The term “singer-songwriter” has come to mean something very different from its original meaning, and this is a direct outflow from the digital age beginning at the end of 1990s. It has instead now come to mean something mostly mechanical and descriptive, rather than alluding to a unique kind of spiritual insight and human perception.
“Singer-Songwriter” as Poet, Prophet, Bard
For as long as the term existed prior to the digital revolution, it meant, almost by necessity, one skilled person creating something real—picking away at a guitar, humming a melody while walking down the street, and eventually sitting down with an notepad and placing lyrics on a page.
This person was more like a poet, writer, or even prophet or bard, rather than a manufactured industry persona.
Occasionally, in a serendipitous meeting of worlds, two people could be better than one, forming in their work a greater unified artistic whole as co-writers.
The available technology—or lack of it—lent itself to this interior-focused structure. Recording instantly, even for the famous, wasn’t easily accessible.
Joni Mitchell didn’t have an iPhone in her pocket.
This focus on the interior is what was implicit in the genre that emerged in response to the original descriptor.
If a person liked listening to “singer-songwriter,” it usually meant someone thoughtful, attentive, and dissatisfied with simplistic popular anthems in favor of that which reflected the real complexity of human life.
In this context of interior excavating without technology to immediately preserve various discoveries, a song only “stuck” if it was worth sticking—the kind of thing that a songwriter would come back to repeatedly until it was cemented, or would remember distinctly after writing it.
Often, song ideas drifted off, and this turns out to generally be for the better.
As a singer-songwriter myself, even in a digital context, I experience the relevant questions: what’s worth spending time with and retaining, and what smatterings of ideas can I simply let go in favor of the better ones?
Musical Dismembering: Cut & Paste & Hook-Hunting
In the digital age, songwriting is increasingly only about proliferating “hooks.”
We see now a sort of dismemberment of the original interior instincts and insights, due to the ease with which pieces of music can be strewn around, cut, changed, distorted, misplaced, replaced, and then sent on to another production lab for more inspection and dismantling.
This process often involves many writers, most of whom have no vested interest in any interior goal the original artist may have had, but only in delivering an easily-digestible product that can make money and explode fame. While this has always been a temptation—where effective spectacle becomes the primary driver of value—the temptation is now extreme.
What results is an incessant stacking of “hooks” for the sake of entrancing a market with a kind of sonic candy or cocaine becomes the primary activity, rather than the reverent excavation of the authentic interior of a human experience, resulting in its expression in song.
Dismemberment is an intentionally violent metaphor.
I use it be ecause I’ve experienced it, and because it expresses the reality that a true song feels like an organic whole—a real organism with an intrinsic meaning, structure, and end.
To pull it apart and reconfigure it not for the health of the whole and the benefit of the listener but for the sake of turning it into a disfigured kind of drug is ugly, and it strikes at the core of authentic artistic work and its interior value.
In my time with the record label, although I did this sparingly after experiencing its devastation, I would bring a completed idea into the studio, only to have parts amputated and rearranged into something that, at worst, felt monstrous, and, at best, felt like a betrayal.
I quickly pivoted into only bringing in partial ideas, or starting fresh in the session.
And it wasn’t about the writers or producers themselves, but something amiss in the very structure. We could chase the muse together (however clumsily), but I could not bring something shaped into a whole to be crushed and destroyed, regardless of end result. Something precious had to cease to exist in order to make way for the deformed mechanized version.
Setting aside the necessary nuance of editing any artistic work and the value of peer feedback (principles I already took and continue to take seriously), completed works subject to this process, usually for the sake of trying to contrive a “hit,” were left empty and limping, drained of the authentic inner blood which offered their raison d’être.
Sometimes they were catchy, but at what cost?
Only the whole world, it seemed.
Have We Left the Greatness of the Songwriting Craft Behind?
In this environment, where we see multiple writers and producers throwing in their little bits, it is unlikely we could have seen, for example, the success of Tracy Chapman’s 5-minute long Fast Car, or R.E.M.’s looping, chorus-lacking Losing My Religion.
Jewel could not have dreamed of releasing several 7-minute tracks detailing a variety of griefs on a debut album, and the generally honest, visceral songwriting of that time period would have had little place (although we do see the occasional, welcome exception.)
As a songwriter, I often like to joke that I was “raised” on the female singer-songwriters of the mid-nineties, made popular through a banding together via projects like the Lilith Fair and the Women & Songs compilation albums.
I was initially entranced, despite my young age, by Jewel’s vulnerable Pieces of You album, Tracy Chapman’s heart-behind-the-voice early records, Alanis Morissette’s gritty anthems, Sarah McLachlan’s haunting stories.
