What makes a song’s lyrics good? Though “good” is very subjective, a number of components within songwriting can undeniably make or break a song. No matter your age or musical preferences, knowing when a song’s lyrics are striking and worth the listen is rather intuitive – you either find yourself listening intently, or nodding along passively with the beat.
Budding songwriters often find themselves in the familiar loop of writing about recurring subjects, overusing the same words, or simply having a hard time getting an idea across. You may find tons of information online about what the standards are when it comes to song structure, rhyme scheme and the like, but there is no real rulebook for writing a hit song. Though you can follow certain formulas, at the end of the day it’s a creative writing exercise, so keep the following tips in mind and get creative with your lyric writing!
Key Takeaways
- Writing song lyrics is like writing poetry, so it may help to write without music first
- If you start with music first, embrace the messiness of freestyling nonsense over a beat as a starting point
- Figure out your “what” and your “who” – what are your talking about and who are you addressing?
- Use the five senses to trigger the listeners’ imagination and make for better imagery
- In addition to perfect rhymes, use near-rhymes and internal rhymes to switch things up and practice writing better lyrics
- Do not over complicate things or over-describe to avoid losing you audience’s attention
- Avoid clichés when you can and embrace your own perspective
- Study your genre for common themes, levels of description, and song structure
- The more you write songs, the easier it will be to write lyrics
—
Are you looking to get your music heard? 👇
—
1. Make it Messy
A common misconception in songwriting is that all writers are able to spew a perfect succession of words onto their page at the drop of a hat, and it’s totally unrealistic. In fact, most seasoned songwriters will happily explain that writing songs involves carving out the right message from a heap of emotions and finding the words to describe it accurately, which takes a lot of time and editing.
I’m sure you’ve heard stories of how some of Pop’s biggest hits were written in mere minutes, and that’s possible, too. Some are able to synthesise verses and choruses that make sense with ease and rapidity, but that is only indicative of how much practice they put in prior, not that the job itself is an easy one. Everyone starts somewhere in their writing process, and it starts messy.
How to Begin the Process of Writing Lyrics
Step 1:
- Find a beat/instrumental/chord progression you like or pick up an instrument and use it as the foundation for your song. It can be from online, something you made, or a few strums of your guitar – as long as it gives you a base, it doesn’t matter.
Step 2:
- Listen through it once to give yourself an outline of the rhythm and key signature so you know where to sing and what general flow might work. If you’re playing an instrument, pick a chord or two as a starting point.
Step 3:
- Press record on voice memos and let yourself go – start singing, humming, or rapping whatever comes to mind over the song. The point of this is to see where you naturally flow, and what sounds feel good in what spots.
- Whatever comes out will likely be a spotty melody, a word here and there, or total gibberish – that’s perfect! You will intuitively fill in areas of the song with what feels like it should be there. Let the song play all the way through and do not stop recording just because you didn’t like something.
Step 4:
- Do you think there were any sections in there that you might have liked or that felt right? If so, listen back. If not, do it again and challenge yourself come up with something completely different. The more takes you have, the more you’ll have to work with later, which can be both a help and a hinderance (more choices, but more to sort through).
Once you have a take or two you’re happy with, you’ll likely have a couple melody ideas along with a few lines of text here and there, whether they’re real words or not. Gibberish is your best friend! This is what you’ll be using to start writing the rest of the song. Since we’re focusing on lyrics, your next step is to take your nonsense sounds/words and turn them into something coherent. This is how most songs are born.
The more you do this, the better you will get at being able to pull an idea seemingly out of nowhere and running with it. Think about rappers’ freestyles – this is how they got to that level of skill, too!
Trust Your Gut
You’ll find that with gibberish takes, you’ll often throw out words that already hint at a particular theme or story. Maybe you said one line that could be the thesis of the whole song, or a perfect pre-chorus attention-grabber. Try to make sense of what your subconscious mind was telling you, and build your verse around it. Whether or not it ends up being your final theme, it’s a great place to start.
