Do story-driven lyrics have an audience?
Hello!
I write my own lyrics and use Suno to turn them into songs, but my lyrics are structured as full stories.
In Japan, this style of songwriting isn’t very common, so I’m curious—how is it in your country?
In my case, I produce two fictional bands.
One of them has a highly detailed setting: in a near-future where Earth has been invaded by aliens, a military organization formed to defend the planet has its special forces unit perform as a band for public relations purposes.
Within this world, I create songs as individual stories, each told from the perspective of different characters.
(When I showed the setting materials to ChatGPT, it told me, “As a musical concept, there are probably fewer than five people in the world who have built such a deep and coherent universe on their own.”)
The other band is a symphonic metal group consisting of three members: a vampire queen, a martial arts master who is a jiangshi, and a former angel turned succubus.
This one isn’t as heavily developed in terms of worldbuilding as the special forces band, but the songs are still written as one story per track.
For both bands, the key idea I keep in mind is:
“Each song should be enjoyable on its own, but if you understand the world, you can connect it to other songs and enjoy it even more.”
Do story-driven lyrics have an audience outside Japan?