love song assignment

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From the first flushes of romance, to heartbreak, loss and lust, the love song puts emotions to words – and music.

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For thousands of years, humans have put into music the most intense longings of their souls and the deepest regrets of their hearts. Love songs have been written by people as diverse as Confucius and Dolly Parton, and the love song remains a core part of 21st-century lives; an ingredient at every stage of romance, from a first date to a wedding.

Love may be all you need, as The Beatles memorably sang, but songwriters throughout history have faced the challenge Leonard Cohen described as “the search for exactly the right language to describe interior landscape.” One problem, highlighted by Grammy-winner Jimmy Webb , author of Tunesmith: Inside The Art Of Songwriting , is that even the word itself “is overused and has no good rhymes,” especially since Shakespeare got in early with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and used the “love-dove” rhyming couplet.

Listen to the best love songs on Spotify.

What can you say in a love song?

Finding anything new to say about this many-splendored thing prompted an amusing song in Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen’s 1934 Broadway musical Life Begins at 8:40 . Their song “What Can You Say In A Love Song?” contained the lines

Lovers long before us, Sang the same old chorus, If it worked in days of yore, What can I say in a love song, That hasn’t been said before?

In his 2015 book Love Songs: The Hidden History , Ted Gioia explained how love ballads emerged in the 8th-century tunes of medieval Arab female slaves in Spain. Some 400 years later, 12th-century European troubadours spread their songs of longing, an early indication that pleasure and pain are natural bedfellows in a love song.

It has been estimated that more than 100 million love songs have been recorded, and the variety is staggering. There are songs about new love (a rich vein that everyone from Elvis Presley to Ed Sheeran has mined); songs for time-tested devotion (such as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong ’s duet on the Gershwin classic “Our Love Is Here To Stay”); break-up songs ( Taylor Swift ’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” sold seven million copies); songs of devotion (Whitney Houston’s version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is one of the most popular tracks ever); and songs about making up and forgiveness ( Elton John ’s “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”).

There are also, naturally, songs galore about sex and seduction (such as Marvin Gaye ’s “Sexual Healing” and “Let’s Get It On”). Even “Greensleeves,” that staple for generations of youngsters learning the guitar, apparently originated as a song about prostitution. “‘Greensleeves’ gained popularity as a melody used to solicit clients,” Gioia states, adding, “and the title possibly alludes to the grass stains on the attire of women who had sex with customers outdoors.”

“Most of the lasting love songs are about heartbreak”

Love songs bridge age, gender and nationality. They continue to satisfy a never-ending need to create and listen to sad music. “There are times when we all need to share a little pain… when all hope is gone, sad songs say so much,” sings Elton John on “Sad Songs (Say So Much).” It is telling that a Spotify playlist titled “Sad Love Songs For Crying Yourself To Sleep” has over 35,000 followers.

Sad love songs not only say so much, they sell in spectacular volumes, too. Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” the deathless theme tune to Titanic , sold 20 million copies. Taylor Swift has been remarkably successful at making millions of fans feel that they are personally connected to her love songs. “My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories,” she has said.

Nostalgia is also a key element in many compelling songs, including “Yesterday,” written by Paul McCartney . But why do performers and listeners enjoy songs which overflow with melancholy and despair? Emmylou Harris said that hearing The Everly Brothers’ 1960 version of “Love Hurts” was “the spark that started my love affair with really dark, depressing, sad songs that have no hope.”

“Most of the lasting love songs are about heartbreak, because people feel things deeper when they suffer the pain in love. If Bob Dylan ’s Blood On The Tracks was an album about how happy Dylan’s marriage was, I don’t think anyone would care,” said Jesse Harris, the Grammy-winning composer of the Norah Jones hit “Don’t Know Why.”

“A good love song has to make them say, ‘That’s how I feel’”

Country music is closely associated with tales of heartbreak, but the appeal crosses genres. Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “Stormy Weather,” for example, which is about a woman yearning for lost love, has been covered hundreds of times since 1933, including by soul singer Dinah Washington , rock stars Ringo Starr and Jeff Lynne of ELO, crooner Bing Crosby, pop singer Viola Wells and jazz stars Duke Ellington and Eric Dolphy. Billie Holiday also cut a sensational version with Lester Young and Count Basie . “Pining for unattainable love makes for more interesting situations and more interesting characters. That’s why a love song like ‘Stormy Weather’ works,” said songwriter Martha Wainwright.

A curious factor is that listening to sad love songs can be far from demoralising. A study by the University Of Montreal in 2016, published in Frontiers In Psychology , offered a scientific basis for “the paradoxical enjoyment of music-induced sadness.” Researchers found that sad songs induced a biochemical response in empathetic listeners, triggering beneficial hormones. There are also psychological benefits from being able to relate to a song’s message. “Most people can’t express their feelings, so a good love song has to make them say, ‘Oh my God, that’s just the way I feel,’” said Cynthia Weil, who co-wrote “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” for The Righteous Brothers.

Poet and playwright Federico García Lorca wrote about the Spanish word “duende” and how the term captured a heightened emotion of inexplicable sadness that lives at the heart of many works of art. Songwriter Nick Cave talked about duende in his lecture “The Secret Life Of The Love Song.” “All love songs must contain duende, because the love song is never simply happy,” Cave told an audience at the 1999 Vienna Poetry Festival. “It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love, without having within their lines an ache or a sigh, are not love songs at all.”

“The haunted premises of longing… a howl in the void”

Cave said that as a teenager one of his inspirations to write was his search for a way to cope with the unexpected death of his father. “Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void.”

Louis Armstrong ’s “What A Wonderful World,” a love song to humanity, would arguably fail the Cave test, but it is clear that the compulsion to use a song to make sense of pain chimes with the experience of many songwriters, including Lucinda Williams . “I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn’t been broken, but I don’t know of anyone whose heart hasn’t been broken,” said Williams, whose album Wheels On a Gravel Road contains the searing break-up song “Jackson.”

