Lyric Writing:
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Writing lyrics is the deeply personal part of the songwriting process, this is where you have your say. Lyrics are what relates the song to the songwriter. There are only so many chords and chordal sequences and in popular music these are reused or re-arranged time and again, but words speak eternal.
A poem can be used as a lyric but a lyric doesn't have to be a poem. Poems have metre or a rhythmic flow, in a song this rhythic flow is taken up by the music. The lyric can have spaces whereas the poem usually cannot. These spaces can be filled by extending the end of the note which allows the vocalist to express themselves or left open for another instument to fill.
Rhym is very common in popular and rap music and is often a challenge for the songwriter, fortunatley there are few useful resources available. MasterWriter.com is an excellent resourse for the lyricist.
There are no rules to the lyrical compositional process but we have a few suggestions:
- Draw on your own personal life experience.
- If telling a story you don't have to get into all the detail, stick to the main points. Don't concern yourself that someone else may not fully understand, a few simple words can say a great deal, and if they interpret your words differently then so what!
- Write down all the thoughts and ideas that come to you, even if they don't sound quite right, too many cliches or even corny. If you have an idea for the start or end of a line write it down. What you don't want to do is write one line and then sit there for hours trying to ''find the next line'. You can come back to your ideas later. You will find that when you concentrate on a line that your thought cliched at first and then consider how it can be phrased in a different way you may come up with a pearler.
- In very many cases you can get rid of un-necessary words to create space, the less words you use the more the emphasis is on the ones you leave in. Words like "I, you, and, but, so, if..." can often been cleansed. "I saw him at the party but he was with her" loses no sence when culled to "Saw him at the party, he was with her".
- You don't have to be grammatically correct, which may upset your high school english teacher: "...he was with she".
- You can even make up your own words, there are NO rules.
Here is an example that follows some of these principles. All un-necessary words have been removed leaving just the important ones, some made up and the end of the chorus is left exactly as is reads. The listener can fill in the blanks:
Exquisitry Enticingly
Classicity Enchantingly
Fabulosity Delightfully
Delicacy Gracefully
Dazzlocity Stunningly
Superlicity Extra ordinarily
CHORUS:
How many words does it take?
How many words does it take?
How many words does it take?
To say…
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