Last fall, I bought a beautiful notebook with ivory-colored thick pages, which I have been using to write down my favorite lyrics while listening to music. I didn’t have a rule as to which lyrics I would put on paper. I wanted it to be intuitive; if I heard a verse or a sentence in a song that caught my attention, I would take out a color pen, consult Spotify or Genius.com, and transcribe it. After a full year, I now have a good mix of songwriters documented in my lyrical diary. Marie Davidson, Townes Van Zandt, Sia, Jazmine Sullivan, Amy Winehouse, John Grant, Little Simz, and so on.
I knew the answer already, but just out of curiosity, I then wanted to do a little bit of research and see whether the internet agrees with my adhoc list of best songwriters. It unsurprisingly does not. ChatGPT told me that any notion of “best” is subjective, but that certain songwriters are “widely recognized for their exceptional talent and influential contributions to the music industry.” For our AI pal, that means: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Prince, and a few others. My guess is that it was probably trained, among many other articles, on Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.” A much lengthier list, with some other nuggets like Björk, Bono, Michael Jackson, and Leonard Cohen.
I am a big fan of Björk and Michael Jackson. I do listen to David Bowie every once in a while, and I adore Prince’s Purple Rain album. But I really don’t care for their lyrics. I also know that many of the other mentioned musicians have genuinely been the greatest gifts to the music industry, and yet, I also don’t care for their songwriting.
It was apparent to me, after just a few months of writing down lyrics, what I was drawn to in songwriting: personal specificity. The verses and lines referencing exact locations, particular moments, or real names of other people, all of which have unequivocal connection to the artist. The sort of specificity that has traditionally been more suited for prose and not for chart-topping music.
But it’s really been only in the past few weeks—an incidental result of reading Susan Sontag’s essays— that I have started disentangling why I am drawn to personal specificity. Before I get to the why, let’s start with the what. What are examples of personal specificity and who are some of the vanguards of this sensibility?
The what behind personal specificity
Specific places:
John Grant, Benjamin Clementine, and Rina Sawayama
The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by writing about particular locations: explicitly identifying them and often providing names of exact neighborhoods, streets, or buildings. I personally tend to gravitate—as will soon be obvious—to those artists who dissect the liminal spaces between their hometowns and the cities they had escaped to. These liminal spaces are charged with so much emotion and I find it inspiring when a songwriter can translate that to listeners.
"Back then I often found myself Driving on the road at night And the radio was broadcasting the ocean Warm late spring wind whips through my hair I am right here, but I want to be there And no one in this world is gonna stop me. At 25 and 36 to Boulder I was getting warm But now I'm getting colder And I stomp my feet demanding like a child I hope you get everything you wanted boy I hope you conquer the world and turn it into your toy But don't come crying when you're forced to learn the truth." —— John Grant, Pale Green Ghosts
I am not too versed in John Grant’s discography, but his song “Pale Green Ghosts” is by far one of the most striking, beautifully written electronic tracks of the last few decades. Pale green ghosts is a reference to the Russian olive trees found along the I-25 highway, close to Grant’s childhood home in Colorado, and is a locational anchor that serves as the glue of this haunting, Rachmaninoff-inspired song.
These two verses do an excellent job at painting Grant’s anxiety and greed as he drives on Interstate 25 and switches to 36 to get to Boulder, Colorado. He never says this explicitly in the song, but the specificity of the highways and cities give us enough information to infer what’s going on—Grant is taking us back in time, to a period when his younger self had a greedier and simpler vision of the world, fueled by ambition and desire to succeed (“turn it into your toy“). Many years later, Grant would end up with a history of substance and sex addiction, a jarring outcome that Grant now sees as lack of maturity and self-awareness (“but don’t come crying when you’re forced to learn the truth.”)
It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking ode to one’s inner child by a much wiser, slightly more damaged older self in a setting that always warps time. A setting called home.
"Adiós Yes, goodbye, adiós Adiós to the little child in me Who kept on blaming everyone else Instead facing his own defeat in Edmonton After all, I should have no regret For if it wasn’t for the mistake I made yesterday? Where would I be by now?" —— Benjamin Clementine, Adiós
While Benjamin Clementine has cemented his status as one of the most admirable songwriters in Europe, he hasn’t yet reached that level of recognition in other parts of the world. And, by “other parts of the world,” I particularly mean the United States, where an English-speaking artist should not have a hard time gaining traction. My guess is that his avant-pop, spoken-word style of music eschews the formula that typically guarantees at least moderate success on mainstream charts.
