ou Can Write Better Lyrics by 

Mark Winkler

I’ve been writing songs for over 30 years. I’ve had 150 of them cut by famous singers
like Liza Minnelli and Dianne Reeves, and written songs for a hit off Broadway musical
and have had tunes on the soul, pop, county, dance and jazz charts. But when I started
teaching songwriting about seven years ago, I was still surprised to find out that there
were simple things my students weren’t doing that could have made their songs a whole
lot better.

1. Come Up with a Great Title

Dianne Warren, who has written more hit songs than anybody writing today, could have
replaced the title to her No. 1 song by Toni Braxton, Un-Break My Heart, with the title
Please Mend My Heart. It means the same thing. But, it wouldn’t have had one-tenth of
the commercial impact. Un-Break My Heart is unique and catchy; you’ve never quite
heard that thought expressed that way. But I can’t tell you how many students come to
me with the most boring, pedestrian titles on their songs. A great title is more than half
the battle; it tells you what to write, it attracts the listener and gets them hooked. Don’t
even write word one without a great title!

2. Be Specific

New lyricists inevitably tend to be vague and non-descriptive with their words.The best
way I know how to illustrate “being specific” is through a song written by one of the
greatest lyricists of all time, Johnny Mercer. In the movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Audrey
Hepburn, playing a country girl who’s come to the big, bad city, is having a moment of
doubt on a Manhattan fire escape, when she sings these lyrics from the Academy
Award winning song Moon River: “We’re after the same rainbow’s end Waiting ’round
the bend My _____ friend, Moon River and me.”

Now, she didn’t sing “good old country” friend or “gee you’re such a” friend, although
both fit the line and are correct descriptions of her friend. No, Johnny Mercer had her
sing “Huckleberry” friend. He couldn’t have been more specific. Huckleberries grow by
the river, a country girl would know that, and it also has literary echoes of Huckleberry
Finn, who was a country boy who ran away from home. So here we have one word that
lifts the whole song up to another level.

3. It’s the Music, Stupid

I’ve learned no matter how good the lyric is, if the music is bad the lyric can’t save it. So
you need to find yourself a great melody writer. But here’s the catchРРyou won’t find
one unless you’re a wonderful lyric writer. And most professional melody writers know a
good lyricist faster than you can say “prosody!” Al Kasha, my first lyric writing teacher
and winner of two Academy Awards, said: “A great melody can take you into the Top
10, but a great lyric coupled with a great melody will allow you to stay there.”
4. Writing is Re-Writing

Ask any professional songwriter what sep-arates him from an amateur and he’ll say it’s
his ability to rewrite. But so many of my students come in with their “precious” first drafts
thinking every word is gold. They think this because it came to them during a moment of
“inspiration.” I’m all for inspiration, but “perspiration” is much better. Keep coming back
to the lyric until it’s as close to perfect as you can make it. Remember, it’s not the
quantity of songs you write, but the quality.

5. What You Say Counts

Anyone can learn the techniques it takes to write a song. But not everyone has
something truly unique to say. When I started out in songwriting, for some reason the
teacher really liked my songs. Looking back on those days, I realize that it must have
been because of my “content,” because back then my songs didn’t have much
technique. While other people were bringing in their latest, perfectly rhymed, yet
anonymous odes to love and dreams and sunshine, I was bringing in my roughly written
songs about The Great Gatsby and moonlight cruises and my mother who was a singer
with a big band. Unconsciously, I was doing something right. I was writing about what I
knew and things nobody else had written about.

6. Step Away from Your Piano or Guitar

Burt Bacharach, who writes some of the most complex and sophisticated melodies of all
time, says that when he’s writing a new melody he purposely writes it away from his
piano. His thought is that if the melody stands up being sung a cappella, the chords and
arrangement will only make it sound that much better. Too many writers get
mesmerized by their chord selection and think they can fix anything with fancy
arrangement ideas.

