Writing Lyrics

The Lounge General Discussion
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I’m sure there must already be a thread for this, but anyone got tips for writing lyrics?

I write stacks of music, but I don’t write songs. Through writing some instrumental music I think I’ve now got a bit stronger at writing melodies, but I suck at lyrics and I’m a fairly poor singer.

I’ve discovered Synth V which now lets me add reasonably convincing vocals in my songs and managed to write one song I consider is passable because I lucked into a subject to write about which seemed to flow nicely.

Everyone always recommends the “Object Writing” approach, but I’ve never found it to click with me.
I read “Write one song” which was better, but still didn’t fix it.

Any tips, books to read general commiserations about how hard it is?

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Pretty much:

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I think one of the main questions to ask is do you want to say something or rather to paint a picture/atmosphere with the lyrics.

The cut-up technique can be v interesting to experiment with. It usually helps to create very rich imagery and to get ideas flowing.

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I think this is a very insightful point.

I don’t have some agenda I want to share with the world.

The one song I managed to write that I was happy with was because it was about a specific real world event which there was a lot of material about (including letters) I could draw on. This suggests story songs based on background I can draw on might be the way.

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I think this is slightly different. Though it’s a great thread, thanks for sharing!

I’m happy with my approach to writing music, (Or at least I have an approach that works for me and I’m getting better with practice) it’s specifically the lyrics I struggle with.

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this may be a silly exercise but when me and my friends freestyled together as teens i found it way easier to get something going when i took on a character, specifically different jobs. like im rapping as a plumber or a mail carrier. wont end up with a hit single but it gets the lyrical brain engaged

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I’ve found that all you really need is one line. Like something you really, really, enjoy throwing out there. That is like all of the force you need. Then you take that and sort of allow it + and work it into a whole song. But it needs to be like something super inspiring, in that moment. Then it will work. That’s my method anyway.
What makes lyrics more interesting in my opinion, generally speaking of all song lyrics out there, is that the writer/singer has a good vocabulary, which means reading books with words from a large, even vast, cornucopia of words.
Simply: know more words than most. Then let a sentence happen. Then the real work begins :grinning:

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Hmm lyrics. My approach goes something like wait… wait longer… have something to say and write it down… hate it… wait another decade or so, decide it wasn’t awful after all and finish it.

I struggle with writing lyrics, mainly because if I’m going to say something I want it to be meaningful, which is ironic given the rest of my musical output.

I did a couple of bits around more traditional approaches, one of which was a response to my wife scoffing at the idea of me even being a musician (in a nice way I should add - she’s a nice person!), where I finished some really old stuff and wrote some new around traditional instruments that you actually had to play in order to make them work. I still haven’t actually made her listen to it but everyone can here:

Not long after that I went the other way around and started writing words from scratch around electronic stuff I made - given I’ve had a total block since I’m still amazed I got anything out of me at all, though I definitely did have a lot to say as I was headed into fatherhood by way of adoption, the process of which threw up all kinds of stuff about my own life. That one is here:

For advice I wish I had it - most of my words were fairly personal and probably overly coded for the most part. Just doing it is the best advice I could give. It’s advice I should take too, as those two projects, while perhaps not my best, are the two things I’m probably most proud of. The hardest thing for me is having something to say that isn’t just moaning/ranting about stuff…

Oh, and I did try to write more but nothing came, so my last blend of words in my music was odd Monomachine covers of the first thing I posted!

So yes, lyrics - there’s mine, and while there’s some fluff there are also a couple of bits I’m particularly proud of lyrically. As always, others can judge for themselves… But yes, lyrics: do it!

(Edit: and perhaps my advice should be, given my output in this spell, to have a really annoying social worker visit you - or not; often they’d no show - for 18 months or so, pulling various parts of your life that you’d rather not revisit into focus every week because they either can’t write effective notes or get their head around your life experiences. That ought to do it!)

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Write a love song. Write about someone or something that you love. It’s the standard for a reason. If you can’t express anything compelling in a love song, then you might not have much to express lyrically, which is totally fine. Most of Frank Zappa’s career was a satirical protest against the notion of musicians being compelled to sing words over their music, which he likened to commercials. Of course, being Frank Zappa, his lyrics were often so good that they would undercut his own message.

When I’m having trouble writing lyrics, I just start writing totally absurd songs that make me laugh. Like unhinged songs I would never publish… ironically when I listen back on these songs months or years later, they often represent some of my strongest output.

