Quick Tip: Split Personality
Posted on November 12, 2010 with 1 comment
Quick Tip: Split Personality
I remember as a kid watching a movie where Sally Fields played a troubled young girl named Cybil, which was the name of the movie… even movies have one word titles. Anyway it showed a tragic condition imposed on a young girl where she developed what was sometimes called Split Personality or Multiple Personality, now referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder.
As serious and unfortunate that is in real life, songs can also mistakenly suffer from that same dilemma. IN fact songs are written from and towards certain perspectives or “personalities”. There are three of them “I”, “You”, “They”… First person, second person and third person respectively.
Out of the split personalities perspectives in general there are two different kinds, intentional and unintentional, or otherwise a flat out mistake. What do I mean, how could this happen? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s take the unintentional kind first of all. If I were to write a verse and chorus as:
Verse 1:
I can’t believe she told me
It’s over and soon she was gone
I thought our love was solid
Her leaving seems so wrong…
Chorus:
Honey what’s the matter
Honey what did I do
We built our life on the fact
There’s nothing we can’t pull through
If we love each other
Without the fame or money
Please tell me why you’re leaving me… Honey
OK. So it’s a lame example… get a knife and cut me some slack. Notice in the verse the character in the song is facing us, speaking directly to us telling his woeful story. Suddenly however he got a bit rude, I mean the gall of the dude. What do I mean? Well didn’t you see him? He up and turned his back on us. Just like that, in the middle of telling us his woes, he snubbed us right after the verse.
He started talking to his “honey” in the chorus. In the middle of the song it changed from first person “I” to second person “you” in the chorus. Now to save a song as this, if this particular one would actually be worth saving, the title is obviously “Honey” so it might be best to change the verse to first person such as…
I can’t believe you told me
It’s over and soon you were gone
I thought our love was solid
Your leaving seems so wrong…
Chorus:
Honey what’s the matter
Honey what did I do
We built our life on the fact
There’s nothing we can’t pull through
If we love each other
Without the fame or money
Please tell me why you’re leaving me… Honey
Now when we here the chorus, we’re still innocent bystanders listening in on their conversation and not shocked that he’s talking to her and not us. It now rolls into the chorus seamless.
As I said the other kind of split personality is a purposed one or intentional one. These intentional perspective changes are a little harder to write and pull off successfully. A good example of one however is one Alabama recorded in the 80’s called 40 Hour Week.
The verses start out like…
“There are people in this country who work hard every day,
Not for fame or fortune do they strive…”
So we’ve established it is a third person “they”. And if you punch it up on the net and listen you’ll see the verses are all from that perspective.
But… the choruses intentionally split off to first person with…
“Hello Detroit auto worker let me thank you for your time….”
I know you’re probably thinking … “But I thought you said you can’t…”
Wait a minute now… don’t get your tongue all hung up in your teeth on me! The last line in the verse says ”…and its time a few of them are recognized..” Setting up a dialog change. All the choruses are consistent with first person and so the set up works. It works as well because the people Randy Owen is singing to in the verses are very likely all the folks or one of them, that he sings about in the chorus. Even if not, we all feel a sense of being appreciated because we can identify with the universal point of the song.
So as you write be mindful of the perspective you are writing from. Often times one can write a song from a first person and decide later third would work better, that’s fine, just make sure you catch all the nuances that made it first person. If you’ve found you’ve unintentionally wrote half a song one way and the other half another way, it is generally an easy fix with a simple re-write similar to the example above.
So from me, myself and I, we say… get writin’!
I remember as a kid watching a movie where Sally Fields played a troubled young girl named Cybil, which was the name of the movie… even movies have one word titles
As serious and unfortunate that is in real life, songs can also mistakenly suffer from that same dilemma. IN fact songs are written from and towards certain perspectives or “personalities”. There are three of them “I”, “You”, “They”… First person, second person and third person respectively.
Out of the split personalities perspectives in general there are two different kinds, intentional and unintentional, or otherwise a flat out mistake. What do I mean, how could this happen? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s take the unintentional kind first of all. If I were to write a verse and chorus as:
Verse 1:
I can’t believe she told me
It’s over and soon she was gone
I thought our love was solid
Her leaving seems so wrong…
Chorus:
Honey what’s the matter
Honey what did I do
We built our life on the fact
There’s nothing we can’t pull through
If we love each other
Without the fame or money
Please tell me why you’re leaving me… Honey
OK. So it’s a lame example… get a knife and cut me some slack
He started talking to his “honey” in the chorus. In the middle of the song it changed from first person “I” to second person “you” in the chorus. Now to save a song as this, if this particular one would actually be worth saving, the title is obviously “Honey” so it might be best to change the verse to first person such as…
I can’t believe you told me
It’s over and soon you were gone
I thought our love was solid
Your leaving seems so wrong…
Chorus:
Honey what’s the matter
Honey what did I do
We built our life on the fact
There’s nothing we can’t pull through
If we love each other
Without the fame or money
Please tell me why you’re leaving me… Honey
Now when we here the chorus, we’re still innocent bystanders listening in on their conversation and not shocked that he’s talking to her and not us. It now rolls into the chorus seamless.
As I said the other kind of split personality is a purposed one or intentional one. These intentional perspective changes are a little harder to write and pull off successfully. A good example of one however is one Alabama recorded in the 80’s called 40 Hour Week.
The verses start out like…
“There are people in this country who work hard every day,
Not for fame or fortune do they strive…”
So we’ve established it is a third person “they”. And if you punch it up on the net and listen you’ll see the verses are all from that perspective.
But… the choruses intentionally split off to first person with…
“Hello Detroit auto worker let me thank you for your time….”
I know you’re probably thinking … “But I thought you said you can’t…”
Wait a minute now… don’t get your tongue all hung up in your teeth on me! The last line in the verse says ”…and its time a few of them are recognized..” Setting up a dialog change. All the choruses are consistent with first person and so the set up works. It works as well because the people Randy Owen is singing to in the verses are very likely all the folks or one of them, that he sings about in the chorus. Even if not, we all feel a sense of being appreciated because we can identify with the universal point of the song.
So as you write be mindful of the perspective you are writing from. Often times one can write a song from a first person and decide later third would work better, that’s fine, just make sure you catch all the nuances that made it first person. If you’ve found you’ve unintentionally wrote half a song one way and the other half another way, it is generally an easy fix with a simple re-write similar to the example above.
So from me, myself and I, we say… get writin’!