We are drawn to songs and stories like a crackling fire on a cold night.

They offer us comfort, a place to settle and a space to reflect. The great story songs that survive the elements of time and trends are about subjects we all relate to: falling in love, losing love, death, rites of passage, challenges, disappointment, despair, the longing for the triumph of good over evil. Story songs offer hope, perhaps, more than any other type of secular song.

Story songs such as the haunting Scandi-Scots ballad, ‘The Twa Sisters’ or the love torn Ulster folk tale, ‘Johnny Doyle’ survived because at their core is a denominator that can never die - the strength of great story telling. The truly great story song draws you into its world; it transports you to another country, another time, or another place.

Arguably, the best story songs are short films with well-drawn characters and a plot. As Lamont Dozier, one of the Motown songwriting triumvirate, Holland-Dozier-Holland, explained, “…a song is a mini-story - with a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a complete, meaningful story. The song’s story and theme have to be universal, so that listeners can identify with it.”

Sound advice from one of the 20th century’s greatest songwriters. If a song’s plot lines are clear and well-drawn, we want to hear it over and over. Diana Ross and the Supremes’ ‘I’m Livin’ in Shame’ was inspired by an actual movie, the 1959 drama, Imitation of Life. Combining that irresistible Motown exuberance with despair (as ABBA went on to prove, that sweet and salt equation works every time), the song captures in 3 minutes the backstory and heartbreak of the film’s final scene, depicting a young woman who bitterly regrets shunning her loyal, loving, hard-working mother. The story is so well told you can see the action spooling in your mind’s eye and Ross sings it with such an urgent cry you sense her almost panicking grief.

The story song that always made my heart lurch as a child was ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero’ by Paper Lace. I’d hear the foreboding military drums and the twang of the opening guitar, and immediately feel a strange mix of fear and yearning. I believe it is placed in the category of 1970s cheese, or is a guilty pleasure at best. But recently, I realised that it was written for all humanity. It’s set in the American Civil War but really, it is a song for mortals throughout time who have watched loved ones go off to war.

The 60s and the 70s were a golden age of story songs, but the Kinks, Lou Reed and Rod Stewart cracked open the concept to broach the subject of transgender and homophobia. Stewart’s ‘The Killing of Georgie’ beckons the listener to consider the injustice of someone who was murdered for being different. Likewise, in the 80s, Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ made my teenage-self think about the life of a young man forced to leave his family and home town in order to simply be who he was. The bleak opening refrain and sweet strength of Jimmy Sommerville’s voice puts the story over in a way the defies the listener not to empathise, yet beneath it pulses onward determination.

Modern story-songs from Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar have gone on to tackle racial inequality, drug addiction and mental health struggles. Sheeran’s debut single ‘The A Team’ about the waste of a young life is composed in the ballad style in short brutal phrases, whilst Lamar’s devastating super-speed narrative of events in his California universe offer meditations to young people who may be struggling with their own vulnerabilities and life choices.

For a truly hard-hitting story song, go find Chris Wood’s ‘Hollow Point’. Wood walks us through the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes as if captured in real time, describing an ordinary day that was to be his last. This one is composed in the old folk style and proves the magic of the original formula remains undimmed.

It’s a formula that’s quite simple. Great story songs are only ever about the message - whether it’s teaching a life lesson or highlighting an injustice, or whether it’s to uplift us, or simply to make us feel we are not alone. Stories are all we have. Let’s tell them well and sing them loud.