A song gets about three minutes and maybe two hundred words. An essay gets as long as it needs. You would think the essay has the advantage. Most days I think it is the other way around.
A song cannot explain itself
In an essay, if a line does not land, you can add another one. You can qualify it, expand it, put a “that is to say” in front of it and try again. The form forgives you. A song does not. If the line does not land, you have spent four seconds of the only three minutes you get, and everyone heard it, and the next line is already arriving.
So songwriting teaches a kind of ruthlessness that prose writing lets you avoid. You stop asking whether a line is good and start asking whether it is load-bearing. Take it out. Does the song fall over? No? Then it was never a line, it was a comfort.
Every word in a song is paying rent. Prose lets far too many words stay for free.
What prose has that a song does not
The honest answer is: evidence. A song can assert. It can make you feel that a thing is true with nothing behind it but a chord change, and that is a real power, and it is also why you cannot report a story in one. A song is allowed to be certain. Journalism has to show its working.
I write both, and I have stopped trying to make them the same. What crosses over is not style, it is discipline: cut the line that is only there for comfort, and never assert in prose what you would need a chord change to get away with.
A small exercise
Take something you have written — anything, a paragraph of homework will do — and set yourself two hundred words. Not as a summary. As the whole thing. You will find out very quickly which sentences were doing work and which ones were keeping you company.
This is a sample post, written to show how an article looks in this theme. Delete it, or rewrite it as your own — the layout stays the same either way.