Goodnight Kiss Articles for Songwriters

Archetypes in Country Music

by Marc Kuchner  (C) 2009

Archetypes are the stock characters in legend, in movies, in the Bible, in the stories of our lives. These characters are so fundamental to human experience that they need no explanation.  The moment they walk on to the set, we know who they are.  Here is an introduction to archetypes that can help get you started applying this powerful idea to the business of country music.

In their book, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through Archetypes, Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark claim that brands fitting one specific archetype, rather than a blend of archetypes, fare better in the marketplace.  Many companies and individuals have capitalized on this advice.  As a music publisher, artist, or songwriter, you can too. 

The best way to illustrate the concept of the archetype is by example.  Consider Star Wars IV: The Phantom Menace.  Luke Skywalker, dressed in white, is Innocent.  Grey-bearded Obi Wan Kenobi is a Sage.  Han Solo has a price on his head; he is an Outlaw.  Darth Vader, lord of the Empire, is a Ruler.

The use of archetypes is part of what makes the story of Star Wars compelling.  We already know in our hearts exactly what happens when an innocent meets a sage or an outlaw.  The archetypes themselves contain part of the story.

Likewise, businesses can use archetypes to brand themselves.  By evoking an archetype, they tap into something we already know and understand and feel deeply about.  That deep feeling translates into brand loyalty.

1. The Twelve Stock Characters

Several systems of archetypes have appeared over the years.  Carl Jung described the first one in the 1930s; the concept even has its roots in the writings of Plato.  But the list of twelve archetypes provided by Pearson and Mark seems to be most popular in the business world.  Here is the complete Pearson and Mark list, together with some examples of brands that adhere to them.

The Innocent:  The innocent is the child inside us all, the child that thinks everything will be OK if you just relax and let the world spin.  Coke is an innocent brand.  Have a Coke and a smile. 

The Outlaw: You don’t need to ride a motorcycle to feel like a rebel; just don a Harley Davidson leather jacket.

The Sage:  The sage is the proverbial wise elder who dispenses advice.   Oprah, with her book club and her magazine full of tips, is a good example.

The Hero/Warrior:  The hero is the character that takes responsibility and faces challenges.  For example, Nike commercials try to suggest that if you put on your Nike sneakers and you’ll be ready to win the Olympics.

The Lover: The lover focuses on matters of the heart—in the bedroom or anywhere else.  The Victoria’s Secret brand is for the lover in you.

The Everyman/Regular Guy/Gal:  The everyman is the average Joe who takes pride in being a good honest hard working guy.  For example, Mike’s Hard Lemonade was named “Mike’s” simply because Mike is the most common male name. 

The Joker:  The joker entertains us, maybe with slapstick and dirty jokes, or maybe with deep insights that nobody else had the courage to say. Consider the Alka-Seltzer brand.  Plop plop, fizz fizz, what a silly song that is!  Or think about the incisive honesty of “Honkytonk Badonkadonk”.

The Explorer:  Indiana Jones, in a nutshell.  Brands like Levis and Jeep make you feel ready for adventure.

The Caregiver:  If you really care about someone, you’ll send him a Hallmark card, and drive him around in a Volvo.  Picture Mom or Dad in an apron, pulling dinner from the oven.

The Wizard:  The wizard is someone who creates something out of thin air.  For example, Oil of Olay claims to perform the magic of  “age defying” regeneration. Bernie Madoff had a reputation as a financial wizard, until his vast fraud was unveiled.

The power of the archetypes partly explains why investors stuck with him so long; they longed to have a wizard in their lives.  This longing drove them to make unwise decisions.

The Creator: Einstein, with his quotes about the power of imagination, his reputation for playfulness, and his outstanding original ideas, is the archetypal creator.  Some brands have harnessed the power of this archetype too; with Legos, or Home Depot, you can build anything you can imagine. 

The Ruler:  The boss, the president, the CEO, the chief.  When you use your American Express card, you’ll feel like a king.

We all have every archetype inside us.  These successful brands help bring our inner archetypes to life.  When we put on Levis, we become explorers.  When we crack open a can of Coke, the world becomes a place of peace and harmony.   When we use these products, our lives become more than just lives---they become stories.

2. Country Songs

The same principles work in the music business.  A good song, just like an effective brand, can evoke an archetype we have inside us.   When we hear a song that contains an authentic archetype, the song brings meaning to our lives.

Here are some examples of archetypes from songs on today’s Country radio. I think these examples show that songs contain a wide variety of different characters, and that the above list of archetypes above does a pretty good job at classifying them. 

Here are a few more illuminating hit songs from last few years, analyzed. 