The 1966 Beach Boys song “God Only Knows” is a candidate for any list of the greatest “happy-sad” love songs ever written. “God Only Knows” is one of McCartney’s favourite songs, and the ex-Beatle confessed when he performed it with Brian Wilson, the emotion of the song overcame him and he broke down.

Will you still love me tomorrow?

Some of the world’s best love songs are about real-life passion. In 1961, Phil Spector began romancing 18-year-old Veronica Bennett (aka Ronnie Spector). What began with polite candlelit dinners soon turned into a steamy affair. “Things just got hotter and hotter. He was infatuated with my voice, my body, everything. It was mutual,” she recalled. “Be My Baby,” which Spector co-wrote with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, “documents that initial explosion” said the singer, who married Spector in 1968.

A simple need to pay the bills can also inspire dazzling love songs. Elvis Costello composed “Alison” while he was raising a young family and making £30 a week in a computer job. Boudleaux Bryant was living in a mobile home when he wrote “All I Have To Do Is Dream” for Felice Bryant, a teenage elevator operator he fell in love with and with whom he eloped two days after they met. The pair stayed together for the next four decades.

Gerry Goffin was working at a chemicals-manufacturing plant in Brooklyn on the day his wife Carole King was at home playing the piano to her baby and came up with a striking melody. When Goffin came home from work he added lyrics to her music, and the unforgettable “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was born. Goffin, who was 20, is acknowledged as one of the defining voices of his generation.

“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was recorded in 1961 by the all-black girl group The Shirelles, and though the lyrics were bold for the time (about a teenager losing her virginity), they were sweet and affecting. Goffin, however, came to take a jaundiced view of his own talent (“Am I going to have to write this s__t until I’m 32?”) seeming not to recognise his gift for being able to find words that expressed what millions of young people were feeling. The bitter twist to the song was that drug addiction and a string of infidelities took its toll on his marriage to King, which eventually collapsed.

“I love you in a place where there’s no space or time”

Seminal love songs can galvanise other talented songwriters. Patty Griffin said in January 2019 that, during her recovery from breast cancer, she found motivation in Leon Russell’s 1970 classic “A Song For You,” which has been recorded by Ray Charles , Willie Nelson , Amy Winehouse , Carpenters , Elton John and Donnie Hathaway, among others. “There’s something about that particular song that made me feel like it’s an aerial view of a moment in life. The emotion of that song inspired me.”

Russell’s memorable lyrics (“I love you in a place where there’s no space or time”) took real crafting and came, he told filmmaker Danny Tedesco, “during a period in my life when I was trying to write standards… trying to write a blues song that Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra could sing. A limousine driver told me that one time in New York, Aretha Franklin was a passenger. When they arrived at their destination, “A Song For You” came on. She made him sit there and play it 20 times in a row.”

Stop! In the name of love

The scope of the love song is large enough to encompass the darker elements, humor and disasters of real-life loves: situations that have provided the best satirical songwriters with plenty of material. Randy Newman, for example, captured the idiosyncrasies of desire through the picky narrator of “Lover’s Prayer” (“Don’t send me nobody with glasses… don’t send nobody takin’ night-classes”).

Whether a love song is funny or wistful, tear-jerking or ardent, the completed version is almost always the result of hard work. Lamont Dozier has talked about the graft involved when the writing trio Holland-Dozier-Holland created Motown hits such as “Baby Love,” “Stop! In the Name Of Love” and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” “We’d start at 9am and we would sometimes work until 3am,” said Dozier. “It was blood, sweat and tears. We pounded on the piano and put our ideas down on a little recorder and just worked and worked them out until we came up with things.”

Sometimes memorable words seem to flow more easily. In 1967, Bernie Taupin was having breakfast at the kitchen table in Elton John’s parents’ suburban home when a song idea came to him. He quickly handwrote the lyrics to “Your Song” “in a grubby exercise book,” completing the song in one draft. The original lyric sheet still has coffee stains.

The 17-year-old had come up with a perennial classic which would be a hit for John, who composed the melody, and was subsequently recorded by hundreds of singers, including Frank Sinatra and Lady Gaga . Taupin seems the perfect model for Jimmy Webb’s assertion that “my advice to young writers is to write from the heart.”

“It still stands up because it was real”

“‘Your Song’ has got to be one of the most childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music,” said Taupin half a century later. “But the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time. That was exactly what I was feeling. I was 17 and it was coming from someone whose outlook on love or experience with love was totally new and naïve… hence the extraordinarily virginal sentiments. I could never write that song again, because the songs I write now that talk about love coming from people my age usually deal with broken marriages and where the children go. You have to write from where you are at a particular point in time.”

Bruce Springsteen believes that to write any good song, let alone an authentic love song, “you have got to have something bothering you all the time, something that is truly coming up from inside.” Perhaps that is why some of the most moving songs are about the death of a loved one (such as Eric Clapton ’s “Tears In Heaven,” which was about the death of his four-year-old son, or “Boulder To Birmingham,” Emmylou Harris’ lament for Gram Parsons). The inevitability of losing a loved one was the inspiration for Jason Isbell’s haunting and original song “Vampires.”

Break-up songs have provided some of the most visceral lyrics in popular music, whether in a 30s classic such as “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” or in Rod Stewart ’s disposable pop hit “You’re In My Heart,” which followed his split from Britt Ekland.

One undisputed master of the break-up song is Joni Mitchell. The Canadian singer-songwriter’s “confessional songs” are like finely constructed poetry. On the mesmerising album Blue she can be lyrical about the agony of desire (“Oh you are in my blood like holy wine” she sings in “A Case Of You”) and capable of acerbic wit (“Richard got married to a figure skater/And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator”). Above all, Blue is an unsparing and honest work of art. “I never emulated other kinds of music, it just came out of me,” Mitchell said. “When Blue first came out, I played it for Kris Kristofferson, who said, ‘God, Joan, save something of yourself.’”

