightness was just the fresh air you needed to dive a little deeper next time an idea, pleasant or painful, hits.

Stay creative,