Songs That Tell Magical Stories
5 keys from narrative songs to help you connect authentically with your audience
Happy Monday, everyone!
Ready to learn why powerful stories are crucial to your success as a creator? Necessary to maximize your reach as a business (whether you work for yourself or manage employees)? Want to learn how to tell such stories that connect effectively with your audience? Don’t worry, all you have to do is keep reading and I’ll teach you! But I’m a fun teacher, so I’m going to teach you through songs. :)
Real talk: I spent my week listening to so. much. good music, and now I need someone to appreciate it with me.
Cheers,
Ceylan (OBA Studios editor-in-chief)
Share our newsletter with other world-changers and creatives who need encouragement!
Songs That Teach Us 5 Keys to Telling Stories That Connect
Storytelling is a tool tested by time and proven to be the most effective way to deliver a message straight through a person’s mind to their heart. If you know how to tell stories well, your work will spark a connection with your audience like a flame to a match. As creatives, we need to know how to tell stories effectively through our art. As entrepreneurs, we need to know how to tell stories so that we can connect with our customers authentically and expand our reach.
Storytelling secrets appear everywhere, if you are paying attention. One thing about me: I absolutely LOVE niche music. I find so many gems of narrative beauty that strike right to the listener’s soul in little-known places like this one. So let’s learn 5 powerful storytelling secrets by taking a look at a few songs I may or may not have cried to at some point in my life.
“The Meadow Lark” by Owl City
“The Meadow Lark” is the song I was listening to on a run (okay, a slow, pitiful jog) last week that gave me the idea for this article. Such a simple story–two enemy soldiers and a nearby bird on a tree branch, whose graceful song interrupts the pair’s staredown. Basic, and YET, this story carries a lesson poignant enough to end wars and begin to heal our current world torn by violent conflict, if people will just listen. This song is a perfect example of how vital good storytelling is to our hurting world.
Adam Young, the man behind Owl City, has a unique songwriting voice that tells beautiful stories about rough parts of life with a witty tone and the most quirky, whimsical, and simple words. (Just look at some of his song titles then listen to how he spins their narrative arcs: “Hospital Flowers,” “Fiji Water,” “Learn How to Surf,” “Strawberry Avalanche,” “Sunburn.”) He expertly combines the literary device of using a singular object as a symbol of a concept, such as in “Hot Air Balloon,” with sweet, imaginative lyrics like:
“We drank the Great Lakes / Like cold lemonade / And both got stomach aches / Sprawled out in the shade / So bored to death you held your breath / And I tried not to yawn.”
This kind of writing calls us to consider raw feelings through a different lens. When I first listened to Owl City’s song “The Tornado,” a story of a young paperboy stuck in a storm, I immediately shared the song with my sister and said, “Why does this song sound like the moment when you’re growing up too fast, so you’re reading a middle school adventure book, but it’s helping you understand how to put words to feeling like you’re fighting the world?”
What do all these examples have in common? A simple narrative, yet told in a way that makes you consider something many of us have experienced in life in a different way.
Finding new ways to say old things is a big part of being a memorable storyteller. Define your own style and don’t be afraid to be unique or quirky. Stories that are as old as time are still relevant to our hearts today. But you need to tell them in your own authentic voice to make them new. Don’t worry, you can be inspired by the most everyday experiences to jump start your imagination.
“Must Have Been the Wind” by Alec Benjamin
Alec Benjamin has said, “If I could describe my music in one word, it would be ‘stories’.” Lauded as “The new storyteller of our generation,” Benjamin’s song “Must Have Been the Wind” is one of the most powerful examples of his narrative songwriting. Not only does this song showcase the beauty of humans caring about other humans instead of ignoring their neighbors, it also leaves us with the validation that sometimes, the best thing we can do is just BE THERE for people. Sit with them in their mess. Simply be a steady presence, no matter what struggles they are facing. It’s the smallest thing anyone can do, but the easiest way to make the world a better place from right where you are.
Share your stories even when only a few people are listening. Even when nobody is listening. Even if you are just telling yourself what you need to hear.
Alec Benjamin moved to California as a teenager to pursue songwriting. When his record label dropped him and took all his rights to his music, he played for anyone on the streets who would listen. Eventually, more people listened because they saw that the stories were important.
