This is such a great post.
It’s a way to teach songwriting I hadn’t considered–describing how it felt from the inside for you to write that particular song, step by step. It’s like learning about playing an instrument by watching someone else play it, up close.
Glad this is helpful/interesting to you. It occured to me when I wrote that post that an actual example might be the best way to understand how that approach could work in practice. My goal was to show that writing lyrics is as iterative as writing an arrangement. And that for me, both need to come from the heart and be spontaneous, but then need to be refined by putting in the work. With the goal of transporting that initial feeling as best as you can.
Yes, I think you described your process well–keeping in touch with the good initial inspiration and then growing the complete song out from it. The finished song almost gets discovered, after a certain amount of staying with it and feeling around in the dark, rather than being “solved” using some formula.
I haven’t been able to keep up with all of the thread, but I find I need to sing/speak/utter the words out loud and recorded to really understand their auditory qualities.
Take my advice with a grain of salt, as I’m not a singer song writer, but even with the weird stuff I do, I oftentimes find that words that read great to me within my head or on some form of paper, don’t work as well when spoken out loud in the context I intend to use them.
I also find that if I can’t speak them out loud confidently and hear them back without cringing for the wrong reasons then I either need to change the words (or abandon the concept entirely). (That isn’t to say I won’t use or say cringey stuff. I do that intentionally all the time, but I still need to be able to have confidence with those words and phrases and I can only confirm this by hearing them out loud and played back to me.)
Content wise, I love mining everyday mundane life for ideas. Daily life has tons of stories that may seem uninteresting, but if you avoid being literal or overly specific with covering every detail, I believe one can make taking out the garbage into an epic story of struggle and survival if one wished to do so.
It doesn’t have a tidy conclusion or even make sense.
This is huge, actually. I think what you’re talking about is cadence.
Basically, most words have many different ways they can be stressed, which is dependent on context, especially the words that come right before and after it, and whether it shows up closer to the beginning or the end of a sentence (or phrase).
It’s very, very hard to “hear” this in your head if you’re just reading it on paper. You may find that a line that works on paper “doesn’t scan” when sung (meaning the stresses or rhythm are awkward).
Same reason why I tell all my junior writers to read their work out loud before they send it to me. Because things often sound different in your head than they do when spoken out loud.
Ezra Pound, despite being a despicable Nazi and an overall garbage heap of a human being, had some good advice on the matter:
- Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
- Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs.
- Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave.
- Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave.
(From Make It New, 1934)
This post is amazing. A gold mine.
My big takeaway from your “unc” song is that in a weird way, universality can emerge from specificity.
I think the great lyricists all use this technique.
If you capture something that is meaningful to you with enough specificity to make it feel real, your listeners will take those specific details and lay them over their own experiences.
If it feels real and tangible to you, it will feel real to them, too—even if you’re singing about your uncle and they’re thinking about a favorite teacher or their first car. The universality comes from the feeling, and the feeling is captured in the little details, not the larger subject.
Edit:
I always think of a poem a friend of mine wrote in high school. It started I will die at 8a.m. on November 3rd, in a little room in Lodi, New Jersey.
The poem was specifically about her being afraid to take her SATs, but to me it was about being afraid of getting a boring job and watching your life slip away. But the feeling was still there and felt so real to me, even though I took it to a different place than she meant.
@KingDuppy mostly lurk but had to say I’ve enjoyed your contributions to this thread. I’m about to get back into writing lyrics but it’s been a while, I’m a bit rusty, and I’m needing to find a new voice and style. I’m getting some solid inspiration here and if I ever get stuck I can always snag a line from one of Clive’s books of blood!
We use the cut-up technique. Different texts are taken, interesting bits are cut-up, and they get thrown into an archive. Then we them out and arrange them until something interesting appears.
Most people have to write write write and get through writing a LOT of bad lyrics before they get to the good ones. YMMV.
My approach with electronic music, specifically dance music, tends to be about vibe and storytelling. What mood and feelings to I want the listener to feel and what is the (hopefully) compelling story being told.
Also, HOOKS HOOKS HOOKS. I like to create earworms as much as possible so that the listeners end up singing the song to themselves whether they want to or not.
Sometimes I work backward from the vibe and hook combo to get to the story.
Here is a recent example: I wanted a party/clubbing vibe. Fun with friends, maybe a little messed up, but in a good way.
I then thought of how sometimes when you know people who run the venue or you’re tight with the promoter or other people putting on the show, you can just show up and get waved in. Sometimes, you get waved in through a side door while everyone else is in line up front. There’s a feeling of bypassing the line or just connecting with your friends early on that can put you in a good mood for the rest of the night.
