Perception and Reality
Upstart singer-songwriter Eli Teplin explains his unique writing process
Recently I was sitting in Human Perception, one of my psychology courses, half listening and half daydreaming. The topic was auditory perception, and the professor was describing something called synesthesia, a condition in which an experience of one sense leads to an experience of a totally different sense. The classic case, he said, would be someone who sees color in numbers, where the number nine could be orange, for example, and the number five could be blue. I was shocked—while I don’t see color in numbers, I’ve always seen color in music, and had never really acknowledged it.
For me, E major and A major are always red, C is blue, G is brown, Bb is orange, D is white and so it goes. I’ve always synthesized color and music, but weirdly have never been quite conscious of it. So I sat there awestruck, amazed that I had never addressed this peculiar way in which I see music.
It seems like we often take for granted the unique ways in which we perceive the world. Isn’t it amazing that you and I can have the same experience, but perceive it differently? In pondering these types of metaphysical questions, I seem to always go back to the experience of writing a song. No songwriter has the same songwriting experience, and so perhaps mine is worthy of explanation. In my life, there’s nothing more consuming—more inspiring—than writing a song, so let me give you the play-by-play of how it works for me.
My experience begins before I sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar. It starts with a feeling. It’s an electric feeling, sort of like the tingling you experience after downing too many energy drinks, and it usually ignites when I’ve just experienced something in a heavy way—whether it’s despair, longing, love, fear or any other extreme on the emotional spectrum.
When I get this feeling, I rush to a piano. I begin by letting the music flow from my fingers, usually closing my eyes and looking upwards, so as to not interfere with whatever is going on. For all of you wondering which comes first—the music or the lyrics—for me, it’s definitely the music first. And within about 15 minutes of playing, I start singing along, sometimes with actual lyrics, but other times with just nonsense phonetics.
And then comes the part that’s difficult to explain. Once I start singing on top of the piano, I usually land on a phrase that is central to the theme of the song. To make it more real for you, I’m going to use a song I wrote called “Telescope” as an example going forward. I was in an old beige practice room beneath my dorm with the tingling feeling I described before pulsing through me. I kept playing this one riff, which, for all you music heads out there, was an F major over A to a Bb, and then C major to D minor. Out of nowhere, I sang, “If I were a telescope, I would bend the light you send my way,” and about 10 minutes later I landed on the second half of the chorus: “And if I were a telescope, you wouldn’t seem so far away.” Boom.
The weird thing was I didn’t know where the idea came from. Some songwriters say ideas come from above, while others say they just appear, but it seems to me more plausible that our ideas lie dormant inside of us until the perfect conditions exist for them to come out. Either way, I now had this cool chorus that I didn’t have only 20 minutes earlier. It’s kind of like breaking through the clouds at the end of an airplane journey and seeing a landscape you’ve never seen before.
After the central idea rears its head, it’s all about remaining inside the feeling of the song. You might be hungry, but don’t leave that piano, because inspiration can be as fleeting as it is spontaneous. So now, in this example of “Telescope,” I’m onto the verses. For me, the best verse-writing comes not when I’m trying to figure out a lyric, so to speak, but rather when I try to capture the actual sensation of an emotion. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s the difference between writing just to write, and writing to let free something inside of myself.
I remember when I wrote in the first verse of “Telescope,” “There’s nothing like a shadow to show you where you stand,” looking at it on the page and going, “Yeah! That’s exactly what I mean.” It’s not easy converting feeling to lyrics, but when it’s done the right way, the emotion elicited by the lyrics transcends the words on the page.
Once I’ve made my way through the verses (and a bridge, if it seems necessary), I take a break, usually for the rest of the day. When I return to the song, I don’t return as a songwriter—I return as an editor. It’s this revision process—whether it’s making sure the pronouns match, stabilizing the tense or reordering the verses—that makes sure the song is clear and engaging.
