The Girl In The Song

On Perspectives, Points of View & Slipping Into Someone Else's Skin

“I’m not always the girl in the song. Sometimes she’s a version of someone I saw on the street, or a feeling I didn’t have the courage to feel myself.”
— Lana Del Rey, Interview Magazine (2012)

There’s a lot of ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘me’ in songwriting, so its not surprising that our first instinct on listening to a song is to think its ‘about’ the singer or the songwriter. After all, a lot of the time, it is.

Confessional songwriting is spawned by natural instinct, a creative response to make sense of your own confusions, heartaches or other innermost feelings.

But character driven narrative songwriting can give a songwriter freedom to explore people and situations from unexpectedly intimate angles. As a songwriter, it can feel so liberating to inhabit the mind or experience of another, and as listeners, we are invited to step inside a new perspective.

Bobbie Gentry was an early pioneer of storytelling in songwriting, as well as one of the first women to compose and produce her own records (although she wasn’t always credited for it).

Bobbie Gentry reimagined herself as “Fancy’ and painted the album cover portrait herself

The worlds contained in her albums present songs written from the various reflections and perspectives of a preacher’s daughter (‘He Made A Woman Out Of Me’), a rich woman celebrating escaping her life of abject poverty through her wiles and sexuality (‘Fancy’), an undertaker trying to up sell a coffin to a young widow, a town gossip, and of course the enduring enigma of the secret teen lovers in her classic debut ‘Ode To Billy Joe’ - which she notably recorded accompanying herself with an acoustic parlour guitar in only 40 minutes, suggesting they add to strings to it after. In a 1968 interview with Fred Bronson, Bobbie explained “The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty. But everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of the people expressed in the song. What was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important. Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge—flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”

Tony Joe White often credited Bobbie Gentry with inspiring his distinctive, character filled songwriting, after having a total revelation when hearing ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ for the first time while he was still truck driving, and realising songs could be real, simple stories about characters he knew. “I thought if I ever write something it’s got to be as real as ‘Ode to Billie Joe’. It wasn’t too long after that I started on ‘Polk Salad Annie’. I remember the radio, listening to it, the whole thing – it was like a turn-around, you know?”

After being mainly known as songwriter who wrote about her own relationships, Taylor Swift took great delight in inventing or bearing witness to an entire world of interconnected characters that she made clear were absolutely NOT her FFS, in her landmark albums Folklore and Evermore, songs from perspectives including her grandfather, a trio of teenage lovers, ‘wild’ heiress Rebecca Harkness who was the original owner of Taylor’s holiday house, and a ghost at her own funeral. In a 2020 Instagram post she wrote ‘I loved escaping myself a little.’

Songwriter Will Jennings, responsible for hits such as ‘Up Where We Belong’, ‘Tears in Heaven’, ‘Higher Love’, ‘I’ll Never Love This Way Again’ and ‘Looks Like We Made It’ told Songfacts that he met a ‘very vibrant 101 year old woman’ a couple of years before being asked to write the title track for The Titanic movie. He remembered her and realising she was old enough to have actually been on the Titanic, was inspired to use her as a kind of portal to tell the story and write the enduring classic ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

In ‘Wristwatch’, MJ Lenderman explores the empty holes humans try to fill with empty consumerism and bragging, with the narrating character apparently inspired by Andrew Tate and the rise of ‘alpha men’.

John Prine has said ‘I’m a better writer when I stop trying to write about myself. Other people’s stories make the best songs.’ His songs ‘Sam Stone’ ‘Angel From Montgomery’ and ‘Hello In There’ give us an ever resonant window into a heroin addicted returned soldier, a disillusioned wife and a lonely elderly couple.

Tom Waits told the Paris Review in 1999 “I write songs as if I’m acting. I put on a character like an actor would. I imagine the world through their eyes and what they’d be feeling.” Tom has allowed us to see the the world from the perspective of nighthawks, dreamers, outcasts, waitresses, hustlers, paranoid neighbours - he says “My characters are the kind of people you see in a coffee shop at 3 a.m.—if you can’t sleep, they’ll talk to you.”.