7. A Song is Not a Poem

One of the easiest ways I can tell if a lyricist is an amateur is if the person asks me to
read their poetry. Lyrics are not poems. Though they share many things in
commonРРcadence (the rhythm of the line), rhyme, etc.РРthere are in fact many
differences. Songs are meant to be sung, so avoid hard-to-pronounce words and
incompatible consonants. Songs are meant to be understood quickly; popular songs
generally use only two distinct formsРРverse/chorus and aaba.

8. Your Lyrics Must Sing

This would seem to be a no-brainer. But the longer I teach songwriting the more I
realize that the way the lyricist sets the words to the melody is as important as the
content of the song. Your lyric must strive to be conversational. If you hit a high note, it
should be on an open vowel. And if your melody goes down, don’t ever say the phrase
“pick myself up.”
9. Need I Repeat—Repetition Works

One of the big differences in Top 40 pop and hip-hop music today is the number of
“hooks” that are in each song. In the past, perhaps a pop song would have the title
repeat any number of times (from one to four) in the chorus and that’s it. But in today’s
era of producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin, from the time the song starts there are any
number of repetitive hooks. They range from the repetition of the title to melodic hooks
played instrumentally, to “nonsense syllables” to secondary hooks in the chorus.

10. Know Your Genre

As a songwriter, you have the luxury of writing in more than one format. Diane Warren
has had hits in pop, AC, country and dance. But, each genre has its own strict rules and
you must know them to succeed. For example, you can get away with imperfect
rhyming in pop and hip-hop, but in musical theatre and cabaret you can’t. In country you
must be very clear in what your saying, while if you’re writing songs for a rock group a la
Coldplay or Kings of Leon you can be more metaphorical and artsy.
Understanding & Writing Lyrics, Part 1
Tips & Tricks
Published in SOS December 2000
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Technique : Miscellaneous

Writing the words to songs is often thought of as a process of pure intuition,

but there's a lot more to it than that. In the first part of a new series, Sam
Inglis suggests an alternative way of going about it. This is the first article in a
five-part series. Read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Many people think songwriting is a craft that can't be taught. After

all, it is often a matter of finding expression for very personal ideas
and themes; and beyond the traditional instruction to write about
what you know, people are often reluctant to give or receive advice.
This is particularly true in the case of writing words — no-one
knows your mind better than you do, so how can anyone else be in
a position to tell you how to say what you think?

Everyone has their own experiences, beliefs and emotions, and lyric writing often is a
matter of expressing these. However, pop lyrics are often written to achieve other things
in addition to exploring their authors' feelings. And in any case, the ways in which
people express their private feelings in song lyrics are learned — through schooling,
through practice and, above all, through listening to other people's music. You can't tell
people how to write lyrics, just as it would be ridiculous to write an article called 'How To
Produce Records'; but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways in which you can learn
to do it better.

In this series, I'll be trying to explore some of the things you can do with the words to
pop songs. There'll never be complete agreement about which lyrics are good or bad,
   Opening Up  

