Ways to Add Imagery to Your Lyrics

One way or another, vision is essential to song writing. Of the five senses, the sense of sight is accountable for most imagery. Seeing things may not be as significant to the song writer as seeing beyond or into things. Sight must lead to insight. Develop into a seer, or a visionary, and make that your true mission. Apply that to some of your songs and see what you can come up with.
Becoming a visionary makes the difference between songs that matter and songs that don't. Try to do things opposite of what you do well. If you rap loud try rapping low or calm. If you usually spit fast try slowing it down a bit. You will find all types of little things you can incorporate in your lyrics to enhance your flow. This little exercise can stretch and expand your range in addition to broadcasting imagery within your raps.
Five Exercises To Help With Adding Imagery To Your Lyrics
1.) Wherever you are, close your eyes and try to reconstruct the scene around you in your head. When you've completed the picture in your “minds eye”, open your eyes and check the results. Jot it down in a notebook or journal, if you like. Then later incorporate what you've came up with into a verse. Repeat this exercise frequently, in different places. Imagine a scene and you being in the middle of it. If a song comes out of this , fine, but that's not the immediate point. Learning to see is.
2.) Practice close observation the way Sherlock Holmes would. Try to notice everything about a person or a place and thing. Then try to figure out whats behind that person or place: the dirty fingers of the bank teller, the crushed, greasy thumbnail of the mechanic, the door-shaped discoloration on the wallpaper. Be a detective. Then write a poem about what you've observed, perhaps in the voice of the crime buster or mystery solver or even the person.
3.) Imagine you've been blindfolded and taken to some strange location. Visualize what the place might look like. Is it indoors or out? Cold or hot or mild? Dark or light? What colors do you see? What sounds can your hear? What actions are taking place arund you, if any? What plants do you see? What animals? What objects? What other people? Write a poem about what you do next when stranded in that place.
4.) Look at something for a long time, longer than you think necessary. An animal, a scene , apicture, a person, the night sky, a field. Then describe whats invisible but nevertheless there. Make what you don't see as real as what you see. Write a poem that moves back and forth between the seen and the unseen.
5.) Picture what a place will look like in a hundred years or what it looked like a century ago. Don't allow yourself the cliches of science fiction. Don't assume an apocalypse or a nothingness. Imagine as fully as you can. Start by trying to figure out where the scene now is headed, then set out from the trail of logic into the wilderness of fantasy.
Next time your in the studio try to provoke energy within your lyrics. I guarantee you it will help.