3. The Dark Side

You may have noticed that some songs are still hard to classify with just the tools laid out above.   So let me add one more detail to the scheme.   Every archetype has a good side and a dark side (or “shadow” side as Pearson and Mark call it).  Darth Vader is not just a ruler; he is a demagogue.   Likewise, the dark side of the hero archetype is the aggressive warrior.  The dark side of the go-with-the-flow innocent is the whiny orphan.

Most of the time you don’t see the dark sides of the archetypes expressed in commercials; companies don’t want their brands to have negative images.  But music is art, and the dark sides of the archetypes can resonate with radio audiences just as much as the good sides do.  So there are a many songs on the radio that invoke the dark side of one archetype or another.   For example,

The orphan is an important archetype for rock music and for younger artists in general.   The orphan blames other people for his or her problems, like an adolescent blaming his parents for dressing him funny, or a teenage girl blaming all boys everywhere for being such jerks.   In Country music, young artists like Taylor Swift, tend to take what is probably a healthier attitude.   When they face hard times, they clench their fists and forge ahead, like the hero.

4. Lessons for Songwriters

Just looking at the range and distribution of archetypes on the radio can give you new ideas for writing songs, and help you decide how you need to develop your skills and your catalog.  Today’s Country radio contains several prominent archetypes; the innocent, the everyman, the sage, the hero, the lover, the joker, the caregiver and the outlaw seem to be common.  All archetypes probably have their places in the world of popular song.

But it’s easy to get stuck on just one.  I myself was caught in a rut of writing mostly outlaw songs last year; that wasn’t leaving me very many options when it came to artists who would cut the songs.   So in the last few months, I’ve focused more on writing everyman songs, to explore something new and improve the odds of getting my next cut.

Are you co-writing with an artist?  Keep the artist’s favorite archetypes in mind, and I bet the session will go more smoothly.  And every songwriter is also a songplugger---so read the tips below for songpluggers.

Here is another important message for songwriters: Make whatever archetypes you’re writing about loud and clear throughout the song.  I recommend that when you are laying out the concept for the song at the beginning of your writing session, you take a few minutes to decide on the archetype for at least the song’s narrator.  That will help you decide how he or she speaks and what artists you are going to realistically be pitching to.

Remember:  the theory says that your listeners have these characters hard-wired in their heads.  If you don’t pick an archetype for your characters, your listeners will.  And it might not be what you intended.

5. Archetypes for Artists

If you are an artist, you are a brand, just like Coke or Levis.  So perhaps you should follow Pearson and Mark’s advice:  find an archetype that suits you, develop your image along the lines of this archetype.  Then stick with it till you become a big success and you need to put more variety in your set list, or till you can’t pull it off anymore.  

Your choice of archetype can guide your choice of songs, the names of your albums, the way you dress on tour, and your choices of professional alliances.  On his website, Chesney is bathed in a white light, heightening his innocent appeal. Gretchen Wilson, the everyman/woman, poses in a baseball cap and ripped jeans on her website, looking like she’s ready to repair a truck; you wouldn’t catch Carrie Underwood in that outfit!

Every person has every archetype inside him---there is no one archetype that can sum up all of you.   Indeed, Pearson argued, in her book Awakening The Hero Within, that to live a complete life, we all must live every one of the archetypes.  But as a brand, you will benefit from emphasizing one particular archetype, and making all aspects of your image consistent with it.

When you are starting your career, you can’t get all that creative; there are only twelve choices, and only maybe 7 or 8 that seem to work in Country music (see above).   Also, you’ll need to make sure the archetype of your songs matches your actual public image.  It has to be real and authentic.  If you aren’t a natural sage, outlaw, innocent or everyman, don’t pretend you are; the public will see right through it. 

If your public image changes, you’ll need to evolve with it and change the kinds of songs you sing.  Britney Spears may have started out as an innocent in her Disney days.  But with her scandalous tabloid-worthy behavior, she became an outlaw.  Now there’s no way she could cut “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.  But her current edgy songs that seem to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable go perfectly with her new outlaw image.  On the other hand many an artist’s career has fizzled because the artist’s image changed and he or she did not keep up with it musically. 

6. Publishing and Songplugging

If you are a publisher or a songplugger, part of your job is to match the archetype of the song with the needs of artist.   Sometimes this task is simple and straightforward.  For example, Toby Keith is something of an outlaw; don’t pitch him a song where the singer is a caregiver.

If you are a successful publisher or plugger, you probably do this instinctively!  But the language of archetypes can help you put into words this process of casting your songs, and maybe it can help you organize your catalog. 