So the hook came to me, “This is our side street signal”, with phrasing and a rough idea for a melody. But by that time, I also knew I wanted a kind of Charlie xCx meets Daft Punk’s “Technologic” answer to the main hook. “All green, all night, head low, eyes smiling”, etc.
The rest was coming up with verses that tell a story of being out with friends and going to an underground rave, everyone getting on the same wavelength where hearing only a few words here and there doesn’t matter, that kind of thing.
Notice the lack of traditional “moon/June” rhymes. The lyrics are kind of free-form, where it’s more about the imagery in the words and the rhythmic flow. It’s the contrast of the free-form verses and the repeating hooks of the chorus that give more interest overall.
This song is just one example and my approach can vary depending on inspiration. For instance, I DO sometimes write lyrics with more formal phrasing and rhyming. But even without inspiration, I’ve written so much music over the years that I can start putting together a new song pretty quickly. Songwriting is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
Hopefully something in my screed will help.
Thanks for all the brilliant comments, so glad I made this thread.
I had another bang at writing lyrics for this weeks Weekly Beats:
What I’ve learned is if I have a defined story that’s not personal then I find writing lyrics a lot easier.
Lyrics
Snow White Testarossa
No Socks Penny Loafers
He just stepped of the plane from San Tropez
Ray Ban Aviators
Chinos Padded Shoulders
He Makes me feel like I’m the only girl in here
He makes my yacht rock
My jan hammer and my moet pop
he knows what a fool believes
He wears his gucci with rolled up sleeves
Treats me like a lady
Dressed up like I’m Sade
Wrote me a solo on his CS-80
goes like…
MASSIVE SYNTH SOLO
Took me to Hawaii
Mustache like Magnum PI
He proposed while we were fighting crime
He said
You make my yacht rock
In red stilettos and a feather cut
I’m not a fool to believe
I wore my wedding dress with rolled up sleeves
Geoff Bridges is Rockwell Steele - Part time bartender at Bongo’s Tiki Lounge and synth player in the house band Boogaloo Joe (Played by the real life members of Toto)
Fights crime in his Testarossa Spider. Lives on a super yacht in Marina Del Rey in LA and wears nothing but Gucci even though he has no obvious source of income other than his part time bar job…
Rosanna Arquette is Alexis Silke - Pulitser prize winning investigative journalist and part time swimwear model.
Together they are the crime fighting duo Silke and Steele.
Bongo - Dean Stockwell owner of Bongo’s Tiki Lounge and creator of PORCARO (Patchable, Oscillator, Routing, Crime, Analysis, Reasoning Operating-system) - A self aware computer and modular synthesizer which they use to fight crime.
Their main plot of the show relates to a drug triangle between LA, Hawaii and Miami leading to the show having regular crossovers with Magnum PI and Miami Vice.
Kenny Logins plays - Santino the drug gang enforcer and Christoper Cross plays the shadowy “El Conquistador” the kingpin of the whole organisation.
Eventually when the ratings slip PORCARO is downloaded into a futuristic hovercraft deigned by knight industries and he becomes “Hover Cop” although many people feel the show jumped the shark at this point.
I havent written lyrics in a while, and ill get around to putting them on this electronic stuff ive been making, but im not there yet, im still figuring out what im doing lol.
But I loved writing lyrics for my mostly instrumental witchcraft doom band, because the vibe was so clear and strong that there were positive limits on the kinds of lyrics that would work. So it wasn’t like having to pick from infinite options, I knew they’d be bleak and occulty. That really helps narrow it down.
I’ve always really appreciated audacity in art - writing, music, everything. Often my way in to lyrics starts with an idea that feels so dumb it would be ridiculous to write a song about it, like omg lol that is such a compellingly stupid idea. I feel animated about it so I’m thinking about it a lot and finding actual substance under the audaciously stupid idea - why does this combination of things actually feel potent?
Once im thinking about it a lot, then I start writing down phrases and kicking around ways to make them alliterative and/or rhythmically compelling and/or rhyming. Eventually ive got enough that I just connect the pieces.
Like when Sunbather by Deafheaven came out and I was obsessed with it, I was reading the book of the new sun by gene wolfe and I was like, what if I was just screaming like George from Deafheaven about what it’s like living in this dense, weird sci-fi. Thinking about it, came up with an opening line i still really like, “Someday soon, the sun will die.” The Alliteration in contrast to the hopelessness work together really well. My friend Emily sang it. The last five minutes (of a fifteen minute song) were the part with me screaming lol.
We did another song where the lyrics started with the dumb concept “herbal time travel.” I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was hanging out with witches, little bottles of herbs and sticks and berries and stuff everywhere, and I started thinking about them and why a woman would need to figure out how to use herbs to travel in time.