Perhaps the most important lyrical hook in a

song, with the possible exception of the
chorus, is the first line. As well as introducing
the subject of the song, and helping to
establish the mood, it is the best opportunity
and everyone probably has different to grab the listener's attention — so make the
opinions on the matter, so I'll be most of it! A good first line can often do this in
concentrating on ways in which you can find several ways. It can make a powerful
your own voice by learning from the lyrics statement or declaration, like John Lydon's
'Anarchy In The UK': 'I am an antichrist/I am
that you like, whichever they are. I hope that
an anarchist' is one of the most memorable
the ideas I'll be setting out, many of which first lines ever, because of its obvious shock
are derived from poetry theory, will help us value. It's not subtle, but it's certainly
to understand the different ways in which effective.
lyrics can function, in order that we can
analyse the ones we like and discover what You can use a first line to say something
makes them work for us. My aim is that this surprising or unusual, which instantly tells the
will also demonstrate the often under- listener that this is going to be an individual
record. Catatonia's 'I Am The Mob', for
explored range of lyrical possibilities that is   instance, starts with the line 'I leave horses'  
open to us, and introduce some new ideas heads in people's beds' — the kind of bizarre
for those who feel they are stuck in a rut. but diverting claim that forces its way into
your consciousness.
Why Write Lyrics?
If your song takes the form of a story, the first
line should hook the listener in, so that they
It may seem like an odd thing to do, but it's want to know what happens next. Pulp's
worth asking yourself exactly why you bother 'Common People' uses its first line to
to write words for your songs at all. Different introduce the song's central character: 'She
people will come up with different answers to came from Greece, she had a thirst for
knowledge'. Hearing it for the first time makes
this question. Some write words to their
you wonder who came from Greece, and
songs because they have ideas, opinions or what that person's thirst for knowledge led
stories that they want to be heard by an her to do. Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive'
audience, or because they want to make likewise hooks the listener into its story
their audience feel particular emotions, or straight away with the classic opening 'At first
I was afraid, I was petrified'. You're
because they want their audience to identify
immediately curious about what was so
with them. Others write words because it's petrifying!
conventional for the style of music in which
they're working to have lyrics, or because the human voice is an important musical
instrument in that style and it needs to have some words to sing.

Answers to the question can thus be boiled down, roughly, to the question of whether
you start writing lyrics with some message or effect in mind, or whether you simply want
something that sounds right with your music. Weak lyrics can frequently be traced right
back to this issue. On the one hand, songwriters get carried away by the message they
want to put across, and concentrate on making their point at the expense of subtlety,
elegance, poetic quality, or fit with the melody. On the other, songwriters tend to resort
to cliché and boring, generic phrases when they have nothing to say but need to
produce words to fit a tune.

Starting To Write
So what can you do if you or your collaborator has come up with a cracking melody, but
you have absolutely no idea what the words should even be about? Or what if you have
the burning desire to write about something that's happened in your life, but no idea how
to turn events into words? There are, proverbially, many ways to skin a cat, and there
are equally many ways to approach lyric writing.
  On Draft  
The most important thing to bear When is a lyric finished? Some maintain that there is
in mind is the final result. What do something sacred about the first draft — that it's somehow
you want out of the words to your the most pure expression of what you have in your mind.
song? In fact, what do we want Others, more pragmatically, just keep writing until they've
out of the words to any pop song? got enough lyrics to fit the number of verses and choruses
One common answer in pop they think the song needs, then they stop.
   
writing is 'hooks'. We're used to
However, it can be valuable to force yourself to write more
thinking that good pop songs
than you need, and then to pick out the best bits. There is
should contain melodic and also no reason why you shouldn't revise draft lyrics. Just
instrumental hooks, and it's also a as you might come to think that a C sounds better than an
hallmark of many a classic record F in a certain place, so you might decide that your original
that they contain production- lyric is weak in places and needs to be modified.
based hooks or 'ear candy', such as the Auto-Tuned vocal in Cher's 'Believe'. It's
perhaps less common to think of lyrics as contributing to a song's 'hookiness', but a
moment's reflection reveals just how important they can be. What would Lou Reed's
'Walk On The Wild Side' be without its title phrase? Would Ian Dury's 'Hit Me With Your
Rhythm Stick' have been a hit without its bizarre but catchy chorus lyric? If Alanis
Morissette had never written the line 'Would she go down on you in a theatre,' would
she still have become a household name?

In other parts of this series, I'll be looking at what makes a lyrical phrase memorable,
but for the time being, let's stick to questions about the overall construction of a song
lyric. Whether or not you start with a firm idea of what your song will be about, it's crucial
that a finished pop song contains hooks. The earlier in the songwriting stage you can
come up with these hooks, then, the better. In fact, why not start with the hooks?