It’s a shame because he is a terrific songwriter, and one who ingeniously uses locational specificity as a poetic device. London and Paris, the two cities that have defined much of Clementine’s life, have often been the central topics of his songs, from “Winston Churchill Boy” to “London,” but nothing gets more personal and more specific than “Adiós,” a song about Edmonton—his hometown where Clementine grew up in a strict, religious family.
Take out the line about Edmonton from this verse and the song could easily have a very different meaning. It could be understood as a self-lacerating rumination about one’s own immaturity or even about an unfortunate faux pas. The charm is in the essence of this line, though, in which Clementine says “instead of facing his own defeat in Edmonton.” It’s a moment of specificity that tells us he is saying goodbye to his younger self, the one who was likely at odds with his religious family and the one who escaped Edmonton to busk in Paris. The defeats he didn’t face were probably life’s hardest lessons: that, in most cases, we can’t blame anyone else—even those closest to us—for our hardships.
"国々に 歩き渡り 鳴り響き 悲劇のシンフォニー 喜びに 変わる悲しみ をさぐる毎日 28 and I still want to scream Can't face who I can and can't be 5,938 miles between you You make me Akasaka sad 'cause I'm a Sucker, sucker, so I suffer" —— Rina Sawayama, Akasaka Sad
In so much of Western culture, Tokyo is often glamorized, seen as something majestic, unattainable, maybe even indescribable. For Rina Sawayama, Tokyo represents hope that inevitably always turns into depression. We learn about this dichotomy on “Akasaka Sad,” a track from Rina’s debut album, which describes her perpetual desire to connect with her Japanese roots, leading to repeated stays at a hotel in Akasaka, a district of Tokyo.
The album’s themes of unclear identity and familial mental health issues are vividly described on this song and manifest exceptionally through numbers, measurements, and exact locations, none of which are typical poetic devices of a songwriter. Rina flees London—where she had immigrated to with her parents when she was five—to find solace in Tokyo, but even with 5,938 miles away from London and just two years shy of turning thirty, the generational trauma catches up with her. It’s a sad feeling, one that only immigrants stuck in a limbo between multiple cultural identities know, and Rina pays homage to this turmoil in the only way that makes sense—with geographical precision, with mathematical exactness, and without any symbolism.
Specific moments:
Little Simz, St. Vincent, and Amy Winehouse
The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by narrating very specific moments in their lives. This type of specificity is the closest a song can get to being an artist’s diary entry. It requires precision and vulnerability and—most importantly—a life that’s lived; a life full of moments worth writing about.
"Book smart with the bars, but I never learnt that from school 16 doing up radios sets, I was spinning up all them fools Times I would get home late to my mumzie's crib 'Simbi, who are you with? What have you done? Where have you been?' Shit Tears in my eyes, real tears when Ken got nicked Tore everyone apart, but the law don't give two shits Just another Black boy in the system doing time in bin" —— Little Simz, 101 FM
An artist with precision and vulnerability is Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, who goes by the nickname Simbi and who is more commonly known to the rest of the world as Little Simz, the British-Nigerian rapper based out of London. One of my favorite rappers, not only does she capture the essence of British hip hop today, with her exquisite blend of rap layered on top of grime, R&B, and punk, but she embodies specificity in all of her lyrics.
Take “101 FM,” for example, from her album GREY Area, which takes listeners back to Simbi’s adolescence, when she was coming up in the UK’s music industry, “doing up radio sets […] spinning up all them fools,” coming back home late, annoying her mom. The three lines that quote her mom, “Simbi, who are you with? What have you done? Where have you been,” do a beautiful job of painting that classic teenage moment of facing an infuriated parent after a night out, rolling your eyes at them, and mumbling “Shit.”
She then gets even more personal and tells the listeners about the year when her childhood friend got incarcerated, which tore her community apart and left an indelible mark on her adolescence, and, very likely, on her view of the world. This is hip hop at its best: heartbreaking, funny, and endearing all at the same time.
