A very powerful tool to stash in your lyric writing locker is the simile. Pronounced ‘si-mi-lee’, it comes from a Latin word similis which means comparison or likeness.
A simile is a figure of speech that takes two things or ideas side by side and compares their resemblances in a phrase that links them with the words, like or as. For example:
'He cried like a baby.
She’s as busy as a bee.'
Everyday conversation is full of them and many, like these examples, are now well worn but useful clichés. They clarify ideas and make points, quickly. But here’s the thing - great songwriters don’t use similes in everyday ways.
When the choice of those two objects or ideas in a simile is new, it takes potentially boilerplate lyrics to moments of great beauty or happy jolts of surprise, yet recognition. It creates a wonderful ‘wow – I hadn’t thought of –‘’exciting new simile’’- like that before!!’ feeling for listeners – and we just love it!
A newly fashioned simile makes us connect the dots perhaps we hadn’t considered before, like a virgin, touched for the very first time. A new simile can express emotion profoundly and beautifully, tattooing the words in our hearts and minds, like a bridge over troubled water.
These are the work of songwriters putting some serious thought into how to express their ideas in an original way. Not just reaching for the tried and true phrases, but creating their own, as fresh as a daisy!
How can you do that?
First, you have two ways to present your simile: either using the comparative word like or as. Often the ‘as’ similes are doubled – as something as something.
Whether you use like or as-as in your simile will depend on your rhythm and other elements of the actual words you wind up choosing.
Now it’s about your ideas or images you want to compare. You’re looking for features between your two images or an image and an idea that listeners will be able to recognize quickly.
If the features of the two parts of your simile aren’t instantly recognizable to the audience, you’ll confuse us and you’ll miss your moment. Remember, we’re not reading the lyrics – but hearing them in real time, initially for the first time.
Taylor Swift does a great job with this simile in Blank Space saying:
‘You look like my next mistake.’
Unexpected, but totally understandable.
Another I heard in a television drama made me laugh out loud –
‘You crept up on me, like a Prius’
Definitely contemporary usage, but highly accurate! And fresh.
Another example I heard in conversation used the as-as form of simile plus a ton of alliteration make the phrase roll off the tongue:
‘The room had a bed as big as Belgium’
Now that’s one big bed but it’s funny too, so I remembered it. When you’re comparing images, it will help to think how strongly visual you can be so you can burn your simile in the memories of your listeners.
Similes such as this one in Outkast's Hey Ya! led to a #1 Billboard hit.
‘Shake it, like a Polaroid picture!’
When you’re comparing an idea and an image in your simile, the more emotive you can make the image, the better. Here’s a powerful example from the writer James Joyce. He’s comparing an idea – morality with, well you’ll see it!
'She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat.'
Humans can see links between unrelated things. That’s why similes work well. The trick is the more visual and surprising the comparison; the more compelling and memorable it will be because our emotional response is much stronger.
Sometimes, songwriters start with the simile and use it to develop the lyric by underlining the reasons for the direct comparison in it, making it even more insightful.
In Back to You by Selena Gomez, the song starts with a simile that compares the feeling she had going back to her boyfriend to a stiff drink. But then the verse continues the simile further, explaining what she means by using words associated with strong liquor – shot/chase/cold/water down.
'Took you like a shot
Thought that I could chase you with a cold evening
Let a couple years water down how I'm feeling about you'
However, the same word in English can mean something quite different in another context. The simile in My Shot by Lin-Manuel Miranda has young founding father (Hamilton) comparing himself to the American colonies wanting to become a new country in their own right. Then explains what he means.
'Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young, scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwing away my shot.'
Here’s one of the reasons Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature - his song Like a Rolling Stone. He uses not only this evocative simile in the title, but builds another right before it, and rhymes while he’s at it. Note the more conceptual simile like a complete unknown is before the concrete one like a rolling stone. This makes the last line pack more of a punch.
'How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?'
To write great lyrics, you have to take a risk and try creating something different to what has been done before. This is one way. By brainstorming characteristics of the idea or image you’re starting with and comparing to something surprising, particularly something strong in imagery – something we can see. Like a rolling stone!
But just to throw a spanner in the works, Nirvana used a smell! In their song, Smells Like Teen Spirit, they cleverly compared the smell of a well known deodorant (Teen Spirit) with the energy and frustration of teenage youth.
This simile as a title was a powerful way to capture our attention and engage our emotions. Job done. With a little time and imagination, you too could write something out of the ordinary!
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Charlotte Yates is an independent New Zealand singer-songwriter with a growing catalogue of seven solo releases and fourteen collaborative projects. She also provides a songwriting coaching service, Songdoctor.
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