Have you taken on the challenge to write a song for the spooky season? Unless you’re about to write the next “Monster Mash”, you may be wondering, “Am I supposed to write a song about pumpkins and skeletons?”
And you can, of course! But if you’re trying to get the vibe of Halloween with more sophisticated emotions, there are ways you can go about doing this. It’s actually quite fun to take inspiration from Halloween to switch things up.
Play with Nostalgia
It may come out as a more autumnal-themed song, but not necessarily. Perhaps Halloween is the backdrop of the larger message you’re conveying about the season, or missing someone, or feeling lonely.
In “Haunted House” by Holly Humberstone, she describes a classic Halloween-themed topic in a nostalgic way. The combination of her warm chords and familiar memories in the backdrop of a “haunted” house is particularly engaging.
They say this house is haunted
But all these ghosts, I’ve grown with
Haunting
While doing research for this exercise, I’d say the most songs I found were about hauntings, but not in the literal sense. You could talk about skeletons in the closet or, of course, ghosts.
In Noah Kahan’s “Halloween”, he describes all the different ways that a lover comes back into his life as a sort of ghost. His hook summarizes the haunting he deals with:
It’s not Halloween, but the ghost you dressed up as
Sure knows how to haunt, yes it knows how to haunt
Mortality
Halloween speaks to the mortality of us as humans and our relationships. Maybe you’re writing about death, the afterlife, or something of that nature. Even Zombies!
You can also approach this as a storyteller, like Lord Huron’s “The Ghost on the Shore”. In the perspective from the ghost, the song straddles the transition between life and death, reflecting the story of their lives from the beginning to end.
All who sail off the coast evermore
Will remember the tale of the ghost on the shore
Fear
Monsters, demons, ghosts—there’s a lot you can work with when it comes to fear. Though fear is a big part of Halloween, you don’t need to talk about scary movies or fighting zombies. You can work your real fears into your songs.
My favourite example of this is “Panic Room” by Au/Ra, which is such an immersive song about anxiety. Both the music and lyrics create that Halloween feel without it being too obvious.
Hell raising, hair rising
I’m ready for the worst
Soul frightening, face whitening
Fear that you can’t reverse
Happy Halloween! 🎃👻
