Who Is Singing This? Point of View in a Lyric

Stand in front of someone with a camera and take their picture. Now take two steps to the left and take it again. Same person, same afternoon, same light. Different photograph. The shadow falls the other way; the thing behind their head has changed; what was hidden is now showing. You did not change the subject. You changed where you stood.

A lyric has a place you stand too, and it is the most quietly powerful choice in the whole song. Who is singing this, and to whom. Move that, and the song turns over completely, the way the photograph did when you stepped sideways.

The I, the you, the she

Most songs are sung by an "I" to a "you." That is the close-up, the one held two steps from the subject's face. But it is not the only place to stand. You can sing as "I" about a "she," and now you are a witness, watching from across the room. Or you can drop the people almost entirely and describe the kitchen, the weather, the empty chair, and let the listener feel who is missing without ever being told. Same story. Three different distances from it.

When the I should become a you

Here is a move I come back to. Sometimes a song written as "I felt this" stays locked inside the singer, and the listener watches from outside, sympathetic but separate. Turn the "I" into a "you," and suddenly the listener is standing inside the song, being addressed, being implicated. I think the second person is the most underused vantage in songwriting. It hands the song to the person hearing it.

When to step back and watch

Or the opposite. Sometimes a feeling is too big, or too raw, to sing from inside, and the truest, kindest thing is to step back and report it from across the street. The distance is not coldness. The distance is what lets the listener come close on their own terms, instead of being grabbed by the collar.

Joe is building a small boat in the yard, and this week he kept running his thumb along one seam none of the rest of us can see anything wrong with at all. He is standing somewhere I am not. That is point of view: not what is there, but where the person looking happens to be standing, and what that lets them notice.

Point of view is not what is there. It is where the person looking happens to be standing.

About a thing, or from inside it

There is a difference between singing about heartbreak and singing from inside it, and you can hear it in a single line. A lyric that names the feeling from a distance, "I was so sad that day," tells you the weather and keeps you on the doorstep. A lyric that stays inside it, the one about still making coffee for two and pouring one cup away, never says the word and lets you stand in the kitchen. I think the second cup is almost always better than the adjective.

Choosing where to stand

So you choose before the first word: am I the one this happened to, the one who watched it happen, or the one it is happening to right now. Or you write a verse, listen back, and notice the song has quietly chosen for you, and your only job now is to stop fighting it. Both are fine. Once you know who is speaking, the words start to sort themselves, and even the rhymes change, because a witness reaches for different words than the person in the wreck. When you are hunting for the word that fits the voice you have settled on, RhymeForge hands you a wider spread of rhymes and near-rhymes than your first instinct, so the pronoun, not the panic, picks the line. (And on staying close to the true word, the boring line is the one to read next.)

Where you stand is a choice you make before the first word. Or one the song makes for you, two steps to the left, while you are still deciding.

Either way: someone is at the window of this song, looking out. Move two steps to the left, and see who is standing there now.