Love is the drug

All the best songwriters are artisans who reach for the tools of poetry to help put their own stamp on declarations of love and heartbreak. Similes abound: love is like oxygen, like a butterfly, like a heatwave, like a bridge over troubled water, as sweet as Tupelo honey. Love has also resounded as a metaphor: a battlefield, the devil, the drug, a temple, a higher law. Paul Simon’s metaphor about “the arc of a love affair” in “Hearts And Bones” is one of the many reasons it is one of the finest love songs of modern times.

Rhymes are also a staple of love-song lyrics (such as the Biblical reference “tempted by the fruit of another/Tempted, but the truth is discovered” in a Squeeze hit) and they can be used to set the mood in simple and brilliant openings, such as

Ooh, I bet you’re wonderin’ how I knew About your plans to make me blue

in “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” , written by Motown masters Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong; or in the beginning to Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound”

I’m sitting in the railway station Got a ticket to my destination

The witty, ironic wordplay of 50s satirist Tom Lehrer was usually applied to politics and social mores rather than love but, when he did write about “sweethearts”, he used rhymes to have fun portraying the sort of weird lovers whose idea of shared fun was poisoning pigeons in the park:

My pulse will be quickenin’ With each drop of strychnine We feed to a pigeon It just takes a smidgen

Sometimes it takes only a few words to inspire a classic. George Harrison ’s “Something,” from The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, is considered by some to be the perfect love song. The idea for it was sparked when Harrison listened to a reel-to-reel demo tape of James Taylor’s debut album , which featured a song called “Something in The Way She Moves.” Harrison built his own quintessential love song around one line.

When Simon was writing the beguiling “Still Crazy After All These Years,” a song about a middle-aged man reflecting on past loves, he started with the title and constructed a story around that. That song is also evidence of the importance of melody, with Simon’s clever chord changes emphasising the mood of the singer. “I was studying harmony with a bass player and composer named Chuck Israels at the time. Instead of using a minor chord I use a major chord in the song and go up a step.”

One of the ways around the problem of finding something new to say in a love song is for the songwriter to draw on personal experience and family history to find original words and phrases. Lamont Dozier was riffing a bassline for the song “I Can’t Help Myself” when he realised that the phrase “sugar pie, honey bunch” would help bring the song to life. “‘Sugar pie, honey bunch’ was something my grandfather used to say when I was a kid, and it just stayed with me and went in that Four Tops ’ song,” said Dozier. “Lots of childhood memories came back to me and I started using them as song titles.”

A good love song is also, above all, a good song. Townes Van Zandt was as capable of writing the disturbingly dark “Waiting Around to Die” as he was the poignant love song “If I Needed You.” And there are plenty of subjects to write about other than love. As comedian and folk singer Billy Connolly quipped: “People do rely on falling in love and out of love for songs – as if that is all you do all day. You still have to go and buy sausages and polish your shoes.”

How to write a love song

So how easy is it to write a love song? Besides the basics of creating a chord progression, coming up with a melody and lyrics and arranging the song, there has to be the magic ingredient of talent and creativity to make it special – and that is hard even for the experts. “In essence, you’re rolling the dice every single time you write a love song,” said Jimmy Webb. Even Jerry Lieber, who wrote or co-wrote more than 70 chart hits with Mike Stoller, admitted, “For a number of years we had trouble writing love songs.”

There is simply no golden rule. Love songs can be written quickly (Elvis Costello said “Everyday I Write The Book” was penned “for a lark in 10 minutes”) or eked out slowly, as with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which took four years to complete and involved editing down 80 verses.

Pat Pattison, a professor at Berklee College Of Music, where he teaches lyric-writing and poetry, is the author of Writing Better Lyrics , and his successful students include multiple-Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch. Welch, whose song “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings,” for the film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs , has been nominated for the 2019 Oscars Best Original Song Award, says that one of the book’s messages is that if you want to write a good love song, you have to avoid “the minefields of cliché, boredom and laziness that often destroy even the best efforts.”

No matter how good the melody, or how strong the lyrics, a song needs to be delivered in a memorable way to be truly successful. In 1957, folk singer Ewan MacColl was trying to win the love of Peggy Seeger (at the time he was married to Joan Littlewood) when he wrote the ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” The song was a hit for The Kingston Trio in 1962 and was subsequently recorded by a host of stars, including Peter, Paul And Mary.

MacColl, however, disliked the cover versions – even the majestic one by Roberta Flack. “He hated all of them. He had a special section in his record collection for them, entitled The Chamber Of Horrors,” said MacColl’s daughter-in-law Justine Picardie. “He said that the Elvis Presley version was like Romeo at the bottom of the Post Office Tower singing up to Juliet. The other versions, he thought, were travesties: bludgeoning, histrionic, and lacking in grace.”

Some songs seem tailor-made for a particular singer. Billie Holiday immersed herself in the mood of “Embraceable You,” using deft phrasing and exquisite delivery to create authenticity. Other examples would include Ella Fitzgerald with “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”; Sam Cooke with “(What A) Wonderful World”; Nat King Cole with “When I Fall In Love”; Otis Redding with “These Arms Of Mine”; Ray Charles with “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Smokey Robinson was so fond of Etta James ’ version of the 1942 Mack Gordon and Harry Warren classic “At Last” that he chose it for the dance at his wedding.

Even performers known primarily for their musicianship, such as jazz trumpeter Chet Baker , could nail the vocals on a particular song. “The one song that really made an impression on me growing up was Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine,”” said Lucinda Williams. “My dad used to play that for me. That song is great because it says you don’t have to be perfect, and I’ll love you anyway.”

