It's noon on a Saturday and I have just gotten off the phone with my grandfather. We talked about Johnny Cash for the better part of an hour and what makes him so great. My grandfather says his songs are relatable: he tells you about human experience. He recommends I listen to The Man Comes Around by Cash. So, I do. 4 minutes and 26 seconds later I have been reduced to tears. I am enacting a kind of cathartic ugly crying reserved for the movies and the girls bathroom at a bar. I vaguely knew about the song before, how it was about Cash facing his own mortality. But what I didn’t realize is how moved I would be by it. And why was this? The song was honest.

Honesty in songwriting has been something I have always been conscious of  when listening to music. Songs with honest lyrics tell the truth. They don’t explain situations in clichés to mask the feelings behind an experience; they don’t beat around the bush telling you a story. They cut straight to the heart in a brave attempt to tell you the truth, their truth, about what it feels like to be human. I believe honesty is the most important quality in songwriting. 

We live in the age of throw away singles, AI generated rhymes, and the ability to produce music quickly using various programs. These songs are meant to stick in your head, with a punchy one liner that will blow up on Tik-Tok. These songs live in the charts for a week, and then disappear like they never existed. The internet’s favourite song this week will be replaced by a new one next week. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Now, I don’t want to sound old and pretentious claiming that Tik-Tok has ruined the music industry forever. Because that is far from the truth. Throw away singles with cheap songwriting have existed forever. As long as there is money to be made in making music, music created with the sole intention of producing as much money in a short period of time will exist. But these are not the songs that will last. These are not the songs your parents made you listen to and you still remember, and these are not the songs you will show your children. These songs have no longevity. The songs that forever will have a place in your heart, and a spot reserved in your mind made you feel something - those are impactful.. And that is what good music does -  it makes you feel something. 

The purpose of music is to bring people together to share in a moment. Before music was put on records, before you could hear music on the radio, people gathered to hear music because it moved them. They all sang the same lyrics out loud, and it all meant something to them. That is because humans are not actually unique. We all face the same challenges, the same experiences, and are therefore moved by the same music. Johnny Cash and I have lived very different lives, but as Cash clearly questions and wonders about his own mortality, so do I. And that’s why he was able to create such an intense reaction of emotion that Saturday at noon when I first listened to Johnny Cash’s Song, The Man Comes Around. 

When artists tell the truth about their own experience, they create a bridge between them and the listener. A shared unique human experience. In Chinese Satellite, Phoebe Bridgers confronts mortality wishing she believed in something greater than herself, “I want to believe, but instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing. You know I hate to be alone. ”

Just like Cash, she sings about something everyone has done or will do at some point. Think about their own mortality, and crave something, or someone bigger then themselves. 

In Triple Dog Dare, Lucy Dacus brushes off a friend concerns about death, because as scary as death may seem, everyone is afraid of it at one point, “You tell me you're afraid that we might die, I say so what, everybody’s scared of that.”

In The Archer, Taylor Swift reveals her anxious dwellings of the people in her life discovering that she is not all that she seems “Can you see right through me, I see right through me.” 

And in I want you to love me, Fiona Apple does not complicate things with a metaphor, but rather just tells her love simply, “I want what I want and I want you to love me.” 

While these artists may have very different lives than their audience, these lyrics resonate with people like they are the ones who wrote them. And what these songs had in common is that they were told by artists who were being honest about their life experiences. 

When Bridgers was talking about her own songwriting she said, “Gradually, my songs started to suck less because instead of trying to sound interesting, I just started telling the truth.”

With that, she has mapped out how to make a successful song that will stay with people for generations to come. Be honest. Tell the truth. Tell us how you really feel.

Header: Jena Williams