I knew early on that I wanted to be able to do what they did: authentically capture something real via lyrics and music, delivering a gift to those who would come to listen.
While the 1990s shouldn’t be overly glamorized even in this territory—we had our Vanilla Ice and MC Hammers as well, although these had their understood cultural “place”—it remains true that even in popular contexts and Top 40 radio, there were regular invitations into deep reflection on the meaning of existence, the power of love, the reality of grief and loss, and sincere encounters with reality.
Popularity isn’t the core problem; derivative work based primarily in markets is.
Intermingled with melodramatic ballads that now seem profound in our fake-earnest popular musical landscape, these singer-songwriters served as our cultural poets and prophets, relentlessly calling us back to something real despite the growing trend toward the unreality that would eventually overtake us in our current tech age.
It’s hard to articulate the difference in these writers verses what we see now.
It’s rare to find that quality of storytelling even among a more independent scene; most of what we encounter is, at best, a failed attempt at similar depth or simply a stripped down acoustic pop song, but remains a shallow simulacrum because of the lack of shared cultural sense of quality rooted in real interior life.
The problem is that depth and taste can only be formed via subtlety over time, and usually with much shared exposure.
One has to develop a quiet intuition for what is real verses what is false but pretending.
I hate to reference Taylor Swift explicitly as she’s such a third rail, but her work, aside from the folklore and evermore albums which evidently received much inspiration from her intelligent British boyfriend at the time and which subsequently retreated and devolved upon his exit, lacks all of this authenticity which was meaningfully constant in the 90s.
There is a difference between a confessional style—long normative in most great singer-songwriters—and a pure self-obsession geared toward the usefulness of lyrics for marketing and tour purposes, pulling on vulnerable listeners and their perceived need for parasocial relationships in lieu of a functional society.
The marketing and self-aggrandizement has come to be the main concern, rather than serving the main thing and the true vocation.
This is the arena of a circus monkey, not the purview of the real artist.
In fact, an honest heart can feel the crumbling of interior integrity in allowing oneself to be ruled by self-interest and the dictates of algorithms and public whim. He or she rightly senses that being an artist is a vocation, and one that can easily be betrayed.
Notably, most singer-songwriters began with a more confessional style in their early work based in youth, but fairly quickly graduated to meta themes, cultural topics, and the stories of others. This is appropriate and predictable. No great artist can be satisfied with oneself over decades. We are not interesting enough to ourselves.
This is the mark of narcissism rather than great, honest, relatable writing that helps listener become more of who they are rather than degraded and hollowed out with thin and flittering false emotion.
The 1990s As Apex Reference Point
It’s not an accident that, in trying to reference the intangible thing so much of modern songs lack, we easily start stumbling back into the great songs and artists from the 1990s.
What was is about that decade that allowed for such a flourish of authentic artistic work, even in the face of the pressures of popular markets?
In reality, there has been greater writing in many other epochs. Those who don’t particularly value modern forms of music, and especially the folk music of the mainstream music industry beginning in the 20th century, will not even consider its excellence, instead preferring timeless classical forms.
But the 90s had something sacred in that the sheen of perfect modern life was evaporating—summarized perhaps most starkly in the decade’s notorious grunge scene—while retaining the authentic human core that had always attended folk music throughout history.
This combination, paired with a growing allergy to anything that lacked reality or forced sticky-sweet fantasy, made for songwriting that had both a warm, beating human heart and proper teeth that could grind through reality on humanity’s behalf. In other words, it offered authentic, thoughtful catharsis and an invitation to deeper reality, rather than locking us into a permanent adolescent framework.
Pre-social media gatekeeping, while heavily imperfect, still allowed for real, cultivated talent with perseverance and character to be make its way and be emphasized over the fundamentally mediocre which now easily pleases capricious algorithms.
Of course, there is a bias as well for those of us who came of age during this songwriting heyday—me as well, although as a very young girl with a significantly older network around me at the time.
But to that I would say there is a clear throughline in Irish folk and early Americana, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Jewel and Tracy Chapman and R.E.M, all the way up to Brooke Fraser, Gabrielle Aplin, Luca Fogale, and Searows.
This is the tradition I place my own work within, and proudly, whether exploring religious, poetic folk, or meta-narrative pop genres.
The core of everything good in song form is a gift with a sincere desire for honest and edifying art that reaches the human soul and slakes a bit of the inescapable eternal thirst with meaning and lasting value.
I’d be very happy to see us all contemplate the 1990s and what it embodied, and return to that tradition of real artistic engagement.
We are dying on the thin soup of degrading, digitized, disjointed, narcissistic, market-driven music.
Give us again the meat of expressive vocabulary, visceral stories, and haunting, too-long melodies that invite us into richer lives.
Give us again the chance to be fully human.
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