"Prince Johnny, you're kind but you're not simple By now, I think I know the difference— You wanna be a son of someone. Remember the time we went and snorted That piece of the Berlin Wall that you'd extorted And we had such a laugh of it, Prostrate on my carpet You traced the Andes with your index And bragged of when and where and who you gonna bed next All with sons of someone's" —— St. Vincent, Prince Johnny
I wouldn’t say that Annie Clark, more commonly known as St. Vincent, is a songwriter who wears her heart on her sleeve. But she captures intimate moments from her personal life with great specificity, even if the listeners might not be able to identify the people behind the aliases. On my favorite track of hers, “Prince Johnny,” Clark takes us directly into the post-New York nightlife comedown hours, with her and Johnny—a pseudonym for a friend from the city’s queer scene who’s very self-destructive and rejects help—prostrate on Clark’s carpet, both very likely high on drugs (they literally snorted a piece of the Berlin Wall; it’s not a metaphor).
The next verse stops the time for listeners and masterfully depicts the intimate moment between them, as Johnny traces his index fingers along Clark’s breasts (the Andes mountains likely being a fitting metaphor) and brags about the famous people he’s going to sleep with. I love these few verses because they distill Clark’s sadness into a concise, nonjudgmental narrative: as she listens to her friend claim the starfucker title with great pride, Clark realizes that Johnny is ultimately just looking for validation and acceptance from his own family—to be a son of someone’s. We, as listeners, get to live vicariously through this specific moment and see the shiny but also dark side of New York’s inexhaustible love for those who don’t belong anywhere else.
"Your neighbors were screaming, I don't have a key for downstairs So I punched all the buzzers, hoping you wouldn't be there And now my head's hurting, you say I always get my own way But you were in the shower when I got there, and I'd have wanted to stay But I got nothing to say You were so beautiful before today And then I heard what you say Man, that was ugly The Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas Put it in the box, put it in the box Frank's in there, and I don't care Put it in the box, put it in the box Just take it, take the box, take the box" —— Amy Winehouse, Take the Box
A wordsmith in a league of her own, Amy Winehouse was a true master of lyrical specificity. From hip hop-like references to Donny Hathaway and Ray Charles on “Rehab” to the famous 9-and-14 shoutout to her and Nas’ shared birth dates on “Me & Mr. Jones,” she allowed so much visibility into her personal life through lyrics.
A standout for me is the track “Take the Box” from her debut album Frank, which word-for-word describes the day when Amy went to her ex-boyfriend’s house to drop of his stuff following their breakup. She describes the moment with immaculate exactness (“Your neighbors were screaming, I don’t have a key for downstairs, so I punched all the buzzers, hoping you wouldn’t be there“), including the Moschino bra and Frank Sinatra CD gifts that Amy didn’t want to keep (“The Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas”, “Frank’s in there, and I don’t care”), and puts on paper what is essentially a highly personal time capsule. Amy did the impossible with this song: isolated an event that lasted only a few minutes, made it factual as if she were offering a testimony, and somehow made it heartbreakingly poetic as well.
Specific people:
Nicki Minaj, Sia, and Big Boi
The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by referencing actual people in their work, often by real names and without any pseudonyms. It’s a courageous and a risky thing to do. Each time an artist references real people in their work, they break down the walls that separate their two selves: the artist and the person behind the artist.
"She said, "Fuck Fendi", but I think she was playin' I heard she move them thangs, I think she fuckin' Wayne She call herself Lewinsky, that means she give him brain She tryna be like Lil' Kim, her picture looks the same Why she ain't signed with G-Unit, she from Queens, right? And what's her nationality, she Chinese, right?" —— Nicki Minaj, Still I Rise
Nicki Minaj is well known for her unmatched razor-sharp lyrics and I doubt anyone familiar with her music would dispute that. But I think she doesn’t get enough credit for her ability to continuously weave in direct, up-to-date references to people in her own life, references that leave no room for endless interpretation. “Barbie Dreams” from Queen is probably a recent example of this, though I prefer the more factual specificity on “All Things Go” from The Pinkprint and on many songs from Beam Me up Scotty.