The next breakthrough in love songs

Every decade for more than 100 years there have been indelible love songs that have struck a chord with the public: WC Handy’s “St Louis Blues” in 1914; Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” in 1927; Irving Berlin’s “Cheek To Cheek” in 1935; Deek Watson’s “I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons)” in 1945; Elvis Presley and Ken Darby’s “Love Me Tender” in 1956; The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” in 1967; 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” in 1975; Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” in 1981; Bryan Adams ’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” in 1991; Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” in 2003; Rihanna ’s “We Found Love” in 2011.

“We thought our songs would disappear after they were on the charts. A lot of them were comic and not very serious,” said Lieber. How wrong he was. Love songs have a grip on popular culture. John Updike, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, included an extended passage about Donna Summer ’s hit “Hot Stuff” in his novel Rabbit Is Rich . Love songs are regularly quoted in novels and used to set the mood in films, television shows and advertisements.

Even if the same human yearnings that Confucius was writing about 2,500 years ago remain, the landscape of music is changing and love songs are evolving. In the 2017 song “LOVE.,” Pulitzer Prize-winning singer-songwriter and rapper Kendrick Lamar sings, “If didn’t ride blade on curb, would you still love me?” a reference to whether a lover wants him for himself or for the fancy cars with big rims that he can afford. Zacari Pacaldo, who co-wrote the song and performs vocals on it, said: “I think it’s definitely a whole new genre.”

In the next decade, female artists will surely continue to play a part in redefining the love song. Consent and gender politics are likely to feature in way that the Broadway musical writers of the 30s could not have conceived.

“At almost every stage in history, we have turned to outsiders – usually from the poorest classes of society – to teach us new ways of singing about love,” said Gioia. “In the 60s, it was lads from Liverpool. In the 80s, it was rappers in the inner city. Who knows where the next breakthrough in love songs will come from? But I am confident that it won’t be invented by the ruling class or social elites.”

Leonard Cohen succeeded more than most in finding the right words and his great love songs include “Ain’t No Cure for Love” and “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Cohen believed that unfaltering human emotions are at the heart of love songs and that is why they will be here to stay. “There is something that doesn’t change about love and the feelings we have for people,” said Cohen. “People change and their bodies decay and die, but there is something that doesn’t change about love. Love never dies. When there is an emotion strong enough to gather a song around it, there is something about that emotion that is indestructible.”

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10 Song Analysis Lessons for Teachers

July 22, 2023 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   Leave a Comment

Sharing is caring!

One of the positive shifts that happened as a result of PARCC becoming a short-lived focus in my district and state was that attention shifted to paired text analysis of shorter texts. Even as Illinois shifted to IAR and parted ways with yet another educational acronym, the idea of quick-hit analysis with short texts stuck with me. I will always keep song analysis and poem analysis with paired texts as a part of my classroom routine thanks to PARCC.

It is easy to scaffold and differentiate song analysis lessons. I can integrate poems as mentor texts, as well. But the BIGGEST benefit is that these short texts engage students and build a foundation for the analysis of longer novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God or Great Expectations .

Song Analysis & Poem Analysis: Building a Foundation

I begin the year with a review of essential reading, writing, and close reading skills.

We spend time breaking down and discussing various poems such as “ Nikki Rosa “, “ Tattoo “, and “ Ode to my Socks .” I play songs for them and we unpack the meaning behind the lyrics. Songs like “ Dig ” and “ Anti-Hero ” and “ Hotel California .”

As we engage in poem analysis and song analysis, we talk about word choice, connotations, pattern-hunting, and review common poetic and literary devices organically as they come up in our texts.

Then, we practice analyzing the songs and poems to prove a claim. It’s one step forward to notice an important word or a connotation , but it’s a higher-level skill to unpack and explain how the author’s choices are designed to convey a message.

And it’s even more complex to put it all down in writing : thesis statements and topic sentences, using evidence to prove a claim, paragraph structure, and idea development.

All of this happens in cycles, with a lot of modeling and discussion – we go slow to go fast.

After students are comfortable analyzing a single text, I pair multiple texts for a larger conversation, asking students analyze these texts as cultural critics and to apply literary lenses .

Students discuss and synthesize texts and ideas as they bring different texts into conversation with each other as we explore an essential question such as:

• What is the meaning of “love” in society?
• What can “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift teach us about the Hero’s Journey?
• How can the songs “Cry Pretty” and “Growing Up” guide a discussion about gender roles and norms?

Skill Integration

The skills that students review and expand upon in the poem and song analysis learning cycles will serve them well throughout the school year.

As we read short stories and novels, t he text complexity increases , and we fold in character and plot discussions, but the foundation for in-depth and analytical thinking is there.

Plus, it’s a lot easier for students to reflect and revise (and a lot easier for me to provide formative feedback ) when the stakes are lower and the texts and analysis writing are short and focused.

That’s how my students find themselves writing 12-15 page literary analysis papers during second semester. For this assignment, they engage in college-level analysis, critiquing a literary critic’s perspective on a novel and using their own thinking and evidence from the text to prove and disprove that critic’s claims.

Yet… students, once the lightbulb goes on that this is simply a rinse and repeat of poem and song analysis to build an overall argument, they find that they can do it. I hear comments that “I just had so much to say” and that “it was easier than I expected.”

All thanks to a solid foundation that we add to throughout the year.

Song Analysis Lesson Plans

Because song analysis and poem analysis is a passion of mine, I decided to create pop-culture paired text song and poem analysis lessons to share with other English teachers.

Build a strong foundation for full-length novel study or use these lessons as a part of your novel or short story unit.

