When we write lyrics, we know what we're trying to express. We have a subject, a perspective, a feeling we're trying to capture. But the words themselves don't always arrive through a conscious process of reasoning.
Sometimes a phrase appears, and we recognise it immediately. We know it belongs in the song. We understand what it means in that context, even if we couldn't explain why those particular words came to us.
Not Yet, the song we'll be releasing in December, contains a line like that.
The song’s essentially an anti-war song, but from the perspective of an unborn child contemplating a world it doesn't want to enter. But rather than describing conflict directly, we imagined the world through the child's relationship with its mother: the anxiety she absorbs from the news transmitted to her unborn child via micro impulse signals. At one point, the child says: I'm not ready to be a wound.
When we wrote it, the meaning was clear to us. The child didn't want its existence to become another source of anxiety for its mother. We didn't need to analyse the metaphor to understand it. It simply expressed what we imagined the child might think.
Some time later, we heard a woman talking about the impact of having a child. She described it as being like having a wound that never heals.
The remark caught our attention because of its similarity to the lyric we'd already written. It was a coincidence. We'd never consciously encountered the expression before writing the song, and it hadn't influenced the lyric. But it made us think about where our lyrics come from.
We often talk about writing as a deliberate process. We choose our subjects, construct our narratives, refine our language and discard words that don't quite work. As we discussed in our previous blog, we've become increasingly conscious of how metaphor can help us approach difficult subjects without reducing them to simple statements.
Yet the actual process of finding the right words can be less deliberate. We might understand exactly what we want to communicate without consciously knowing why a particular image expresses it so well. The words arrive before the explanation.
That's what makes metaphor so powerful. It allows us to express something precisely without having to arrive at it through a fully conscious chain of reasoning.
The woman's remark surprised us, but it also reaffirmed what the lyric meant to us. Here was someone independently using a similar image to express an experience of her own. We hadn't intended the line to describe the experience of motherhood, but the connection was there.
Thinking about it, perhaps it shouldn't have been such a surprise. We have a limited vocabulary, yet an almost unlimited range of experiences and emotions to describe. We continually stretch the meanings of words, borrowing images from one experience to make sense of another. We use metaphor to express things that are difficult to put into words directly. Metaphor uses imagery and pictures are universal.
So why shouldn't a metaphor we've arrived at independently already exist somewhere in the language? Why should we be surprised when someone coins a phrase we thought we’d coined. As human being, we express in language - in metaphor. It's what we all do, all the time.