In my experience, I know a song is great if, when I play it, it rekindles the emotion I felt when I wrote it. And that’s what it comes down to: emotion. If a song doesn’t incite emotion, it isn’t a good song. And despite the endless number of ways we experience and understand emotion, there’s nothing like a great song to show us that, on a fundamental level, the spectrum of life’s emotions is shared by all.
For me, E major and A major are always red, C is blue, G is brown, Bb is orange, D is white and so it goes. I’ve always synthesized color and music, but weirdly have never been quite conscious of it. So I sat there awestruck, amazed that I had never addressed this peculiar way in which I see music.
It seems like we often take for granted the unique ways in which we perceive the world. Isn’t it amazing that you and I can have the same experience, but perceive it differently? In pondering these types of metaphysical questions, I seem to always go back to the experience of writing a song. No songwriter has the same songwriting experience, and so perhaps mine is worthy of explanation. In my life, there’s nothing more consuming—more inspiring—than writing a song, so let me give you the play-by-play of how it works for me.
My experience begins before I sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar. It starts with a feeling. It’s an electric feeling, sort of like the tingling you experience after downing too many energy drinks, and it usually ignites when I’ve just experienced something in a heavy way—whether it’s despair, longing, love, fear or any other extreme on the emotional spectrum.
When I get this feeling, I rush to a piano. I begin by letting the music flow from my fingers, usually closing my eyes and looking upwards, so as to not interfere with whatever is going on. For all of you wondering which comes first—the music or the lyrics—for me, it’s definitely the music first. And within about 15 minutes of playing, I start singing along, sometimes with actual lyrics, but other times with just nonsense phonetics.
And then comes the part that’s difficult to explain. Once I start singing on top of the piano, I usually land on a phrase that is central to the theme of the song. To make it more real for you, I’m going to use a song I wrote called “Telescope” as an example going forward. I was in an old beige practice room beneath my dorm with the tingling feeling I described before pulsing through me. I kept playing this one riff, which, for all you music heads out there, was an F major over A to a Bb, and then C major to D minor. Out of nowhere, I sang, “If I were a telescope, I would bend the light you send my way,” and about 10 minutes later I landed on the second half of the chorus: “And if I were a telescope, you wouldn’t seem so far away.” Boom.
The weird thing was I didn’t know where the idea came from. Some songwriters say ideas come from above, while others say they just appear, but it seems to me more plausible that our ideas lie dormant inside of us until the perfect conditions exist for them to come out. Either way, I now had this cool chorus that I didn’t have only 20 minutes earlier. It’s kind of like breaking through the clouds at the end of an airplane journey and seeing a landscape you’ve never seen before.
After the central idea rears its head, it’s all about remaining inside the feeling of the song. You might be hungry, but don’t leave that piano, because inspiration can be as fleeting as it is spontaneous. So now, in this example of “Telescope,” I’m onto the verses. For me, the best verse-writing comes not when I’m trying to figure out a lyric, so to speak, but rather when I try to capture the actual sensation of an emotion. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s the difference between writing just to write, and writing to let free something inside of myself.
I remember when I wrote in the first verse of “Telescope,” “There’s nothing like a shadow to show you where you stand,” looking at it on the page and going, “Yeah! That’s exactly what I mean.” It’s not easy converting feeling to lyrics, but when it’s done the right way, the emotion elicited by the lyrics transcends the words on the page.
Once I’ve made my way through the verses (and a bridge, if it seems necessary), I take a break, usually for the rest of the day. When I return to the song, I don’t return as a songwriter—I return as an editor. It’s this revision process—whether it’s making sure the pronouns match, stabilizing the tense or reordering the verses—that makes sure the song is clear and engaging.
In my experience, I know a song is great if, when I play it, it rekindles the emotion I felt when I wrote it. And that’s what it comes down to: emotion. If a song doesn’t incite emotion, it isn’t a good song. And despite the endless number of ways we experience and understand emotion, there’s nothing like a great song to show us that, on a fundamental level, the spectrum of life’s emotions is shared by all.