Rick Rubin On Content And Structure
Photo by Eugene Chystiakov on Unsplash
In a recent interview with Marc Maron, Rick Rubin (one of the greatest music producers of our generation) recounted an exercise he gave an artist to extract more authenticity and emotion from the lyrics this individual was writing.
“The person was writing lyrics and I thought the lyrics could be better. And we looked at the existing lyrics…what was working, what was not working and why…and I realized, when the person told me the emotion behind the story, that the emotion behind the story was much stronger than the lyrics in the song…”
So he suggested that the artist go home that night and not try to write the words, but just write pages about the emotions, in the form of a free flowing essay about the emotions, the observations, etc. The artist should then look at those pages of material and underline where the most interesting and charged material was, and then work on putting that content into lyrics in the song.
The idea was that when you’re working with a strong structure and writing lyrics for that structure, you can have the tendency to not focus on the content of what you’re saying. Instead you’re really just focused on putting the puzzle pieces together, and so you’ll throw in whatever words tend to work.
But that’s not the point. The point of the endeavor is the content coming across, but perfectly crafted as part of the puzzle/structure i.e. emphasis always on content.
That’s a compelling approach. I know from my own dabbling in songwriting that it’s easy to get sucked into the structure, throwing in words that fit, as opposed to words that work. That’s the easy way out, and it’s also easy to then rationalize what you write as being really good, when in fact, it’s really not.
Rubin’s exercise puts the emphasis squarely back on the content itself - the message we’re trying to get across. It’s a whole lot more work, for sure, but the end product, if done well, should be quality.
There’s a clear application here to any of the creative arts, including writing, of course. (Incidentally, in writing, the reverse of this can also be seen: it’s often easy to get lost in the content without regard for structure. Both matter.) But there’s as much application in the product or service world as well.
When we’re creating a product, it’s easy to think about getting the process right, or the structure or the delivery mechanism (getting something out). That’s good and helpful but it isn’t enough.
We need to start with the end goal, the result we’re trying to achieve - what’s the emotion we want to elicit - and work towards that. What the audience or the customer or the client experiences is paramount, but through the most effective and efficient means possible.
Doing that work to meld the two, specifically finding ways to deliver the content/end product within the confines of the structure (with minimal compromise) is the paramount task.
It’s not an easy one, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