This is self-indulgent but im just gonna write out the whole song, because these are probably my favorite lyrics ive written, I think they came out great.
Little blue bottles pile up at the edges of the stairs
Calendula, lemonbalm, lavender tangled in her hair
She read somewhere that there’s a ratio of herbs that mixes with your blood and you become unstuck in time
A tincture and a rhyme
Sixteen years six months and seven days ago
She needs not have met you
I’m surprised at how vulnerable it feels to write this out! D: Idk Ive written a whole lot of prose in my life but despite an English degree and a lot of friends trying to explain it to me a lot of times, I just legit, like, dont get poetry, so I couldn’t really look there for inspiration. But somehow with lyrics I stumbled onto a thing that works for me. Anyway thanks for reading my stoned navel-gazing lol. Im kind of obsessed with this thread, I really appreciate everyone here writing this stuff up 
Sometimes it also helps to try to find “the little thing inside the big thing.”
If you have a big, hard to wrestle subject you want to write about, and you have no idea where to start, it can really help if you can focus on a very small detail of it.
See if you can find a tiny aspect (an irony, an object, a gesture or phrase) that’s unique to the situation, and work outward from there. Or see if you can paint a picture of the whole thing from just that limited perspective (then you can widen the perspective through the song, or use the chorus to add a different one).
Since others are brave enough to share their lyrics, I’ll share some. I’ve been struggling to write songs about my health crisis, because everything would just sound so generic, and not in the good way. I forget who said it above, but there aren’t that many interesting ways left to say “I’m in pain” or “I’m in love,” but there are all sorts of little lived aspects that are so specific (and the kind of thing an El El Em would never know about because it doesn’t live in the world).
So I gave up trying to write about The Whole Damn Thing and just focused on one moment, and how it all felt from that moment. If I could just sit in that one island of time and look backwards and forwards from there, could I make it all make sense to someone else?
The stress inside my jaw, / can it be helped at all?
The cold touch of the floor / will soothe you when you’re sore.
The sky won’t be dark long / (another near-dawn song).
The crack under the door. / (The crack under the door!)
More common than you’d thought? / A dozen thousand souls all caught.
Less common than you’d thought! / Seventeen thousand souls all caught.
The cold, clean tiled floor / will soothe you when you’re sore
The crack under the door / casts light across the floor
The stress inside my jaw / spreads cracks across the floor.
The flesh inside my jaw / it won’t heal at all.
But it won’t be dark long
No it won’t be dark long.
The sky won’t be dark long.
Now it won’t be that long.
This is awesome and so insightful, that really is a great way in.
Thanks! It’s fitting that Kegs was the first to like that because it was recorded entirely with an acoustic guitar and an SP404. It’s like he knew.
Sure makes it hard to mix after the fact though. I have to learn how to do that stem separating thing.
Ha! @KingDuppy as I’m typing this! I’d love to hear this at some point. Words are awesome, but can get lost without the voice narrating the story.!
I love writing songs with lyrics! I dig my DN and other gear but all I need is my acoustic, notepad and a pencil!
It only works though if you have something to say. Everything else sounds forced. I took years off of writing due to kids, houses and work. Now I’m stabilizing a bit and nestling back in!
For me, I like something recording so I can go back to an idea. You lose them so fast! I used to have a cassette recorder back in the day and it was awesome! Now I have my 404 or Zoom L-8 listening!
Great stuff! Also appreciated the rest of your post. I‘ve never written for a „genre“ band like you‘re describing for witchcraft doom. I’ve written a lot about how I felt hardcore and metal felt like they’re too restrictive for me at some point, but I‘ve never considered how these clearly defined boundaries can help people feel cozy and accepted. Sounds great to have a set of themes and canon to pull from when writing lyrics, then playing with that!
Metal genres, and by that I mean non-death/trash/black/insta-kill/devil/etc, generally feature pretty good and diverse lyrics. At least, that’s the case when you take a look at songs written by bands such as Iron Maiden, Queensrÿche, Vanden Plas, Stratovarius, Symphony X, Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree, Shadow Gallery, Crematory and Dream Theater.
Aw thanks!
Also can i take a minute to appreciate this? Man I listened to that album a million times in high school, and ive always loved Clive Barker, and it makes so much sense that Trent was reading Clive, but I had no idea that this happened. And it’s one of Barker’s best stories! I’m still kinda gobsmacked, excellent find!
I know, right?
IIRC there’s a shout out to Clive Barker “for inspiration” in the album liner notes, but I always thought that meant more like general sound design inspiration.
Then I was rereading this story in a weird fiction collection just a few months ago and all I could think was “how did I miss this?”