Hey Reader, Keppie here from How To Write Songs 👋

I just finished reading the new Arundhati Roy memoir (with a delightful music reference in the title). She wrote something that really struck a chord with me. In describing her complicated and surprising reaction to her mother's death (and an intersecting meditation on why people revere their persecutors), she said this: There is something knotty here, something puzzling about the human condition in all of this...I’m weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.

Here's something I come back to again and again as both a songwriter and a teacher: the thing that makes a lyric land isn't cleverness, and it isn't polish. It's specificity. It's the feeling that the person who wrote this was actually there—that they drew on something real, something lived, something that only they could have noticed.

This is the secret hiding in plain sight inside some of the greatest lyrics ever written. Joni Mitchell doesn't just write about nostalgia in 'The River'. She gives you the river, the skating, the specific ache of a particular Christmas. Frank Ocean doesn't write a critique of wealth in the abstract, in 'Super Rich Kids'. He puts you inside a room, a scene, a world of details so precise you can almost smell it. And in both cases, the details aren't just ornament. They're the delivery mechanism for the emotion. They're what makes you feel the feeling rather than just understand it.

The reason AI will never replace a great lyricist isn't because AI can't string words together. It clearly can. It's because AI has no memory of a specific Christmas in a specific place, no sense of what the light looked like or what it felt like in the body when the weight of a difficult year suddenly, inexplicably, lifted. That stuff lives in you. And it turns out, when you learn to access it and zoom the lens all the way in on your own experience, that's exactly where your most resonant lyrics are waiting.

In this email series, I'm focusing on radically practical lyric writing exercises that you can do right now, in the next 10 minutes. This one is called Zooming the Lens, and I walk through the whole thing live on camera, starting from a general idea and ending up with an actual song. I think it'll show you something important about how quickly your own real material can translate into lyrics that feel genuinely alive.

👉 Watch the video here​

Write for life, Keppie