How To Write Song Lyrics

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about writing song lyrics. So let's say you've got the song written now, you've got all the music down and all you have to do is throw in the lyrics. Well that can be the hardest part and the reason is that we read the lyrics and we are very critical about them. I'm sure you heard amateurs at open mic. play and some of the lyrics are so embarrassing for everybody in the audience and on stage and you know that there's all kinds of bad lyrics out there. But writing lyrics is actually quiet difficult. One thing you might want to consider doing first of all is not over thinking the lyrics in the beginning, because once you have stuff down on paper then you can cut it apart. If you wait and wait to come up with ideas, then you may never even start writing. So, I have these notebooks that I just fill up with lyric ideas most of what I toss out, but it gets me writing. Once you start writing it's that much easier to keep on going and you can start editing. Another thing that's very helpful is reading. You can read what other people done with words, seeing how people play with words. Another thing you might want to do is give yourself certain limitations with lyrics. Everybody writes love songs and almost everybody writes very bad love songs. One of the great things about punk rock was that it put a taboo on writing love songs. If you stop writing the love music you'll discover that there's a whole world of other things you can write about and it's very liberating and it encourages you to be creative. I really recommend that if you want to grow as a lyric writer give yourself limitations, think about the stuff you always write about and say okay I'm not going to write about these things anymore. If you write depressing songs try not doing it for a little bit. If you're going to be writing love songs try not doing that for a little bit. Write about anything else, write about the news, write about the weather, write about a vacation you went on, anything like that. What you're going to find is anyway you're going to crawl back to your original ideas. You're going to write a love song that isn't a love song, but it is a love song which is fine as long as the lyrics are more interesting. "