The stories that matter are the ones that touched you first. Live what you preach and preach what you live. Others will listen because they will see your message is genuine.
“Orange Juice” by Noah Kahan
“Orange Juice” is a song about reconciliation, but way more nuanced than you’ve ever seen before. The lyrics are a conversation between two people who have both experienced a traumatic accident. One person turned to religion to cope, the other turned to alcohol, and their different ways of handling the trauma ultimately tore them apart. Interestingly, I find that the most telling lyric is
“Mhm-mm.”
There’s so much said in so few words about the way personal tragedy tends to tear us apart. It hurts because it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
A lot of Kahan’s songs mention driving. You get the sense through his vivid descriptions that he is very familiar with feelings inherent to many different scenarios surrounding riding in a vehicle, from sitting in the back of a cop car and your emergency phone call not being picked up by someone you loved, to riding as a passenger thinking you’re heading to your future but the driver ends up taking a different exit. “The View Between Villages” tells the simple story of driving home, but the nostalgia feels like loss. I’ve seen this song be used as a sound behind TikToks by folks living in Western North Carolina who were impacted by devastation from Hurricane Helene. Every video or slideshow is someone telling their own personal story–humanizing something that most will try to spin for a political argument. The most powerful storytelling enables someone else to find a way to tell their story through your own. (Subtext! More on that in a bit.)
The biggest takeaway here: The less words you use, the more you say.
“The Ballad of Jody Baxter” by Andrew Peterson
Andrew Peterson is my favorite storyteller. In a special way, he shows the pain and purpose of living in this world and creating light in the darkness. He writes about the glory of all of us being connected to something bigger than ourselves, but also about the reality of the raw wounds we feel in small moments. His album Light for the Lost Boy was inspired by his reading of “The Yearling” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. That book tells the story of a boy growing up in the backwoods of Florida and adopting an orphaned fawn as a pet.
I found The Yearling confusing when I first read it in 9th grade, because my understanding of stories was that they were supposed to follow a rigid structure of plot: introduction, rising action, climax, conclusion. The Yearling seemed to follow the meandering structure of a memoir, yet was supposed to be a fictional story. I couldn’t pick out a theme to the storyline as a young high schooler. But when I listened to Andrew Peterson’s song “The Ballad of Jody Baxter,” it hit me that the story was about the pain of growing up and having your childhood innocence crushed by the harsh reality of this world. In the song “Come Back Soon,” Peterson repeats the same storyline but with his own experience of watching his little boy experience the Tennessee flood.
Every song on the record Light For the Lost Boy tells the same story in a different way: how it feels to go through life searching for the innocence we used to have as children, and yearning for something better. The music feels perfectly haunting, painful, and hopeful to give voice to the cry that is buried in all of our hearts.
Stories tell the truth, even when it isn’t picture-perfect. ESPECIALLY when it isn’t picture perfect. Good storytellers expose the truth about the ugly parts of life, but they somehow find magic to expose it in a beautiful way.
“Dear McCracken” by Bug Hunter
This song was shared with me by one of my storytelling coworkers. By the end of the song, I was speechless. You wouldn’t think that a song about someone reading over the shoulder of a woman drafting an email while waiting for a plane to take off would carry such a heavy warning of the potential love we stand to lose when we hide truth behind fronts we put up, because we are scared of vulnerable honesty. But much of storytelling is about reading between the lines, which is what the email in this song represents. Drawing our audience in with nuance woven between the lines of our stories is how we hold their interest.
When people harp on the phrase “Show, don’t tell,” what they’re really telling you is to make sure you use subtext. The beauty of subtext is that it makes your story suddenly relatable to the many others who will read it. You are leaving space for your readers to put themselves and their experiences into the story, which makes the tale their own.
Storytelling is all about handing your story to others, giving them a voice to be able to say, “Me too.”
Everyone experiences life in a different way, but we all experience the same world. Tell stories to connect with people, and practice using nuance and subtext to share your own experience. Reach out with your half of the world so the story finds those with the other half: you will both find the wholeness you are looking for.
As long as people continue telling good, true stories, we will change the world for the better. That’s what OBA Studios hopes to do.