How to write song lyrics
A passionate introduction
The first rule of song writing is that there are no rules for song writing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. The words and sounds you make are yours and so are your songs. No matter what kind of words and/or sound you put out there, you’ll find minds on that wavelength.
In this post I’m going to attempt to describe a way to put together lyrics for a song.
Songs, just like people, come in many different shapes, sizes, and personalities. Some songs are scribbled out on diner napkins at 4am and others are methodically written with a feathered pen upon staff paper. Anyone who writes, or has a ever written a song has their own very unique method for this magical process. It’s difficult to even suggest a process per-say (even though I will attempt to do so in a later post) as while I think it’s great to be able to sit down and say ok I’m going to write for three hours; many times you’ll be dozing off to sleep to have an idea race through your head and the next thing you know you’re scribbling for ten minutes to the light of the moon. And boom next thing you know you’ve got a song you really like in that ten minutes after days or weeks of writer’s block.
The one thing that all songs share is the goal to convey some type of an emotion or state of mind. For me personally, this is the key essence and all encompassing greatness of writing and listening to music. When I hear a song that I connect with it’s like I’m being communicated with on a level more primal than language. It’s the like the state of mind and emotions of the creator of the song are being imprinted into my mind just by hearing that certain arrangement of sounds and words. Having the state of your mind changed through hearing sounds and words, it’s like the best drugs you don’t even need to smoke dude!
How to generate ideas for song lyrics
The simplest way to begin writing a song is to put your pen/paper down or take your fingers off the keyboard. Take a moment to focus on something in your mind. It can be an image, an emotion, a person, a situation, anything that catches your focus. You’ll most likely focus on something that will trigger a variety of emotions, memories, smells, sounds, this is great; let all of these things fill your mind and start writing and/or making sounds. You can write sentences, words, detailed or abstract descriptions, even draw some pictures to express what’s going on in your mind on paper. Go crazy with this as nothing will come out of your mind as a clean, detailed, straight-forward product. Just like the biological structure of the mind, emotions and thoughts are messy and complicated.
As you go through what I will call the ‘mind idea-vomit’ process, take note of things that are repeating. Words, imagery, sounds that keep coming up is what you’ll want to incorporate into your song. That stuff is what keeps coming up and it will be the easiest and most fundamental way to convey the emotions and state of mind you’re trying to convey.
Arranging the words and phrases into a song
Once you have a some things down on paper you can begin to arrange them into parts. Most songs have some types of unique sections called verses and some type or types of a section which usually repeats itself throughout the song called a chorus. There are also other parts that have specific names that we can discuss in another post. If you notice that some type of word or phrase repeats itself way more often than other stuff in what you have written you might consider building your chorus around that word or phrase.
You can arrange other pieces of what you have written into verses. Sometimes verses flow together to tell some kind of a story or describe some type of a situation but they definitely don’t have to. Whatever makes sense to you will work. Also remember there are plenty of songs that have no distinguishable ‘choruses’ and/or ‘verses’.
Rhyming
Most songs you’ll hear incorporate some type of rhyming.
Example:
The tree that they saw was tall and green,
and the dog tied to it was crazy and mean!
Lines don’t have to rhyme, and many songs don’t but if you’re just getting started this rhyming the lines or groups of lines of your song will seem natural because most of the music you hear rhymes. There are many rhyming dictionaries online that can help if you’re stuck finding a rhyme, just Google ’rhyme dictionary’.
With all of that you should be able to get cracking on a song or two or 100. Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions regarding the song writing process below.
