Songwriting is a balancing act between music and lyrics.
Recently I was teaching one of my classes about Vivaldi's Winter from the Four Seasons.
I was trying to articulate that the composer was able to paint a picture of Winter using only music.
I then asked my students to think about why the song truly does paint a picture of winter.
We talked about dissonance in the melody first.
"Why would a song about Winter have intervals that create dissonance?" I said that it was because the cold of winter creates dissonance in us, as we try to brave the cold, bundle up and try to move from one warm area to the next.
What about the steady four - four rhythms followed by violin flurries that last an unpredictable number of measures (actually most of them last 3 measures).
We decided that the unmeasured bursts would be the wind.
The steady beats could be the sound of one of us trudging through the snow with each laborious footstep with violin flurries blowing the cold air down our throats making it hard to breathe.
My favorite thought was the shivering violins in the song's most stable section.
Really the most memorable part of the song.
In songwriting that would be called prosody-musical sections that represent what is happening in the lyrics.
In my original band Freerider, we used a lot of prosody.
We have a song called Ageless Veins, which is all about the Nashua River and some of its history.
The introduction uses tapped harmonics on the guitar making a very dripping watery sound.
Further in the song, the guitar solo has a whammy bar dive with delay and chorus on it which sounds like a dive to the bottom of a River.
From there, the solo seems to flow very dramatically rising to climax.
Like Vivaldi's Winter, "Ageless Veins" musically resembles the theme that drives the lyrics.