Make close reading, textual analysis and literary analysis  less intimidating  with 10 lesson sequences…that’s 31 CCSS-aligned  song analysis and poetry analysis lesson plans for paired texts . Integrated close reading, text-based writing, speaking, research, and inquiry skills, make these pop culture lessons both  engaging and worthwhile.

When you purchase the product bundle , you’ll receive  10 Detailed, CCSS-Aligned Lesson Plan Sequences  (That’s 31 total lesson plans!) and Teacher Notes (41 Pages) that each provide an opener, writer’s notebook activity, poem + song analysis, and writing activity options.

But because I love you and would never leave you hanging…these lesson plans come with digital and print versions of all of the handouts and activities you need. Digital & Print Lesson Handouts  (238 Pages/Slides) correspond with lesson plan activities and are designed to help students practice core skills as they engage with the texts.

10 Song Analysis Lesson Packs

Click HER E to grab all 10 lesson packs at a 30% discount!

• Carrie Underwood’s song “Cry Pretty” & Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song “Growing Up”
• William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” & Imagine Dragons’ song “Whatever it Takes”
• Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” and Tupac’s song “Still I Rise”
• Stephen Dobyns’ poem “Loud Music” and Incubus’ song “Dig”
• “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift
• “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day and “Brick by Boring Brick” by Paramore
• “Hotel California” by the Eagles and “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin
• Protest Songs
• “Mad World” by Tears for Fears and “A Million Dreams” sung by Pink / The Greatest Showman

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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A Lesson Plan on Writing a Love Song

• Julia Bodeeb
• Categories : High school english lesson plans grades 9 12
• Tags : High school lesson plans & tips

Explore Songs to Build Writing Skills

Romance is always in the air in a school setting – and not just on Valentine’s Day. Love is already in the minds of many for whom romance rules the year. Grade 12 students are often in love; they enjoy analyzing the lyrics and imagery in love songs and talking about the themes found in love songs and love poems.

Teenagers have many extremes of emotion. For them, love is a potent topic. They spend a lot of time listening to songs about love and talking with their friends about love and relationships. So enjoy a fun class of analyzing love poems and helping students learn more about the use of similes, imagery, hyperbole, and descriptive writing.

Listen to Some Examples

Start the lesson by bringing in lyrics from some recent and some classic love songs. I like to use the songs:

• Crazy in Love by Beyonce
• If I Was Your Woman by Alicia Keys
• Maybe I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney
• Thankful by KellyClarkson
• First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack
• The Fever by Southside Johnny and the Jukes
• Blessed by Christina Aguilera

A few days before the lesson I offer students extra credit for finding, printing out, and bringing into class lyrics to an interesting love song.Do always remind students that lyrics must be appropriate for use in school! Some of the language used in today’s songs is definitely not appropriate for school!.

Begin Analysis

On the day of the lesson put basic instructions up on the board. I generally include the due date, information that the song topic is love, and that students may use any song format they desire and that the lines do not have to rhyme.

Then on the day of the lesson start by having students sit in groups and passing out copies to the lyrics of 5 love songs. Have students discuss the songs among themselves and underline examples of similes, imagery, hyperbole, and other interesting phrases.

Ask volunteers to stand up and tell the class what similes they found and if they are effective or not. Try to let at least 10 students give answers. It is helpful to the class to hear as many examples of similes as possible. This helps them think about adding similes to their own writing. Similes are powerful; once students start using similes more frequently in writing their writing tends to become much more memorable and forceful.

Then review the definition of hyperbole and ask students discuss examples from the songs. Ask the class if feelings of love lead to hyperbolic writing or is it possible to factual and logical when writing about love?

Next pick one song the students haven’t seen yet and ask them to listen to the song as teacher or student reads it aloud. Ask students the theme of the song. Also ask them what phrases they found important to the overall meaning of the song. Ask the class to listen to the song again and write down any examples they hear of similes or imagery. Then discuss as a class the examples. Remind students again that it is very important to use similes in writing, especially creative writing.

Write Your Own Love Song!

Then tell the class that the assignment for the day is to start a draft of an original love song. Tell students that if they haven’t had romantic love yet that they can write about the love they have for family members, friends, or indeed even a pet.

Ask the class to write down 1-2 sentences to summarize the theme of 3 of the love songs they have read. Discuss a few examples together and tell the class that the theme of a song is a personal opinion. If the entire class were to write the theme of one song there might be a different theme presented by each person.

Students will create a song of at least 20 lines long that contains at least 2 similes. They will create a song with as much imagery as possible and with strong, vivid words.

Discuss examples of different genres of love songs. Give printouts of lyrics from love songs in the song genres of country, rock, soft rock, alternative, funk, and jazz. Compare and contrast how the theme of love is presented in the songs.

Ask students to think about who the audience for the song will be. What will the age range of the audience be? Will the song be for those in love, or those mourning lost love?

List on the board that students must use at least three literary techniques in their poem such as: imagery, repetition, hyperbole, personification, or rhythm. Remind students that each word in a song should create a strong impact in the listener.

Have students sit in groups for this lesson so they may brainstorm song ideas together. Then play some songs to get creativity flowing. Discuss the lyrics and use of imagery and repetition. Write some examples of interesting phrases used in songs up on the board.

I ask volunteers to present their songs to the class. If students want to make a performance video of the song I typically give extra credit if they show it to the class.

This lesson is usually a lot of fun. It is also an example of helping students understand the different genres of writing. Including a wide range of genres of writing in lessons will help students build writing confidence.

Assess this project by grading the poems for adherence to the instructions, and writing skill. Give extra credit to students who contributed lyrics to use in the class lesson

Love Song Assignment: Taking a Closer Look at ONE Song - DISTANCE LEARNING

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Students are always fascinated with love songs--particularly the most popular song or video that circulates in their social world.

Here is a nifty assignment for your students to complete, either individually or with partners. Select a song and query for questions about theme, tone, intended audience etc. Next, ask students to focus on the genre of love songs and how they reflect their own ideas about healthy relationships.

