Page 96 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

"The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from."
I totally relate to that. As a family, we love vacationing in Italy. I remember us once visiting Florence to look at the fabulous pieces at art museums and galleries such as the Uffizi, the Brancacci Chapel, the Pitti Palace and so much more. While the colors, the artistry and the stories behind the art were compelling and inspiring in themselves, I remember most the lessons I took away for writing songs. Lessons about perspective, light and shade, themes, focus, and passion.
Song Mapping is a way of "stealing like an artist" in your lyric writing without anyone knowing.
However, this comes with a health warning: mapping the lyrics of the songs you love can sometimes totally ruin your enjoyment of them. And this happens to me a lot. While I still love the songs, Song Maps help me understand more about why I love them–maybe for the melody, harmonies, the idea behind the lyric (even though it could be crafted better) or maybe the artistry of the artist. But you should not be surprised if you start looking at some of your all-time favorites in a different way after Mapping them because sometimes, or maybe even often, the development of songs we hear fail to deliver a good payoff or have a mappable lyric development.
So, the big question is:
"Where can we find more Maps that will improve our writing?"
The best chances are always going to be lyric-driven genres of songs. For example, out of the 31-odd categories at the 2016 Grammy Awards, only a dozen or so categories would be relevant to lyric writers (some like Arranging and Packaging are not at all relevant to studying the craft of lyric writing). Out of those, my personal ranking as potential sources for Song Maps would be as follows:
Country
Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) Pop
Rap
Rock
R&B
Alternative
American Roots
In Mapping a song that you think is potentially "Mappable," the process is simple. In fact, it's very similar to the process we went through for generating a writable idea:
1. Write down the structure of the song (e.g. VCVCBC)
2. Summarize in a few phrases exactly what each section says 3. Extract (or Map) the significance of each section
This will quickly give you many new Song Maps you can start working with. If you can't find an identifiable Map in the lyric don't worry–just move on to another song until you find one.