With “Still I Rise,” for example, she mocks her haters who compare her to Lil’ Kim, or speculate whether she’s sleeping with Lil Wayne, or wonder what actually happened between Nicki and her former manager Big Fendi (their fallout happened earlier than people thought), or why she never signed G-Unit, the record label founded by 50 Cent, a fellow Queens-native (50 Cent explicitly said “’cause of Fendi.”) What I love about a verse like this is that Nicki doesn’t play coy; she acknowledges each rumor and each person involved in the rumor, and she makes it clear that it’s ultimately no one else’s business to know. But should anyone be interested, there is plenty of material out there that can help address each piece of gossip. By bringing in so many names of people in her life, Nicki puts her watermark on this song. Even if you’ve never listened to the track, just by reading the verse, you know that Nicki is behind it.
"Ella is worried about her weight She won't eat in public anymore She is fucking her ex again When they've finished, she sleeps on the floor Nate has a heart of gold But give it away he will not His mother abandoned him at ten It's a pain he has never forgot Mary's afraid of herself Her sentences often cut half She will never give her own opinion She's afraid that people might laugh And I am afraid of sharks I will not swim out past my head And sometimes I worry my boyfriend will die My first love is already dead." —— Sia, Fear
Sia Furler is another fascinating songwriter to study when it comes to lyrical specificity with people, mostly because she has consciously evaded exactness in her songwriting over the last decade. Just think of songs like “Chandelier,” “Cheap Thrills,” or “Titanium”—they are everything but specific. Packed with catchy punchlines, most of these bops are known for their tropey and effervescent lyrics. You can listen to them, vibe to them, but you won’t get to actually learn anything about people in Sia’s life. In her interview with Chris Connelly for Nightline, she even admitted these lyrics were written using a bulletproof pop-song formula. “I usually choose a one solid concept,” she described “So, I see a chandelier. So then, I’m like, oh I know, how could I use that, that’s a strong title.”
What most people don’t realize is that Sia’s vague, concept-centric lyrics are successful only because she intentionally does the opposite of what she’s really good at: writing frighteningly personal lyrics. Before her trademark wigs and the “Titanium”-induced fame, her lyrics were piercingly clear and raw, rife with unequivocal references to her turbulent personal life. On “Fear,” from her 2001 album Healing is Diffucult, Sia goes through several specific people who are all fighting different manifestations of fear, highlighting how this debilitating emotion had hindered their lives. We don’t know whether these people are her real friends, but we get a hint with the lines “And sometimes I worry my boyfriend will die / My first love is already dead,” which is an explicit reference to the sudden death of her then-boyfriend, Dan Pontifex, in 1997 and the booze-and-drugs spree that followed.
I am also convinced that Amy Winehouse’s lyrical specificity was actually strongly influenced by Sia’s earlier work. The transparent references and unwavering absence of metaphor in Sia’s earlier songs like “Healing is Difficult” are the same anti-poetic devices with which Amy crafted her hits. In 2014, speaking to Howard Stern, Sia mentioned that she and Amy—while Amy was still alive—happened to be playing at the Chateau Marmonte on the same day. “[Amy] played the guitar, and she happened to be playing an old song of mine that was called Little Man,” Sia said. Amy mentioned that “Little Man” was one of her favorite songs, which naturally made Sia think that Amy would be open to collaborating. “I knew her peripherally,” she added, “and, I was like, well, we should work together. And [Amy] was like no, no fucking way, man, I’m totally intimidated by you.”
"Shoulda bought an ounce, but you copped a dub Shoulda held back, but you throwed a punch 'Posed to meet your girl but you packed a lunch No D to the U to the G for you Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo Got a little baby girl, four-year—Jordan Never turned my back on my kids, for them Should've hit it, quit it, rag-top Before you re-up, get a laptop Make a business for yourself, boy, set some goals Make a fat diamond out of dusty coal" —— Outkast, B. O. B. - Bombs Over Baghdad
I am also a big fan of Big Boi (Antwan André Patton), former member of OutKast, who has often used real names of people in his life. On a personal favorite track of OutKast, “B. O. B — Bombs Over Baghdad,” Patton gives a frisky lecture to ghetto youth and throws in the names of two of his kids, Bamboo and Jordan (his third kid Cross wasn’t born yet at the time), emphasizing what a committed father he always had been and coloring his playful commentary on the ghetto with tried-and-tested advice. On “GhettoMusick,” a track from Patton’s Speakerboxxx part of OutKast’s 2003 album, he also mentions his grandmother, Edna Mae Kearse, who showed him “how to be a smooth operator, dominator in the state of Georgia.” (Funnily enough, his grandmother planned to have a book, which according to Patton was “going to fuck everybody in the family“) I am not going to make huge leaps here and argue there is something profound to Patton name-dropping his family in these songs — but it brings realness to his image and gives texture to his lyrics.