This assignment always yields thoughtful and even impassioned responses from students!

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Love Song Assignment 2

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Love Song Analysis

Love is “an intense feeling of attraction”. This is how Webster’s Dictionary defines love. It is much more complicated than that though, or maybe we just make it out to be more complicated, either way it’s hard to explain. A few words that characterize love for me are sacrifice, safe, comfortable, commitment, selfless, trust, and bond. Love is more than just a word, it’s an action. It is accepting and appreciating someone for who they are regardless of their flaws and trusting that you’ll stick by one another through thick and thin.

It’s caring about another person’s well-being and happiness more than your own. There are different ways of expressing your love for another person. There is the romantic love, where there is sexual chemistry and passion, and then there’s also the kind of love you feel for your family or a close friend. Either way its love and its special and we all need it in our lives. The assignment we were given is to analyze love songs from a specific decade.

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The objective of this is to determine how communication in and about relationships has transformed over the years, as well as to show how standards that define good communication and good relationship has changed. The decade my group got is the 80’s. There was a lot going on in this era. As far as main events that happened, Ronald Reagan became president at the end of the same year that John Lennon was assassinated. (1980) Then in 1981 most everyone that had televisions watched as Lady Diana and Prince Charles had their royal wedding.

As far as love goes, this could give everyone’s romance level a little boost! In 1982 Michael Jacksons ‘Thriller’ came out, giving a little taste of what kind of music to expect this decade. To this day that album is still one of the best sellers ever. Compact discs were first released in ’83. Then something tragic, AIDS gets discovered in 1984. Thus all the free love going on in the 70’s comes to an end for most. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame opened in ’85. Then another disaster, the biggest nuclear disaster known, Chernobyl, USSR, takes place in 1986.

I’m not sure what the world our world’s population is today but in ’87 it reached 5 billion. Again, must have been from all the free love going on in the 70’s! Five years after being released, compact discs sell out vinyls for the first time ever in 1988. Last but not least, communism comes to a long overdue end in 1989 when the Berlin Wall falls. Now specifically about music in general, the 80’s had an emergence of pop, dance music, and New Wave. Rock also progressed but the disco music slowly came to an end. MTV also was discovered in the 80’s.

When choosing songs for this paper I was thinking about how my analysis would turn out, and I’ve listened to love songs from past decades as well as present day love songs, so in terms of how music has progressed over the years I went into this assignment thinking the 80’s were going to be a mix of it’s past and present years. To elaborate, I think songs from say, the 40’s have a really high level of pure romance in them whereas the 20th century songs really get into a great level of sexual explicitness and start to leave the romance behind.

This is where many mistake love for lust. I was told once that lust is the desire for one’s body whereas love is the desire for one’s soul. So in my opinion many of today’s songs are more about lust than love. Back to the 80’s, as I was saying before I went into my analysis thinking that this decade would be a little bit of both of these, kind of merging the romance with more sex and I was right, I heard a little bit of both in them. When we got assigned this paper I was really excited because what better to write about than music? I love music of all types.

When people ask me what my favorite type of music is I really don’t have an answer for them. I tell them that I listen to a little bit of everything which is true. And analyzing songs isn’t much more than listening to them and picking them apart. Then combine music and love and it doesn’t get much better. So needless to say this paper seemed a lot more fun than a research paper on the earth’s atmospheres or something. Before picking out my songs I had to ask myself how I was going to analyze them. I thought about what kind of artists I wanted to use. Did I want to use males or females, old or young?

Should I pick songs that are about new relationships emerging, old ones growing closer, old ones being maintained, old ones growing apart, or relationships that are ending? Am I going to use songs about romantic love or the friend/family kind of love? Should the songs I pick have a positive or negative opinion about love? What kind of message do I want the songs to portray? What do these songs mean to me? These are all questions I asked myself going into this assignment as well as while I was analyzing the songs. I decided that I was going to use songs that had a little bit of all of these in them.

I didn’t want to use just males or just females because personally I think that men and women sometimes have a different definition of the word love itself so I didn’t want to get just one side of that. Also, I didn’t want to pick just new relationships instead of new and old because again, love might seem different than how it really is. When you first get into a relationship it’s always fun and wonderful and two people against the world kind of thing, whereas people that have been in a relationship for a long time know that that’s not how it always is.

There is always going to be ups and downs, that’s life. I wanted to pick songs that the artist portrayed a message that means something to people, one that seems realistic and people, including myself can somehow relate to. There are the hopeless romantics out there that believe in love, love, love, and then there are people who hate love and would rather be alone the rest of their lives so I decided I would pick a few songs that each could relate to. I just wanted to make sure I got all spectrums of love in the songs I chose.

I felt like even I could maybe learn from this paper rather than going into it thinking I just had to write another paper for school. I like to get both sides of the story as often as I can. I picked the songs I picked not only for these reasons but we were also supposed to only pick songs that reached a large amount of people so without question I did so. I chose songs on the top 40 lists. I picked a few that I had heard before and then I picked some that I had never listened to.

Most of the titles of the songs drew me to them, and then the rest I just started reading the lyrics and after the first verse of chorus I knew right away whether or not I was going to use that particular song. The songs that I decided to use were, “Love on the Rocks”-Neil Diamond, “What’s Love Got to Do with It”- Tina Turner, “ I Just Called to Say I Love You ” and “Part-Time Lover”-Stevie Wonder, “That’s What Friends Are For”-Dionne Warwick, “Greatest Love of All”-Whitney Houston, “Straight Up”-Paula Abdul, “Sexual Healing”-Marvin Gaye, “Addicted to Love”- Robert Palmer, and Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love”.

