Think of clever ways to create the rhymes to make your lyrics more effective. Chords and lyrics have to be put together in some shape or form. Clearly being able to map an intro, chorus, verses, and possibly a bridge or melodic leap outline the overall shape of your song.
Catchy melodies sometimes bare being repeated multiple times over, so maybe your song structure would go something like BABACA. Songwriting is a learned skill that takes a lot of practice, so it is a good idea to start with simple chord progressions and melodies, and simple formats with your lyrics. Simple can also be great! Not only does a good song need to have great chords, melodies, and lyrics, but also should create some sort of reaction, or evoke a specific emotion.
A lot of songwriters craft their music from specific events or experiences that they have had, making it very relatable to others. Think about a certain vibe that you want to give your song. Maybe you really like the way that hip hop punches with its lyrics or a pop song that has a bubbly, feel-good type vibe. Play on these emotions and feelings, and use your song to express them so that people will recognize and react to them in a positive way.
This can be explored when you are figuring out your chord progressions and lyrics. You want to have something solid, whether its a saying in the lyrics or a certain musical interlude that can embed itself in your brain. Then you know that your audience will continue to hum and have in their heads the next day. If you want to learn how to write good music, or what truly makes a good song, listen to your own playlists. Grab your favorite song and listen to it on repeat.
Get on your Spotify and identify what artists, vocalists, or instrumentalists that you idolize. Think about their rhyme schemes. Think about the images they use. Think about why the person who wrote each lyric made the specific choices they made.
And the only way you do that is by doing lots of work on your own. And, well, I can help you know stuff. But truly understanding stuff? You have to apply these ideas to the songs you love to see how they work in practice. The art of making art is looking at lots of different options. Then saying no to the bad ones. Then no to the OK ones. Then no to the good ones. Then YES to the amazing ones.
This is especially true in lyric writing because words are so specific. No one wants your lyric to sound like you swallowed a thesaurus. They resonate in different ways. Just words and phrases if you like. Full sentences without rhyme or structure if you like. But with music underneath it — and a story behind it — it sounds really profound.
Music makes words richer. So if anything, you can afford to underwrite a lyric. Something that looks average on a page or screen usually sounds great when sung. Simplify your lyrics. Find the courage to say things simply, directly and plainly.
You probably know this already, but a song is sung by someone. All these things exist first and foremost on the page, maybe a screen. Or, try starting a song with the chorus. Simplicity is hard to master, but worth pursuing. The longer a lyric becomes, the greater the potential for confusion.
Learn more about studying songwriting online with Berklee. Articles Podcast Subscribe Video. Features , Songwriting. Close this module. But the deeper relation between words and music - the way they land in the listener's ear, and then her soul - is more complicated than it seems. Music alone is puzzling enough - how it is that the mind makes sound into music and music into meaning is one of the big unanswered questions.
No matter how hard we craft them for lucidity and shape and dramatic clarity - and it's the good faith of the librettist's art form to do so as elegantly as he can - music and words together exist in the end in an older realm of magic and enchantment, a place where the nursery rhyme and the church hymn and the pop single all meet. They work as spells do - that is, either entirely, or not at all. We sing and the magic door swings open, or it doesn't, and there's no explaining it. Three boys from Liverpool sing "She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah " and the world turns off its axis.
Had they sung, as Paul McCartney's father wanted, "yes, yes, yes", the old path would not have changed. The libretto writer, I should add at once, is merely the junior partner in the enterprise - or not even a partner, more like the man who sweeps out the candy wrappers from the theatre floor after the patrons leave.
Who now remembers the name of the man who set the text for Handel's Messiah? Well, it was Charles Jennens. The only libretto writer whose name anyone remembers - other than the great lyricists of the American musical theatre, the sacred law firm of Mercer, Loesser and Hart - is Lorenzo da Ponte, who is my hero. He was Jewish and a priest, and a Venetian and a New Yorker. It's a sympathetic package, and he wrote for - more than "with" really - wrote for Mozart, the three operas that may well be the height of all artistic creation: The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte and Don Giovanni.
If the aliens arrived on earth from Neptune and asked me "what should we go out to see first that you humans have made? Everybody in the galaxy has seen North By Northwest. I will say to all the amateur songwriters out there - not to mention Sunday opera librettists - that the real challenge in writing words for music turns out to lie in the tiny space, the sweet spot, between convention and contrivance.
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