The art of reduction: lessons from songwriting

It’s often been said that the best advertising ideas are great examples of the art of reduction. They are the result of human minds, in strategy and creative teams, taking in a whopping pile of information – perceptions, insights, thoughts, connections, feelings, aims – and then putting them through a mysterious process to distil them into something that’s as immediate as it is powerful.

If long-form content is marketing’s equivalent of several pints of session IPA, great ads are its absinthe.

I’ll leave it to an art director to tell you how difficult their side of the process is. (Most of the time it looks borderline impossible without a magic wand, just don’t tell any of them I said that.) But when it comes to the writer’s job, what can we do to make sure the story we tell will hit the spot? Brevity alone is obviously no guarantee of emotional punch – after all, nobody ever said, “A word paints a thousand pictures,” except possibly Stan Laurel shortly before being clonked around the head by Olly.

Well, we can certainly take inspiration from the world of songwriting. It’s an art form that achieves exactly what we’re aiming for: human stories with emotional resonance, that become richer with repetition. Stories that tell us just enough for us to recognise ourselves, to feel seen and understood, while leaving enough unsaid to enable others, with different lives and experiences, to recognise themselves too.

A great example of this is the Tom Petty song Free falling.

It’s stuffed with feelings and impressions: longing, youthful angst, nostalgia, regret, guilt, love. It evokes a time and a landscape. It tells a story of sullied innocence and a fall from grace. If you like the song, it will fill your chest with emotion and your mind’s eye with images.

And in around 160 words (excluding oohs, aahs and chorus repeats) it tells us so much. “She’s a good girl, crazy about Elvis. Loves horses, and her boyfriend too.” The reference to Elvis catapults us back in time, and her love of horses gives us a sense of place. Even if we can’t picture her clearly, we have an impression of a 1960s apple-pie-and-overalls country girl. The order of that list of her loves – Elvis, then horses, then him – suggests she’s naive and hasn’t quite made it over the line into adulthood yet.

All that in only 14 words.

Then we hear a little about why he hasn’t stuck around. “And it’s a long day living in Reseda. There’s a freeway running through the yard.” Nothing ever happens there. But it’s no rural idyll: it’s spliced in half by the polluting, thundering ever-presence of a freeway.

We discover that he’s left her and moved to LA. He feels guilty, or guilty for not feeling guilty, “…I’m a bad boy, ’cause I don’t even miss her. I’m a bad boy for breaking her heart”. And he knows he’s crossed a line that he can never uncross: he’s now one of the “vampires”, the bad boys standing in the shadows of the city at night, while “the good girls are home with broken hearts”. As a habitual listener to lyrics, I find it amazing how much can be conveyed by exactly the right choice of words. They may not be able to paint a thousand pictures each, but they can have a damn good go.

So, what can we learn from the reductive art of song writing that’s applicable to brand and advertising storytelling? I think there are five clear lessons that can help us:

1. Be single minded

Every powerful emotional story is about one thing, at its core. This isn’t about what’s happening, but the message behind it. In Free falling, I would say it’s lost innocence.

2. Evoke one main emotion

There can be many feelings going on, but one should rise to the surface. In this case, guilt.

3. Make it epic

A great song can convey an entire complex human life in a four-minute sweep. (A prime example of this is Goodbye Geoffrey Drake by Graffiti6.)

4. Be an impressionist

By painting just enough of a picture, but not being slavish about the detail, we invite the audience to fill in the gaps themselves. This not only invests them in the story, making it more ‘theirs’, it also means it expands to be relevant to many more people. My reading of Free falling isn’t fact, it’s just what one person’s mind makes of it.

5. Edit and edit again

Chop, cut, trim, slash, slice, burn, and hack until you’ve removed absolutely everything that isn’t critical. See how sparing you can be when you really try.

There is one major way in which the songwriter’s storytelling craft definitely parts company with that of the copywriter.

A song, being ‘art for art’s sake’, can be about anything at all, whereas the advertising team must sit down with a clear purpose to deliver a specific message. We start with a brief. But it’s surprising just how many great songs seem to have more or less happened by accident.

You know how people say, ‘Never meet your heroes’. Well I’d be tempted to add ‘or investigate the origins of a song’. It‘s hard for me to believe that something as evocative as Free falling is anything less than a haunting personal experience that just had to be exorcised. But no. Apparently it started with a few chords and a throwaway line that was meant as a joke.

But I think we can take one final lesson even from this – one that I could definitely do with internalising. And that is that even if we can’t be as free as a songwriter when we sit down with a blank piece of paper, we should try to find a balance between hitting the message right in the bullseye, and tying ourselves in intellectual knots. Let serendipity have its fun, and you might just end up with something truly great.

Free falling (lyrics)
by Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne

She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, is crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too
And it’s a long day livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy, ’cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart
And I’m free
Free fallin’
Yeah, I’m free
Free fallin’
And all the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard (Ventura Boulevard)
And all the bad boys are standin’ in the shadows
And the good girls are home with broken hearts
And I’m free
I’m free fallin’
Yeah, I’m free
Free fallin’
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
I wanna glide down over Mulholland (oh-ah)
I wanna write her name in the sky (oh-ah)
I’m gonna free fall out into nothin’ (oh-ah)
Gonna leave this world for awhile (oh-ah)
And I’m free (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Free fallin’ (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Yeah, I’m free (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Free fallin’ (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
Yeah, I’m free
Free fallin’
Oh! (Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Free fallin’ (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
And I’m free (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’) oh! (Now I’m)
Free fallin’ (free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m)
Free fallin’, now I’m free fallin’, now I’m
Free fallin’ (free fallin’, now I’m free…)