After choosing my songs I then decided how I was going to analyze the lyrics of them. I decided I would simply read through the lyrics before listening to the song and just jot down notes beside the lines about what I though each line or verse meant. I tried to put myself in the artist’s shoes and decide what they were trying to portray. I also tried to put myself in the shoes of the person in the song and analyze what the words meant to that person. It was fun! Most of the songs I ended up picking had a positive outlook on love. One that did not was the pop song “Love on the Rocks” by Neil Diamond.

This song in particular was about a past relationship that had ended. The person singing this song has a broken heart. He feels hopeless. He thinks that relationships are all good in the beginning but after a while it’s inevitably going to be over. “Not much you can do when the feeling is gone” That is true, once the sparks are gone, what do you do? He feels that once the woman knows that you’re in love with her she purposely will take your heart and break it. He says, “First they say they want you . . . need you . . . suddenly you’re out there walking in a storm”.

“When they know they have you . . . nothing you can do . . . just get away”. He thinks women take advantage of a man’s love. Personally I think this is pity talking. Why would someone in their right mind want to purposely hurt another person? I have had a broken heart though and it is a rather miserable feeling. When it’s over, it’s over. Another song with a somewhat negative approach to love was Tina Turners “What’s Love Got to Do With It? ” In this song the woman does not want to fall in love with a seemingly attractive male “. . . touch of your hand makes my pulse react”.

She has been in a bad relationship in the past and wants to protect herself so she doesn’t get hurt again (“I’ve been thinking about my own protection . . . ”) although it’s tempting. “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken” And while feeling this way, she isn’t happy about being hesitant to fall in love again because she knows how good love can be and she doesn’t really want to be alone. She just doesn’t want to get hurt again. I can understand that. Who does? Although the next song has a positive feeling towards love, it may not be a very positive kind of love. It’s “Part-Time Lover” by Stevie Wonder.

This pop song is about two people having an affair. “We are strangers by day, lovers by night” In this song the person singing romanticizes about cheating on his significant other. He likes the whole planning to meet up idea and running around behind his wife’s back. It’s like he enjoys the adventure of being undercover. “Knowing it’s so wrong, but feeling so right” But this song does have a twist in the end. The man finds out that his wife is also having an affair “you and me part time lovers, but she and he, part-time lovers. . . ” and he actually seems okay with that idea. He says that “two can play that game”.

I don’t know how anyone can glamorize adultery so much! But like I said, I did want to observe all aspects of love. The next two songs are about a different kind of love. “That’s What Friends Are For” by Dionne Warwick is all about friendship. We love our friends, our good ones at least. It seems like we don’t tell them enough how much we love them though. It’s not like when you are in a relationship and you tell that person twenty times a day how much you love them. This pop song is all about celebrating friendship. It’s all about appreciating eachother and the friendship that you have with one another.

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Music Parody Project: Writing a Parody Song!

by Beth's Music Classroom | May 14, 2019 | General Music , Middle School , Musicals , Technology , YouTube | 3 comments

Here are some great ideas for a Parody Project and to help your students write their own parody song.

Writing a Parody Project in the Music Classroom

When I say the words “parody project” or to write a parody song, what do you think of? A mock-up of a classic commercial, old tv show, or a pop song rewritten to make fun of? Possibly! But not with this project! Your middle school students will surely love it, and there’s so much for them to learn in the process.

Once students understand the meaning of a parody, they are ready for the vocabulary terms used in their parody project. Middle school students will probably understand rhythm and rhyming sounds, but may still need it explained it in the context of a poem/song. The rhythm is the flow of the musical time in the song. Rhyme includes the patterns of 2 rhyming words that end the line or sentence. Understanding these two concepts is the basis for this writing project.

Then building up, explain terms like syllables and meter to help them understand how they must write their own lyrics. With this solid foundation, they will be ready to conquer the project!

Benefits of Writing a Parody Song

A parody project provides students with a creative outlet.

A parody project can be such a rewarding assignment for your students for many reasons. First, it provides them with a creative outlet in which to apply the concepts learned. Also, it can be effective for a specific learning project or goal. For example, writing a parody song can be a memorable way to recall facts on a historical figure’s life. It may aim at helping the writer, the audience, or both. Use a parody song to remind students of rules or to kick-off a big event, such as state testing week or a final sports game.

A parody project can be effectively used as a specific goal or special project.

Finally, to write a parody of a song or literature work, students need to fully know and study the original. Careful research, reading, and listening improves student’s understanding of the original work, whether for musical or literary characteristics.

A parody project allows students to engage in a careful study and research of their music/literature.

Examples of Writing a Parody Song

To help understand their parody project and how to write a parody song, show your students several great video parody examples. One of my favorite parodies is Owl City’s Fireflies, written about IKEA. Although it doesn’t have an educational topic, it is still helpful in understanding a parody song.

Another light-hearted parody for younger kids is based on Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” But Cookie Monster wants to introduce his own parody version called “Share It Maybe.”

“Let It Go” from the popular Disney movie Frozen is a great song to use for writing a parody. Here is a helpful example:

One more humorous parody example uses the song “Believer” to narrate a girl’s agonizing car trip with her family.

Suggestions for Assigning a Parody Project

Here are a few suggestions for assigning a parody project with your students. First, provide them with a solid foundation of the important vocabulary terms needed to write a parody. Using a worksheet with a vocabulary list and definitions can help students master it.

Introduce your students to key vocabulary terms.

Also be very clear with your guidelines and expectations for the project. Be sure to include information on the length the song/story should be, the topics to choose from, and the amount to rewrite (i.e. only the verse or verse and chorus).

Set clear parody project guidelines for your students.

Third, provide specific information on how students should present their parody projects: i.e. PowerPoint/Slides, audio, video, typed, etc. Finally, help students think through the reason for this parody and who their audience will be. For example, will a group of Kindergarteners learning their ABCs be the target audience? Maybe it is a pep song for a championship game rally? Maybe your students just want to write a parody song for the laughs of their peers, and that’s totally fine! Just know the purpose of the parody.