Here are some other examples of archetypes for current Country artists listed in the tip sheets right now.

7. How Artists Grow and Change

Now, for some artists, it’s easy to guess what archetype they might be looking for in their next hit.   For example, Brad Paisley will probably remain a joker, and Kenny Chesney will probably remain an innocent, for years to come.  But other artists, after they put out very successful records, make a point of changing direction.  How can we predict where they will go?

Often we can’t predict what archetype an artist will be looking for.   However, Pearson has suggested that there are common ways all people, artists and fans included, grow and age.  This progression can sometimes point the way to where an artist might be headed for his or her next album.

We are all born innocent.  As we grow older and find ourselves first taking responsibility for our lives, we identify with heroes--like Superman and Spiderman.    Next, we often become explorers, ready to try new things and expand our horizons.  Then as we grow and mature, we experiment with other roles from lover to joker to outlaw to sage, not necessarily in that order.   The more we experience, the better.  Finally, age can bring a kind of return to innocence when we come to terms with ourselves and with the universe.

This progression seems to apply to artists too.  For example, Disney recognized that young artists tend to evolve from one archetype to another.  They created the Hollywood Records label to host former Disney artists, boys and girls who outgrew the innocent Disney image.   Hollywood Records artists, like Jesse McCartney and Miley Cyrus, are often heroes, like Taylor Swift.

I suspect that as she grows up, Taylor Swift will probably experiment with other archetypes.  As she builds her set list, she may well try on the lover, the explorer, the outlaw or the joker.  If her career lasts, she will likely return to the innocent, like LeAnn Rimes.

Male artists can go through the same sequence.   Rascal Flatts, with their high, youthful sounding voices, and well-publicized charity work, appeals to the hero inside us.   They probably will need to evolve into something else, however, as they and their fans grow and change.  

I’ve noticed that as male artists age, they tend to become sages like Kenny Rogers or rulers, like George Strait.  For example, Trace Adkins seems to have recently transitioned from joker (“Honkytonk Badonkadonk”) to sage (“You’re Gonna Miss This”).  For a while, Brad Paisley will probably remain a joker and Toby Keith will probably remain an outlaw.   But one day, they too may find themselves feeling more comfortable as sages or rulers.   Eventually, male artists approach the ultimate evolutionary stage, the return to the innocent, represented by Montgometry Gentry’s “Roll With Me”.

As a publisher, you need to sniff out the archetype the artist wants next.  For the youngest artists, think about the innocent and the hero (and for rock music, think about the dark sides too, the orphan and the warrior).   For new artists of any age who are still developing their image, pitch them more of the same archetype they have already been successful with.  For more successful artists who are exploring different archetypes and building their set lists, pitch them an archetype they don’t have yet in their collection.   For mature artists, think about the sage, and the return to innocence.

Here’s another complication to keep in mind when you look at the archetypes of country artists.  While there are many archetypes represented in country music, the genre of country music as a whole has a particular archetypal feel to it.  Country music is everyman music. 

So there’s everyman layered on top of almost everything we do.  We may know Brad Paisley as a joker, but the stations that play him, the style of his guitar playing, the plain fact that he’s a country musician, all these things make him an everyman too.   Likewise, just about any male country singer can safely align himself with an everyman product like Budweiser (Keith Urban), Corona (Kenney Chesney) or Ford (Toby Keith).  But that doesn’t mean that Keith Urban would want to cut an everyman country song (like “Chicken Fried” or “Holler Back”).

8. More

This article describes some of the ways archetypal analysis can help us understand, market, and create country music.  But there are probably other ways to use this idea that I haven’t thought of yet, and I’d like your help brainstorming.  So if you have more ideas about how to use the archetypes in Country music, or if you want to share your analysis of your favorite song, or if you would simply like more information, contact:

Marc Kuchner

www.marckuchner.com

marckuchner@gmail.com

Thank you to Kelly O’Brien for introducing me to archetypes, and to Martha Irwin Earls, Rex Benson, and Robin Frederick for conversations that helped me flesh out these ideas.  This article is an updated version of an article that first appeared in the June/July 2009 issue of Music Row Magazine; thanks to David and Michelle Ross at Music Row for their encouragement.

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Astronomer/Songwriter Marc Kuchner writes country songs and works as an astrophysicist for NASA, studying planetary systems around other stars.  Two of his singles were reviewed in Music Row during the last year (“Start Now” 8/08 and “Kissing in The Rain” 2/20/09).   A recording of “Start Now” by artist Brynn Marie was named the best demo of 2008 by Music Connection Magazine.  Kuchner usually portrays a sage or creator.

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