Writing Triangular Songs
There's an old saying in business that goes like this: `Good, fast, cheap. Pick two
." It's presented as a trilemma; only two options can be true at the same time. A product can be high quality and fast to produce, but expensive. Or it can be high quality and low cost, but slow to produce. Or it can be cheap and fast, but, naturally, junk. In other words, you can't pursue three goals at the same time. You've got to pick your priorities.
Could a similar trilemma apply in the music business? I’m not talking about making albums fast and cheap, but about the underlying motivations for songwriting. Do we want our songs to be everything to everyone? To check all the boxes? Do they try do so much that they end up (to borrow another phrase) falling between two stools?
To be clear, I'm no authority on songwriting. There's a good chance you're a better songwriter than I am. But I have written about fifty children's songs and I've listened objectively to a breadth of Children's Music. I've thought a lot about what works well, and, with all that in mind, I created the Kindie Songwriters' Triangle™ fig. 1). The KST represents the songwriter's balance of attention between considerations of craft, product and service.
By craft, I mean purely artistic objectives. I mean the skill and soulful authenticity baked into the creation of a song. I mean the unmeasurable aesthetics of a composition: its tone, structure and arrangement, the sheer poeticism of its lyric.
By product, I mean the supply-and-demand side of music. Artists deserve to be compensated for their labour, even though this is becoming less and less feasible in the age of Spotify. Considerations of music as product, historically, meant technical requirements for pressing albums and singles (e.g., song length), as well as strategies around radio play as promo for album sales (e.g., catchiness). These days, it's a different landscape. For many musicians hoping to make an income off of their songs, the best hope is virality or being added to a high-traffic playlist.
By service, I'm talking about the impact that a song has on its listeners. Is it teaching a lesson (implicitly or explicitly)? Is it designed to educate? Is it modelling empathy, creativity, curiosity, wonder?
All three of these considerations are relevant in other genres. Most songwriters strive to make artful music and hope for some sort of compensation for their labour. The idea of music as service is also not foreign to other genres; folk songwriters, for example, write to have an impact on the world (calls for peace, criticisms of overconsumption...). But the notion of service seems more essential to Children's Music. As writers of songs for children, we're hyper-aware of the impressionability of our listeners, and we often hope that our songs will do them some good. At the very least, we should aim to do no harm.
Can a songwriter pursue the three corners of the KST simultaneously? Geometrically speaking, can a song be equilateral, or will it inevitably end up isosceles or—gasp!—scalene?
It's clearly possible to write songs as product at the expense of craft and service. I'm sure you can think of children's songs that are viral hits but that are artistically anemic and aren't really doing their listeners any good. When you overemphasize objectives of product, you get junk food music—no nutrients.
A song can also be written as service at the expense of craft and product. These are the songs that are explicitly meant to teach a lesson—moral, academic, procedural, social-emotional—and have little else to offer. When songs are too preachy they end up tasteless. It's the audible equivalent of lima beans: sure, it's good for you, but you don't want to eat it.
Craft can also be overemphasized. This is what happens when you forget your audience. You get so hung up on making something artistic that it ends up opaque. This is especially risky when it comes to Children's Music. Children are certainly able to appreciate a complex composition or a nuanced lyric. But it's also possible to write songs that are artistic to the point of unintelligibility, all the more when the audience is still learning to appreciate art.
So, it's clearly possible to overemphasize any one of these objectives at the expense of the other two. But, as the old business saying suggests, is it necessary to ``pick two"? Is it really impossible to pursue all three simultaneously?
I don't think so. In fact, the best approach might be to keep the three objectives in balance at all times. If you want to write a song with an impact, it'll actually have more of an impact if you put some art into it to offset the preachiness. Make it listenable and memorable. Likewise, if you're pursuing art for it's own sake, it's still worth remembering your audience, what they want and what they need. Instead of the Business Triangle, maybe a better model would be the Health Triangle, which insists that we pursue physical, mental and social health simultaneously, all as part of the same process.
I can think of no better example of a triangular song than ``Baby Beluga." Raffi and Debi Pike wanted to make an ecological point, but they did so subtly with a well-written and timeless song, artfully produced by Raffi and Ken Whiteley. This was ultimately more effective, I would argue, than Raffi's later explicitly environmental songs on Evergreen, Everblue.
On the other hand, maybe we shouldn't be thinking of these things at all. If we put too much thought into our own motivations, we run the risk of spoiling it. C. S. Lewis, when asked to describe his writing process, once said: ``you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books.... A man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it." Maybe that should be our fundamental aim: to simply enjoy the process of songwriting. The process is the goal.
Occasionally, having lost yourself in the process of creation, you end up with something you're proud of, something that demands to be shared. By offering the song to an audience, you welcome others into the act of creation itself. Your joy and enthusiasm spills over onto the listener and they are enriched by it.
Matt J. Robertshaw, editor
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