Personally, I find writing songs to be incredibly difficult. So difficult that I generally avoid doing so at all costs, but I recently picked it up again in hopes to release an EP by the end of the year. In doing so, I came to a sort of revelation about writing songs( lyrics in particular) that has helped me tremendously. Maybe all this information would be obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me, so I thought I’d share it, starting with the challenges I previously faced when trying to write songs.
The first challenge was choosing whether to write actual music or lyrics first. Although I personally find it a bit easier to come up with something that sounds half decent when I start by messing around with some chords and trying to hum a melody, I find it difficult to organize my thoughts when doing this. Occasionally I will record myself doing this with Garageband just to create something tangible, however, I struggle to write lyrics that can fit the melodies I come up with. Writing words isn’t all that difficult, but it gets to be hard when given a set beat and syllable count that you have to fit very specific thoughts into.
So normally I’d start with lyrics.
I have a much easier time doing so, as humming a melody (most likely a sub-par sounding one) to some words isn’t incredibly difficult. However, this isn’t to say that writing lyrics first worked for me. The problem I would face with the lyrics-first approach was that I’d very quickly realize I didn’t know where I’d want the song to go. I’d have a thought in my head that I’d fully express in all of 4 lines, and then I wouldn’t know what to do with the chorus, subsequent verse, next chorus, etc. Another big problem that I’d face with writing lyrics was that no matter how hard I try, most things I’d write just don’t feel like a song. Normally, when I’m writing literally anything else (Papers, Journals, Long text messages) I don’t have any problem with the way my writing sounds. But when I’d write lyrics, everything just sounds all wrong.
This leads me into my first set of tips. There are two main reasons I have found that my lyrics didn’t/ don’t sound quite right, and realizing these two things have allowed me to do a third thing that was helped my writing quite a bit. Firstly, you can’t write lyrics the same way you write those other things I listed. Lyrics aren’t necessarily about being 100% efficient with your language or being concise. In fact, I would say you shouldn’t be concise. For me, being concise caused me to write an entire idea in 4 lines. Actual songs generally take a story or an idea and expand it. This isn’t to say it needs to be redundant, but rather that all of the emotions and thoughts and senses associated with this story/ idea need to be fully described; this is something you tend to not really do in analytical essays or texts.
Secondly, lyrics don’t really sound or feel like an actual song because they aren’t. At least not yet. Even once I started fleshing out my thoughts into better, fuller songs, I didn’t feel like the lyrics were really adding up to a good song because they literally were not. Lyrics without an associated melody don’t sound like anything special. To prove this, I challenge you to read some lyrics online. First, read a song you are familiar with the melody of. These lyrics will probably seem pretty good because, whether or not you’re consciously thinking about it, you’re associating a melody with them. Now read lyrics to a song you’ve never heard. Most likely (not all the time) they’ll probably just sound like a bad poem.
Both of these discoveries have helped me to develop a skill that I would consider invaluable to writing lyrics and songs. Don’t be afraid to put things down on paper (or garageband) that sound like complete shit. Most songs are. But that doesn’t mean you should write one that is. My point is that when you’re writing lyrics, the words might not sound fantastic. And maybe the first melody you try to put the words to won’t do them justice. But it’s your song and you can change it freely, so continue to tweak the phrasing and the melodies until you have something that’s starting to sound decent. Just don’t feel stupid for writing something down that isn’t that good. Song and lyric writing, like anything, take practice, and the more you do it, the better you’ll become. I wish I had realized this a lot sooner.
ccv5033 says
I would love to have an ounce of your talent for music or songwriting, but I don’t, so I’ll have to live that dream vicariously through your blog. 🙂 This was a really interesting explanation and analysis of the songwriting process. I know exactly what it feels like to be working really hard at something you love and have a breakthrough that makes everything feel like it is coming together, so congrats! That is fantastic.
A thought I had while reading — Do you have a songwriter you really look up to? Who is it? Why do they inspire you?
djc5627 says
I always imagined it was really hard writing music/lyrics. This explains the difficulty in a really interesting way. I never thought about how people had to decide between doing the lyrics or the music first. It sounds really challenging but you gave some good workarounds for getting through it.