Whether you’re a songwriter who then sells your lyrics onto musicians or a musician looking to put words to your music, writing song lyrics is an important process.

Whatever your reason for writing a song, you’re likely to find yourself trying to capture a vast range of emotions and communicate a number of messages.

Remember This

A song lyric doesn’t always have to tell a story. Many a great song has been a seemingly random collection of words just put together, albeit in a way that allows a song to be sung with rhythm and melody.

You can’t just sit down and write a song, either. Inspiration will come to you at the most unusual of times, be that on a train journey or while you’re awake in the middle of the night. Ensure you’re always ready to record your thoughts, whatever the time of day, whatever you’re doing.

Don’t Have Just One Go

When you have written a lyric, you can go back, review it, change it, throw it away, add to it, or do whatever you want. Many people wonder how it takes established musicians months to write the lyrics to a new album. The answer is because not everyone can just sit down and switch on a torrent of inspiration or get it right first time. In fact, there are few who can.

Apply a Structure

You don’t need to worry too much about rhyming patterns if you don’t want to, but you should have some sort of structure to your song, particularly in terms of verse length. Verses are usually two, four, or eight lines long, although the last line or two lines in longer verses might move away from the rest of the verse as an introduction to the bridge or chorus sections.

If you can get the structure of your song thought out before you start writing, then you’ll find it easier to clarify your thoughts and organize your lyrics effectively.

Stick to One Topic

If you’re writing about love, then write about love and only love. Don’t start bringing in other topics as it will be difficult to capture the mood of your writing and you’ll struggle to bring everything together. If you find yourself going off on a tangent, then use it as the inspiration for another song.

Read Back and Be Honest

Once you’ve completed a draft of a song, read it through in your head and be honest about whether it works. If you’re a musician, begin to think about how it is going to sound when put to music, and perhaps even start coming up with some compositions. The only time you’ll have a problem is if you’re playing an acoustic guitar, for example, but have written aggressive lyrics meant for another genre, although you should be able to adapt your style to fit.

If it doesn’t work, you can always sell them to a band that can use them!

Image Source: tonyhall