Just to provide a sense of what I’m talking about, some of these absurdist unhinged songs:

  • “Double Bald Eagle”

  • “Out Of The Six Guys In Our Friend Group, I Am The Most Proficient In MIDI”

  • “Eating Dunkaroos Thinking About George Costanza”

  • “Ghost Sniffing”

  • “How to Breed a Perfect Dino Without a Groom”

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It’s been a long time since I’ve written lyrics, but the lyrics I like most would also work as standalone poems. They have a narrative arc, they deeply explore a theme, and most importantly the writer’s vocabulary is broader and more interesting than every day speech.

I personally have a pretty strong distaste for lyrics about personal relationships, drinking, partying, anger, etc - surface level pop and rock themes. There’s so much to the human experience and the natural world to explore. That said, I think the best lyrics come from people who spend a lot of time deeply considering subjects they know well, or from people with a lot of interesting life experiences. And people who read a lot. Everybody writes what they know, that’s kind of just the nature of writing.

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one thing that helped me: treat the vocal line as an instrument first. hum or scat to the melody without real words, just vowel sounds and consonants that feel right in the mouth at that tempo. once the phonetic shape is locked, filling in real words becomes easier because you’re matching sound, not searching for meaning from scratch.

the meaning problem is separate. your melody already has an emotional character, and that’s your brief. you’re not writing poetry and then setting it to music, you’re translating what the music is already saying. sometimes the lyric is already almost written, it’s just in a different language.

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So funnily enough I did this very thing:

I wrote a song about FM synthesis and because the lyrics were intensionally dumb it was really easy to write them.

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Reminds me of this complete silliness I made once… I just rambled something on mic, and was like, “that’s all I wanted to express, let’s make some noise now.”
https://on.soundcloud.com/3NxULxDnXJlYCYSmK0

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Exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. And the lyrics are good. Nice one!

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I think a lot of people expect lyric writing to be spontaneous, freeform, and straight from the heart, but there’s a lot of benefit to taking a more deliberate, craftsman like approach. Here’s a method you could explore.

  1. Come up with an overall concept. You can try freeform writing around various topics, real life scenarios, feelings, senses, scenes from a movie or book, or anything. Do this a bunch and hopefully some kind of useful starting point will emerge. Maybe it’s a rough concept and a couple of keywords and phrases that go with it.
  2. Pull out those few words or phrases from your free writing that seem like they could work in a song. Brainstorm any additional words or concepts that are related to the topic or concept of your song and make a list. Random House Websters Word Menu is a book worth picking up for this. It’s organized by topic and subtopic like an encyclopedia and then just contains lists of words related to that topic.
  3. Start with the more promising words from your list and look them up in a thesaurus to find synonyms that might also be useful or stronger than the original word. Also look up antonyms because those can be just as useful. I use thesaurus.com
  4. Edit down this expanded word list to the strongest options and look each of them up in a rhyming dictionary, writing down a list of potentially useful words that rhyme. It’s possible that some of the words won’t have any good rhymes and if you’re lucky some of the words will have a lot of potential rhymes, some of which actually relate back to your concept. rhymezone.com is a good one
  5. From here you can probably start to put together a rough skeleton structure of your song. If you have a good cluster of related words that rhyme you can see how those will fit at the end of lines in your verse for example and you can start to figure out, I’ll use these words in verse 1, I’ll use these in verse 2, etc.
  6. Then it’s just a matter of filling in those gaps with phrases and sentences that lead into the rhyming words. Some possibilities will probably start to spring to mind right away and your song will start to take shape.

I’m sure this sounds too formulaic and not romantic enough for some but it’s a worthwhile approach to try if you’re stuck.

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One method you could try is called “toplining” I think…
Basically you take you existing instrumental song put it in the DAW in record your vocals one line at a time, stop, do the next line. This way you don’t feel like you have to come up with a whole verse at once.
Also it lets you play off the beat easily and leads to less overthinking.
There’s a reason many rappers do it these days.

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This is the one song I have written where I am happy with the lyrics:

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I used to write songs a lot using guitar as the main instrument. Always came up with the music first and then hum a melody which eventually became words. But yeah, the words are the hard part. I would usually let the feeling of the music guide the lyrics, and maybe freestyle some stuff. Outside of big universal themes we all can relate to I also found inspiration in doing the creative writing exercise of pulling a story out of the newspaper (I’m 47!) and using that. It gets you away from using the first person perspective which only works if you have an amazing voice

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It’s funny how finding melody seems so easy while getting (meaningful) words is such a graft. It’s probably just years of layering melodies - perhaps for some it’s the opposite?

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Always let the lyrics shape the musical elements, never the other way around. Read poetry, them poeticists know the rhythm of language. I’m repeating advice I got from my composing teacher and it was probably the most impactful one I got, I had no idea poetry could be that good.

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