Amberly Wegele- Reflection

Amberly Wegele

Prof. Jewell

ENG 1101

14 October 2019

1.All music has a purpose and country music’s purpose is to lay the singers’ deep and melancholic feelings onto the listeners. Country music revolves around sad feelings and emotions. A country song without sad and or angry lyrics is a song that doesn’t deserve to be called a country song. The very essence of country songs are the strong raging emotions of the singer that touch the listeners’ emotions. Country songs that don’t include a broken heart, a lover leaving, a partner cheating, or missing one’s hometown, often don’t become hits.  Each of the songs annotated had an upbeat melody laced with melancholic lyrics. The songs included a feeling of longing and despair as they described their situations through their lyrics. Country singers and songwriters reach their audience through strong emotions, they aim for everyone who have feelings. I learned that many of these artists used upbeat melodies to disguise their sad emotions, helping them lure listeners with the melody and then tying them to their melancholic lyrics so they can feel and understand their emotions. They sing about the sad parts of their life and the sad events of their lives. They sing about broken hearts, cheaters, loved ones leaving, longingness for their loved ones or hometowns. Each of these songs became hits because of the feelings attached to the lyrics. They’ve become famous enough to reach tons of people, including myself, I don’t even like country music because of the same stereotypical sad and angry music country singers produced but these songs have wiggled their way into my daily playlist. I still want to learn how they match upbeat music with sad lyrics and make it a hit. I want to learn about the ways the singers contribute to the songwriters and if they put their feelings into words they sing. I also want to learn why the only building blocks of country music are mainly sadness and anger over belongingness and broken hearts and along with this I want to learn why songs that stray from these guidelines don’t blow up like others when they have so much potential to blow up and become famous hits, just like Jolene, Achy Breaky Heart, The Climb, ect. blew up.

2. I learned that I can analyze not only words but melodies along with lyrics. I learned that I’m open to analyzing different types of genres and not just poems and books.

I believe that my strength as a writer is that I can write and analyze deeply when needed to and strongly relate it to a quote, explaining their relevance and relation. I’m good at using proper evidence to explain in detail. I’m good at expanding to make the writing deep and lengthful. I would like to be able to analyze the little things like english teachers do. My past english teachers analyzed things I never even thought of in books and movies. To do so I could read a piece of writing and read between the lines and look farther into the words of the writer and not overlook the small details that have potential to hold deeper meanings.