Debates have raged through the ages over what matters more in a song: the words or the music? It even inspired a Hugh Grant movie! Music and Lyrics (2007) With some songs we tend to remember the tune but may struggle to remember the words, while in other cases the lyrics can stand alone as great works of poetry, regardless of the melody they are set to.
One thing is for sure: the combined effect of words and music together is unlike anything else in the world of art, and I would argue has the power to move us as humans more than any other artform.
Music itself operates in the world of emotion, something we’ll explore more in Chapter 17: Expression. Words can certainly also elicit emotions, but also bring intellectual ideas into play. That can be story-telling, it can be reasoning and argument, it can be jokes, or sharing life lessons learned.
It’s easy to see how the combination of evoking emotions and ideas has such power, when so much of our inner experience as humans boils down to thoughts and emotions. We’ll explore the musical side in the following sections, and of course there is (or generally should be) great interplay between the music and words, but for now let’s set our focus on the words alone, which in the context of a song we call lyrics.
There’s a great deal we can learn here from poetry—about word choice, rhyme schemes, Form, story-telling, and more. At the same time, we don’t want to fall into the trap which many aspiring writers do, of writing endless words like a poet, and then eventually getting around to “setting them to music” (or not). As a musician interested in developing their musicality, you will find it far easier and more rewarding to explore the two together.
| Andrew Says… Compared with our musical development, we are all stunning virtuosos with language, having practiced it from soon after birth. As we’ll explore in Chapter 17: Expression, language shares so many qualities with music—including rhythm, timbre, pitch, emotion, improvisation, and more. When we take on combining lyrics with melody, we are leveraging this virtuosity to come up with musical ideas that may go way beyond our current capacity to conceive in musical terms. |
How to Write Lyrics
We all write words every day, even if it’s just a text message or email to a friend. So why does “writing lyrics” feel so intimidating to most musicians and aspiring songwriters?
I would suggest it’s two things:
- There is a difference between writing prose and writing poetry, and lyrics are typically much more like poetry. Prose is written in a simple, straight-forward manner, primarily for the sake of clearly communicating ideas. Poetry typically employs rhyme, rhythm, line breaks and paragraph breaks, as well as much more imaginative, evocative, richly descriptive wording. And if producing an emotional response isn’t the primary purpose, it’s at least right up there alongside communicating ideas.
- Lyrics are a creative artform, more akin to writing fiction than writing an email, and we place a much greater importance on how elegant, refined, and beautiful the end product is, compared to day-to-day writing. This creates a perceived pressure to make it “good enough”—which most of us don’t experience when dashing off a quick message to a friend!
If we want writing lyrics to feel as easy and natural as the more mundane writing abilities we all take for granted, we need to address these two points: writing more poetically, and overcoming perfectionism.
Let’s tackle perfectionism first, since it can otherwise be like trying to drive with one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes.
Overcoming Perfectionism
If writing lyrics feels big, scary or hard to you, or if you’ve been too nervous to even try, or if you’ve written some lyrics before and felt disappointed and discouraged, the chances are high that some form of perfectionism is holding you back. That doesn’t mean that you’re consciously thinking “this needs to be perfect or it’s not worth trying”—but rather that subconsciously your thoughts and emotions are sending you that signal.
We’ve already discussed putting your Inner Critic “on hold”, and that’s a big part of avoiding perfectionism and letting you move forwards more smoothly with creative activities.
But there’s another huge mindset shift which can liberate you, which is to remove all expectations about how the thing you’re creating will turn out.
There’s a traditional name for this idea among writers, which for the sake of propriety I’ll paraphrase! They call it writing “a rubbish first draft”.
I can’t tell you the number of creative projects I’ve procrastinated on, until I finally faced up to the fact that it was perfectionism holding me back, making me feel intimidated and overwhelmed about even starting. To then take a step forwards with a mindset of “it’s gonna be rubbish to begin with, and I probably won’t even finish a draft, but let’s bash something out” is an astonishingly reliable way to get into momentum. Often you find that what you come up with is better than you thought it would be, you get further than you expected to, and (most importantly) you now have something to work with, which is always easier than sitting down with a blank sheet.
Some related ideas which may resonate with you and help eliminate perfectionism are:
- “Done is better than perfect.”
- “You have to go through a lot of bad ideas to get to the good ones.”
- “Nobody’s going to see this but me, and I know I’m just practicing right now.”
- “All the greatest songwriters have stacks of notebooks filled with lyrics that never made it into songs, but led to the ones which did.”
| Zac Says… I’ve had Next Level clients have a lot of fun and unlock more progress by writing a bad, or dumb, song on purpose. I like to even have dumb song competitions. Writing bad songs on purpose always makes people laugh, and it’s surprising how often something exciting and usable comes out of it. For example, the lyrics may have been really stupid but actually the melody was really cool. |
There’s also one specific technique which has proven invaluable to songwriters through the ages, as well as being my own #1 go-to tool for being productively creative.
Some people call it “stream of consciousness” writing. I learned it as “free-writing”, I learned this from the book Accidental Genius by Mark Levy, which I would highly recommend. which has a slightly more defined process, so that’s what we’ll call it here.
It’s incredibly simple. It does take some practice. But if you’ve never tried it before, you’ll be amazed by how effective it is for unleashing creative ideas, right from the outset. I’ve had many people tell me after I shared it with them that it was life-changing—either for curing their “writer’s block”, or actually for their emotional well-being, when applied to more therapeutic or introspective purposes.
EXERCISE: Free-Writing
|
You’ll quickly discover three things!
Firstly, that you end up typing a lot of babble and gibberish along the way. With the “why do I have resistance to writing songs?” example prompt above, it might look something like:
“Okay, so why am I resisting writing lyrics well Iknow that it’s a bit big and scary and I want my songs to be really good but what else what else well I think when I listen to songs and love the lyrics I wonder how did they ever do that like Bob Dylanor Joni Mitchel it’s like how couldI ever be so creative but I know that’s a limiting belief and maybe if I could overcome that then it would help but I don’t’ really know how and what else what is it what could I do about that well I could…”
No doubt you can see why some describe this as “stream of consciousness” writing!
The second thing you’ll notice is that by not allowing any pauses, your Inner Critic doesn’t have a chance to butt in. This is one thing which gives free-writing its power: it’s a highly effective way to prevent yourself from wanting to “edit” or judge what you’re writing, and so silence that Inner Critic.
The third thing is that, depending on how long you’ve set the timer for, you may quickly run out of things to write. Don’t stop! This is the other part of the power of free-writing: it forces you to go beyond the obvious, and uncover ideas and thoughts from your subconscious mind or creative instinct, which you’d never have reached if you stopped too soon.
This can be uncomfortable at first, so let me just share that I’ve had countless free-writing sessions where multiple minutes of gibberish and tangents had to pass before I tapped into something unexpected. Then suddenly a whole new world of ideas and possibilities opened up. So be strict with yourself about writing until that timer goes off!
Only after the timer goes off are you allowed to read back over what you wrote. The wonderful thing is that because there’s likely a lot of gibberish and filler in there, you can’t possibly be too judgemental about what you wrote! But you can look for the (unpolished) diamonds. What emerged that’s worth coming back to, exploring more, or refining further?
Try this now, using anything you’ve felt stuck on. And then I would encourage you to give it a try with any of the writing exercises below.