The Unreliable Narrator

The most interesting thing a song can do is lie to you. Not through bad writing or vague metaphor, but deliberately — a narrator who believes their own distortions, who omits the crucial detail, who presents a version of events that the attentive listener slowly realises cannot be the whole truth.

Most songwriting advice pushes toward authenticity. Write what you know. Be vulnerable. Tell the truth. And that advice has produced extraordinary work — there is real power in the confessional mode, in the sense that you are hearing exactly what someone felt at exactly that moment. But it also has a ceiling. When the narrator and the writer are the same person, the song can only contain what the writer is willing to admit to themselves.

The unreliable narrator breaks that ceiling open.

The Character Who Isn’t You

David Bowie understood this earlier and more completely than almost anyone. Ziggy Stardust wasn’t a mask he wore to hide behind — it was a tool that let him explore things the man from Brixton couldn’t access alone. When Ziggy spoke, the rules changed. The character could be grandiose, sexually fluid, doomed, messianic. Bowie could push ideas to their logical extreme without the constraints of autobiography. And then, crucially, he could kill the character and move on.

Slim Shady works the same way, though in a register so different it’s worth sitting with the comparison for a moment. Eminem the person has complicated feelings about his mother, his ex-wife, his industry, his fame. Slim Shady gets to act those feelings out in the most extreme imaginable form — cartoonishly violent, deliberately offensive, morally indefensible. The distance between Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady is the distance between feeling something and dramatising it. One is therapy. The other is theatre. Both have their place, but only one can go as far as The Marshall Mathers LP goes.

Lana Del Rey’s approach is subtler and, in some ways, more sophisticated. Her narrators aren’t clearly fictional the way Ziggy or Slim Shady are. They exist in a haze between autobiography and invention — women who are glamorous and self-destructive, who romanticise their own suffering, who may or may not be telling you the truth about why they stayed, why they left, what they actually wanted. The listener can’t quite locate the seam between Lana the person and the character she’s performing. That instability is the point. It creates a mythology rather than a confession, and mythology has a different kind of staying power.

What the Lie Reveals

Here’s the counterintuitive thing: an unreliable narrator often reveals more truth than a reliable one. When a character justifies something unjustifiable, or minimises something devastating, or insists everything is fine in a way that makes clear nothing is fine — the gap between what they’re saying and what’s actually happening becomes the emotional content of the song. The listener fills that gap. They bring their own experience to it.

Think about a narrator who describes a relationship with total calm — measured, almost clinical — and somewhere in the details, you start to understand they are devastated. They haven’t said so. They might not even know it. But the song knows it. That gap between the narrator’s self-presentation and the emotional reality underneath is where the listener lives.

Confessional songwriting tells you what to feel. Character songwriting creates the conditions in which you feel something yourself.

This isn’t a value judgment — some of the most important songs ever written are direct and confessional to the bone. But if you find yourself stuck, writing the same song from the same perspective with the same emotional resolution, it might be worth asking: what if the person telling this story isn’t quite trustworthy? What are they leaving out? What do they believe about themselves that isn’t quite right?

Give your narrator a blind spot. Let them be wrong about something important. Let them present their worst decision as a reasonable one. Suddenly the song has depth it couldn’t have had when you were simply reporting your own feelings accurately.

The character doesn’t have to be monstrous or extreme. They just have to be slightly more complicated than their own account of themselves — which, if you think about it, is true of everyone.

Explore character-led writing and lyric development with Resonillator’s Songwriting modules.