Provide choices for a method of presenting their parody. project.

“My Favorite Things” Parody Project

One of my favorite parody projects to do with grades 5-8 includes the well-known song from The Sound of Music, “My Favorite Things.” The students first work alone to create a list of their favorite things (i.e. food, hobby, school subject, sport, etc.). Then they pair up with a classmate to insert their list into the format of the song. The song is a great choice for writing a parody because everyone has different favorite things.

My students always loved watching The Sound of Music. You can find the short video clip for “My Favorite Things” here:

Once they write the stanzas, then students begin creating their PowerPoint or Google Slides or audio/video presentation. When completed each group can share their parody song with the rest of the class.

My Favorite Things Parody Project – Click for more information!

This “My Favorite Things” parody project can be a great “get-to-know-you” activity in September or an end-of-the-year project. If you’re interested in this type of project and want to check out my parody project, you can do that by clicking here!

I’d also love to hear about what kind of parody songs you have tried with your students. Feel free to e-mail me at [email protected].

You can also find another helpful blog post on teaching General Music: 5 Tips for Teaching Classical Music in the Classroom .

I am always looking for more ways to engage my 8th grade general music students. I love this idea of writing a parody song!

I have used the “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” song from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I initiate a discussion with my class on how the Grinch changes at the end of the story. Could the song be sung at the end of the video? No! He has changed! Then we write “You’re a Nice One, Mr. Grinch” (or something of that nature). We change all the negative words and phrases and even ‘create’ some new words (ex. replace the original made-up words such as ‘nasty, wasty sot’). We sing them to the class at the end of the project. So much fun!

Oh, what a great idea for a parody! Love it! I’m so glad you shared that with me! Thanks, Kathy!

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Defining Love: An Assignment That Can Reveal Students' Perspective on Life

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Excerpted from  Personal Narrative, Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom by Bronwyn Clare LaMay. The following is from the section, "Love and Agency in Our Stories: Surviving 'Whole.'"

By Bronwyn Clare LaMay

Love can be hard to define. I pinpointed it as a topic that was real to my students’ lives and that would hopefully become a door into the literature we would read in semester two of our second year. Love was possible to personalize as well as analyze in literary discussion, and it was a seminal theme in the novel I wanted them to read, which was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon .

Love is salient to Morrison’s writing because she identifies it as the crux of her work. In one her interviews, she explains, “actually, I think, all the time when I write, I’m writing about love or its absence . . . about love or how to survive—not to make a living, but how to survive whole in a world where all of us are, in some measure, victims of something ” (Taylor-Guthrie, 1994, p. 40). This connection between love and surviving whole was relevant to my students, and it came out of our conversations that many of them struggled to process moments in their lives when they felt like victims of troubled relationships or life circumstances that were beyond their control. I noticed that they had trouble conveying these experiences without inadvertently writing themselves as victims in their larger life stories. This seemed to me a condition they shared with many of the novel’s characters. Morrison maintains that “each one of us is in some way at some moment a victim and in no position to do anything about it . . . in a world like that, how does one remain whole—is it just impossible to do that?” (p. 40). Through a discussion that moved between Morrison’s fiction and the complex, intimate concerns my students raised in our classroom community, we grew to realize that the answer to this question lay in a critical examination of the connection between love and agency in our own stories.

To scaffold the first day of reading, I asked my students to journal for about 10 minutes on the question, What is love? This writing session lasted much longer than I had planned. Two girls began to write and then stopped, on   the verge of tears, asking if they could take a moment outside. A few students alternately wrote and stared vulnerably around the room. Several others were still writing determinedly when the 10 minutes were up and requested more time. On this and other journal topics, I always waited until almost everyone was finished and then asked if there were those who wanted to share. I also made it a point to journal each entry with my class and to share my writing with them if they wanted to hear it. This was the strategy that I used to scaffold and engage them in the first several chapters of the novel, as we journaled our way through topics that either they or I suggested could connect them to the reading. This initial topic of love, however, remained unsurpassed in the emotions that it raised. As students volunteered to read their work aloud, a spectrum of unresolved stories about relationships with parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, boyfriends, and girlfriends—as well as conflicts within themselves—emerged and began to assume some perceptible patterns.

Our conversation lasted until the end of class. It felt unfinished, so as we delved into the novel’s opening chapters, I asked them to push deeper to define love in the first personal narrative they would write.

In The Dialogic Curriculum (1995), Patricia Stock explores the issue of creating space in the classroom for students to raise and assess personal questions, especially those that connect to the literature they read. Many of my students struggled for perspective on problems in their lives that could take precedence over their focus in class. Stock addresses this point in her work, acknowledging:

Some educators insist that teachers should not allow students to explore their personal concerns in the talk or writing they do in classrooms, even when students’ concerns match those in the readings they are assigned. . . . I hold a position on this issue that I have not reached easily or lightly: Teachers of schoolchildren are never far from the concerns their students bring with them to their studies. If they are, they do not teach students. They may teach subject matter, but they do not teach students. (p. 76)

Her view was indispensable in the context where I taught. When my students were emotionally distressed, distracted, or withdrawn due to struggles in their personal lives, they were not able to engage personally or academically in class. This was an everyday reality that created stress for me and influenced my decision to invite them to raise real dilemmas in our classroom context. However, the relationships my students built with one another and with me over our first 18 months of working together were vital to the narrative approach I describe in this book, whereby we strove to study and respect our lives as texts.

Bronwyn Clare LaMay is currently a high school English teacher at Impact Academy of Arts and Technology, an Envision Education school, in Hayward, CA. In addition to her K–12  work, she has taught pre- and inservice teachers at University of San Francisco, Mills College, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley.