How I Made Money In Copywriting By Listening To Country Music And How You Can Too

I've written a few songs...I do draw on many of the same strengths to write good copy as I do when I'm songwriting, and I find a lot of similarities. Foremost is trying to tell a story within a short amount of time.

The way I write a song (lyrically at least) is that I'll have an entire idea for a story -- An entire story, sometimes with a background or history involved so I'll understand the motivations and get a better idea of where the story will lead to. Then the challenge becomes getting all the important points into that story within a finite amount of space. When every word matters (and in songwriting, like copywriting, you've got to make every word or image draw an emotion from the listener/reader), it's a real challenge to figure out how to tell that story in 3 simple verses or less...

The hook being the most important element to the song, what I've found is, again, like in copywriting, it's so important yet so difficult to write a hook that embodies everything your song is about, and yet so easy to fall into cliche territory. You must have a good mastery of finding the right combination of words to evoke emotion and imagery...Sounds a lot like copywriting.

When I was writing a song with Jon Cain from Journey, I described to him everything about the characters in the song...Where they came from, what their hopes were, why they were in the situation they were in...what the future held for them. Cain says skeptically, "Yeah, but you can't say all of that in a song?!" Well of course you can't spell out all that detail in three verses, but you sure can find a way to get the story across using the amount of words you have...

So we finished that song and it ended up selling a million copies, and although there's no real specifics about who the characters are, where they come from, etc, I can listen to the song and know those exact details...and so can the listener, which is what made it resonate with people...And knowing those details helped me to carve away all the nonsense and filter it down into a format where the listener connects and understands and feels what is happening in the song.

Huge parallels between songwriting and copywriting, and I think about that exact thing every single day.

Here's a "story" song that I wrote similar to the one I described above...Knowing all the details and aspects of everything about the story as I wrote it, and whittling it all down into just a 195 words.

I Think I Know | Jeremey Frederick

Ever have any luck with this Steve?

I think it was Eugene Schwartz that said this, in his Rodale speech.

It's a good line...Eugene had an interesting way of conveying entire concepts in just a sentence or two.