This is a particularly useful approach if you're committed to writing the lyrics to a song
but you don't have any idea what to write about. Once you have even one firm lyrical
hook in place, you can often work backwards, and come up with a subject or story to
accommodate the hook. Indeed, if you have one lyrical hook you can sometimes
dispense with the rest of the song altogether, as the writers of the Wamdue Project's
'King Of My Castle' clearly found.

As we'll see in future instalments, a lyrical hook has to work in three ways. Firstly, it has
to fit with the music, in terms of rhythm and melody, and also in terms of mood.
Secondly, it has to form a pleasing sequence of sounds when sung or spoken. And
thirdly, the meaning of the phrase has to engage the listener. So where can you find
phrases that meet these criteria?
  
Brainstorming: Alternative  
Sources Of Inspiration
I've suggested that a good way to
approach lyric writing can be to start
with a single hook, which you then
develop. Sometimes, these lyrical
In some ways, you're actually at an advantage if
hooks can come from the most
you don't have a predetermined idea as to what mundane or obvious source.
your song will be about, because you can choose Coldplay's hit 'Yellow', for example,
any phrase at all without it having to fit with a was derived from a first line that
preconceived point you want to make. You could, came about simply because the
band happened to be in the studio at
for instance, start with a well-known phrase or
night, as producer Ken Nelson
saying (Dire Straits' 'Walk Of Life', Creedence explained in October's SOS:
Clearwater Revival's 'Walking On The Water'), or a "'Yellow' was written at Rockfield
figure of speech (Katrina & The Waves' 'Walking On when we were there. The studio we
Sunshine', Everything But The Girl's 'Walking were in is called the Quadrangle
Studio — the studio is along one
Wounded'), or any sequence of words that strikes
side of an open courtyard about 50
you as potentially interesting (Was Not Was' 'Walk yards square, and we went out one
The Dinosaur', The Bangles' 'Walk Like An night, and because there were so
Egyptian') and which fit the melody you have in few lights, the stars were just
mind. amazing. And Guy just came up with
the line 'Look at the stars'." (It's
interesting to speculate how the
You can often find interesting phrases coming up in song might have turned out if
conversation, in television and radio programmes, something else had caught his eye
books, films, newspapers, adverts — anywhere at that point!)
there is written or spoken language. If you choose a
phrase that's in common use, you have the This isn't the most original line in the
advantage that your lyric will sound familiar, though history of pop, and you'll often find
that you need to look beyond the
some phrases have been so over-used in pop
obvious if you want to come up with
music that they have lost their impact and a fresh and interesting lyrical hook.
freshness, becoming clichés (a good number of So how can you generate these
these can be found in Starship's '80s hit 'Nothing's lyrical ideas? Well, you could try the
Gonna Stop Us Now'...). Alternatively, you can go sort of brainstorming exercises that
are beloved of creative-writing
the other way and choose something so off-the-wall
courses...
as to stick out by virtue of its sheer weirdness.
One approach is to rely on random
If you are writing 'to a message', on the other hand, or 'aleatoric' methods to generate a
the ideal hook would be one that summarises or whole collection of phrases, then
expresses that message in a neat way. However, it search through for one that inspires.
The advantage of this method is that
also needs to have all the qualities of a good hook:
it can lead you in totally unexpected
a bald statement of your point won't necessarily be directions; the disadvantage is that
sufficiently subtle or poetic and, conversely, even if you may have to produce hundreds
your message really is summed up by the phrase of randomly generated phrases
'Whoah yeah baby let's go crazy', it will still be a before you find one that is usable.
There are lots of ways of coming up
cliché. The key is to find something that works like
with ideas at random. You can try,
any other lyrical hook, but which also captures the for instance, chopping up
point of your song. The phrase 'Take a walk on the newspapers or other documents and
wild side', for instance, is an apt summing up of Lou pulling the pieces out of a hat,
Reed's experience of life inside Andy Warhol's recording snippets from the radio or
TV and chopping them up at random
Factory, and is also a striking and memorable   in an audio editor, using one of those  
phrase in its own right. sets of fridge magnets that are
supposed to create 'fridge poetry', or
putting any old word into an Internet
search engine and looking at the
results. If you're collaborating with
other people, you could try playing
word-association games (writing
down the results), or games such as
Chinese Whispers or Consequences
A good lyric, then, needs to have as many hooks as possible — certainly in the chorus,
and preferably at other prominent points such as the opening line (see Opening Up box
on page 145). I've suggested that it's a good idea to come up with some of these as
early as possible in the process of songwriting, and perhaps even to use them as the
springboard from which the rest of that process starts. So how should you develop your
song from here?