The why behind personal specificity
As I’ve mentioned, it’s only in the past few weeks that I have started wondering why I am drawn to personal specificity in songwriting. And, the answer is: transparency. I initially couldn’t name the reason, but as I was reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” it suddenly all clicked. “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today,” writes Sontag. “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”
Now, I know it’s a bit counterintuitive to apply Sontag’s commentary to songwriting because many of her essays argue against the importance of content in art, but where I do see relevance in her argument is in the notion that interpretation “presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers” and that it “amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” In other words, interpretation of art is an act of searching for “meaning:” what did the artist mean? what is the meaning of this color? what is the meaning of this tone? what is the meaning of this song?
It’s the search for the songwriter’s meaning with people’s adorations of songs like The Beatles’ “Yesterday” or Radiohead’s “Creep” or Prince’s “Purple Rain” or Björk’s “Pagan Poetry” that has always baffled me (and, full disclaimer, I actually adore the latter two). The lyrics in these songs are so generalized, sometimes rife with metaphor, that it almost doesn’t make sense to infer any meaning whatsoever. I’m not saying these are bad songs but I feel that we often attribute too much value to highly stylized songwriting just because it can have so many layers of “meaning.”
Instead, why not value songwriting that is so specific, so exact that it warrants only one interpretation, which is the one clearly given by the songwriter? It’s what Sontag describes as “[eluding] the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is.” Personal specificity abolishes ambiguity in songwriting and produces art that is so transparent, so unique, and so irreplicable. Neither would Nicki Minaj ever rap about depression in Rina Sawayama’s hotel in Akasaka nor would Sia ever sing about John Grant’s existential crisis on Colorado highways.
Of course, this only answers why I as a listener am drawn to specificity. There is still the lingering second question, which is: why are songwriters today writing lyrics with so much personal specificity to begin with? It’s obviously not a new thing (some immediate examples that come to mind: Lauryn Hill with “Zion” back in 1998, Eminem with “Mockingbird” in 2004), but my perception is that it’s more common today.
My hunch—and it admittedly could be a silly hypothesis—is that the democratization of music through the rise of platforms like MySpace or Soundcloud and through the increased accessibility of production equipment has led to an industry-specific survival of the fittest. What once made songs with generalized lyrics, like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” or John Lennon’s “Imagine” or ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” successful is no longer what works in the world of recommender systems and limited attention span. Generalized lyrics require too much time and too many interpretations to pique one’s interest. Specific lyrics provide straight-to-the point narrative and one truth, which is what the world craves today. In order to survive, therefore, artists need to “specialize” their brand and stand out. What better way to do that than to write very specific lyrics?
In the end, honestly, whatever explanation there is for so much personal specificity in songwriting, I am here for it. And I certainly hope it doesn’t go away.
Photography credits
The photos in this article are works of several incredible photographers.
(1) John Grant: courtesy of Hörður Sveinsson. Follow Hörður on Instagram as well.
(2) Benjamin Clementine; courtesy of Steven Pan. Follow Steven on Instagram as well or reach out to him on Models.
(3) Rina Sawayama; courtesy of Chloe Sheppard. Follow Chloe on Instagram as well.
(4) Little Simz; courtesy of Nwaka Okparaeke. Follow Nwaka on Instagram as well.
(5) St. Vincent; courtesy of Stephano Colombini + Alberto Albanese (also known as Scandebergs). Follow Stephano and Alberto on Instagram as well.
(6) Amy Winehouse; courtesy of Jeff Kravitz. Follow Jeff on Instagram as well.
(7) Nicki Minaj; courtesy of Patrick Demarchelier. Pay tribute by following Patrick’s work on Instagram.
(8) Sia; courtesy of Amy Sussman. Follow Amy on Instagram as well.
(9) Big Boi; courtesy of GL Askew II. Follow GL Askew II on Instagram as well.