Narrative Songwriting

All songs have a message behind them, even if it is not evident at first however telling a story through a song is a different matter. Described as having a "bittersweet palette of major and minor chords" with a melody of "high emotion recollected in tranquillity" (Brown, 2010), Don McLeans' Vincent tells the story about the famous painted Vincent Van Gogh and pays tribute to his many works of art as well as his mental illness.

One of the more prominent things about this performance of his song here is the use of the place notes on the guitar to lead into each verse. When McLean is singing, his plucking is soft and gradual, to make his voice stand out more. When it's just the guitar on its own, the playing style is louder and is almost free, with his pull offs and hammer ons placed at different points every time. In a way, it helps to create the flow of reading a book and acts as punctuation.
Along with the carefully placed notes which compliments McLean's soothing vocals, the story of the song is told for the listener. Opening with the lyrics "Starry, starry night" is a reference to Van Goghs'  painting of the same name and even after that, other paintings are referenced with Van Goghs' Sunflowers painting with the line "Flaming flowers that brightly blaze" which not only help to create the image of the sunflowers against the yellow background, but also help to produce the image of a sun burning in the sky, to contrast with the starry night time.

It's easy enough to write a simple 4/4, four chord pop song, as evidenced by half of the songs in the charts. For me however, to further push myself, writing a story as a song would help me branch further out into the fields of songwriting.
Although I am good at having a message in a song and getting across emotions through song, one thing that would help would be to use the structure of a story (with a beginning, middle and end) and apply it to a song. One way I could help to do this would be to have a changing chorus as opposed to a repeated on. Not only would this make it different to a conventional ABA structured song, but it would also challenge my writing skills.

For my individual assessment, I'd like to further explore the relationship between music and storytelling as well as continuing to improve my finger picking technique. In the video, McLean uses his thumb on the three strings (E, A & D) which I still struggle to do even though it is considered the 'proper way' to do it - with the thumb resting on the fourth string, index on the third, middle on the second and ring on the first, known as the "home position" (Eckels, 2006). The more I practice it that way however, the better I will become, especially with certain styles such as blues and jazz that need the extra dexterity in order to create the "funky" rhythms.