If all you now have is a hook line or two, but still no idea of exactly what your song will
be about, there are several ways of generating ideas. You can brainstorm: write down
your hook lines in the centre of a sheet of blank paper and scribble down around them
anything that those phrases, or their constituent words, call to mind (see the box on
page 148). Another good tactic is to think about possible situations in which these hook
lines might appropriately be used, and people who might use them. Suppose, for
instance, your hook line was 'And then there were none'. This phrase, for instance,
might be used by a tearful mother faced with the last of her children leaving home; it
might be used by someone talking about the moment when the dodo became extinct; it
might be used by a soldier to describe the loss of his comrades in battle; or it might
even be used by someone complaining about the loss of local village pubs. You could
explore any of these as a lyrical avenue, and end up with songs that differed greatly in
subject matter (and probably in quality...).

The Broad Picture

So, supposing you have some hook lines and a rough idea of what your song will be
about, what else needs to be decided at this stage? There are properties which usually
belong to song lyrics as a whole, rather than just to specific lines, and many of these are
best fixed at the start of the songwriting process. One such feature is that the use of
tense should be consistent across a song. In most cases, this simply means that all the
lines in the song are in the same tense, rather than confusingly jumping between, say,
past and present from line to line. This means that you need to decide at the start which
tense your lyrics are going to be written in.

However, consistency in the use of tense doesn't necessarily mean sticking to one
tense throughout a song. A fairly common device, for instance, is to write the bulk of the
song in the past tense and the last verse or chorus in the present. This can be used to
show the effects of past events on your current feelings. You might do similar jumps
between verses and choruses, or even within a verse, or between past or present and
future tenses.

The 'voice' of the song also needs to be consistent. Does the lyric represent a person
describing their own feelings, or talking to another person, or offering a neutral
description of events? In other words, is the song in the first person ('I went to the
shops'), second person ('You went to the shops') or the third person ('He/she/it went to
the shops')? Again, consistency doesn't have to mean that the voice of the song can't
change, as we'll see; but it does mean that there has to be a good reason for it. In
particular, it sounds very obvious and bad if different lines end up being in different
tenses or voices simply because they have a different number of syllables which
happen to fit the melody better that way.

If you do take a phrase as your starting point, you may be committing yourself to
working in a particular tense or voice; for instance, if you begin with the phrase 'I
couldn't care less', you are likely to end up with a song that's in the first person and the
present tense. This is not inevitable, though, and you could develop the same phrase in
other ways: for instance, you might use it in the context of 'And then she said 'I couldn't
care less',' which would put your song in the past tense and the third person.

Looking Ahead

In this first part of the series, I've dealt mainly with the process of songwriting. I've
argued that, in pop music, one of the most basic functions of a good lyric is to provide
hooks, in just the same way as melodies and riffs do. I've also outlined a way in which
you can create the words to a song by starting with the hooks, and in future instalments
I'll be considering what makes some lyrical phrases 'hooky' and others not. Next month,
however, I'll be looking in more detail at some of the general features of a verse or song
lyric. Consistency of tense and voice, which I touched on above, are basic requirements
for grammatical correctness and for your lyrics to make sense, and therefore essential.
However, there are other crucial choices that can be made about the general form and
purpose of your song lyrics, and next month's instalment will be devoted to
understanding and making these choices.