Springsteen similarly draws inspirations from the world around him, telling Rolling Stone in 1984 “A lot of my characters are people I knew growing up, or people I saw around me. I just took their voices and tried to make them sing.” Bruce let us be a fly on the wall watching the unfurling lives of factory workers, drag racers, mechanics and young men shoehorned into a life they didn’t choose.

The Rolling Stones gave us songs written from the wildly unusual perspectives of Satan himself ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, a hillbilly truck driver (‘Girl With Far Away Eyes’) and a serial killer/drifter (‘Midnight Rambler’), while Neil Young told us stories from the imaginary purview of the explorer Hernan Contes as he conquered/destroyed the Aztec people in ‘Cortez the Killer’ and through the eyes of Pocahontas through surreal time from the massacre of her tribe to hanging with Marlon Brando in Hollywood.

Mary Gauthier was invited to work on a trauma healing project with war veterans in 2018 to help turn their experiences into songs, which resulted in the extraordinary Grammy winning album Rifles & Rosary Beads, all songs written by crafting the words and stories of the soldiers into songs with them. She explains, simply but perfectly, ‘Songwriting is empathy, for self and for others’.

One of my very favourite narrative songs is Bill Callahan’s ‘Pigeons’, written from the point of view of an ‘unreliable narrator’, a wedding limo driver. It somehow manages to be both incredibly specific and universally relatable as the listener sees the world of the song from the mutable perspectives of the advice giving driver/narrator - who introduces himself as Johnny Cash and signs off as ‘Sincerely L.Cohen’ - the newlyweds and our own world view.

I wrote a line into a song (‘I Cut My Own Hair’) that always gives me a little internal giggle when I sing it. It was a story I heard about someone driving Bill Callahan to a show, and putting some music on in the car that they thought he would enjoy. In my memory it was the driver’s own band they played. Apparently, Bill looked straight ahead in silence for a short while before politely demanding ‘Please, turn that off’.

Its like a knife to my heart

I say, please, turn that off

I slip back in my seat and close my eyes

And let the world turn soft

For the moment in my mainly self-inspired song when I sing that line, I slip inside the mind of Bill Callahan, which gives me a little secret jolt of joy, and connects me with a long line of songwriters trying to find their place and peace in this world.

In fact on this particular album of mine, (Everyone You Ever Knew (Is Coming Back To Haunt You)) there are many songs entirely from the perspective of other people; Milliner, from the point of view of my family friend’s mother, once a revered fashionista and hatmaker now living with dementia who would repeat the same stories daily of her proudest moments, Jutta, about the first female musician signed to Blue Note Records, Jutta Hipp (read that story here) and Green Eyes, written from the imagined thoughts of dying rock’n’roller Ian Rilen, a dear friend and hard living/loving/gigging music legend who wrote Australian classics ‘Bad Boy For Love’ and ‘Bad For Good’ amongst many other notable achievements, not all of the musical variety.

A guitarist friend of mine, Jim Bowman, had composed the music and invited me to write the lyrics for a song for Ian to record before he died from the cancer that was slowly taking him, so I tried really hard to come up with words that would feel true to him, but from a perspective he didn’t usually sing from. ‘Green Eyes’ was written as a tender reflection and message of love to the children and lovers he knew he was leaving behind from a man that had seen and done it all. I got a message that he loved it and was excited to record it but he was sadly was too sick to ever do so and left us shortly after hearing it, so I recorded it myself, trying to imagine myself into his perspective and channel his spirit.

As the character of Atticus Finch states in To Kill A Mockingbird ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ Who needs TV when you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes in your mind? You know what they say, dreaming is free.

Which character in song caught your imagination and gave you a new perspective or let you slip into another world?

Til next time,

Lo