Use your nonsense words as a guide for sounds as well – maybe you said a string of words that made no sense, but they sounded good. Try to find real words that have the same vowel sounds or number of syllables so they sound the same, but actually carry meaning.
2. What’s the Story?
Find your “what” and your “who” to frame your lyrics. Remember that writing songs is akin to writing poetry. It should make sense when read without music – the music shouldn’t always be the glue.
The “What”
There are many forms a song can take, so figure out what story you are trying to tell. Is your song about a feeling? A situation? A place? A person? An story/event?
Determining your subject matter will help you in guiding your choice of descriptive words and structuring the outline of your song.
The “Who”
When you write song lyrics, you must also figure out who you are addressing. Are you singing to someone in particular? Or a general audience? Is it in the first person? Maybe you’re talking about other people, so it’s in the 3rd person.
When you know who is speaking and who is being addressed, you will be more consistent in the storytelling of your song.
Examples:
- About a feeling: “20 Something” – SZA (the feeling of being in one’s 20s and feeling alone)
- About a situation: “Deja Vu” – Olivia Rodrigo (an ex doing things they used to do together but with his new girlfriend)
- Telling a story: “Wet Dreamz” – J. Cole (first intimate moment)
- About a place: “Hometown Glory” – Adele
- About oneself: “Prisoner” – Etta James
- Sung to a person: “Angelina” – Lizzy McAlpine
- In the 3rd person: “Sk8er Boi” – Avril Lavigne
Read the lyrics of different songs without listening to the music and notice how each song form demands a different type of narration and choice of words. Then try applying what you’ve learned to your own song lyrics.
3. Use Your Senses
Bring your audience into the story you’re telling by using imagery. In order to do this, you can describe a few of the five senses in detail. Only you know what it’s like to be in the place you’re referring to or the physical sensation you felt at a specific moment – tell the listener about what you want them to see, smell, hear, touch, or taste in order for them to feel the song on a deeper level, and associate their own emotions with it.
Whether or not you’re describing a common feeling, situation, or location, it doesn’t change that great song lyrics will make you think about a familiar sentiment in a way you haven’t before. Try using descriptive words in new contexts. The further you stray from common adjectives when you write lyrics, the more you’ll trigger the imagination of the listener.
Example in “Mariella” by Leon Bridges: “Eyes like a jungle, you’re something wild”
4. Play With Your Rhymes
One of the surefire ways to get a song stuck in someone’s head is to make it catchy, and for that you’ll need it to be memorable and easy to sing along to. One of the best tools to utilize for this is rhyming. However, forcing oneself to use a standard rhyme scheme is a common pitfall among new songwriters, who often feel pressure to make rhyming words sound as perfect as possible, and put them in all the right places. Fear not, for there are so many ways to play with rhymes when writing songs.
The most common rhyme schemes you’ll find in Pop songs will be ABAB or AABB. In case you’re unfamiliar, this is how rhyme schemes are written out – each letter represents a line and the type of rhyme found at the end of it. ABAB is used in “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra, for example:
Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars
There are plenty more rhyming variations to try out, however. In fact, it’s entirely up to you. Play around with other rhyme schemes (AAAA, ABCB, etc) until you find one you like, and that fits the song you want to write.
Near-rhymes and Internal Rhymes
The secret to keeping things fresh-sounding while also giving yourself more word choice is by using the near-rhyme: an imperfect rhyme created with the use of similar but not identical sounds. All the best songs use near rhymes, and when it’s done well, you won’t even notice. That is because they sound good to the ear, despite them not being exact rhymes. Siblings, not twins.
Ed Sheeran’s “A Team” is one of many examples:
Light’s gone, days end
Struggling to pay rent
Long nights, strange men
None of “end”, “rent”, or “men” rhyme perfectly, but they work. You can do this for bigger words as well, and can stray even further from the expected rhyme:
In “Money Trees”, Kendrick Lamar says:
It go Halle Berry or hallelujah
Pick your poison tell me what you’re doing
Everybody gon’ respect the shooter
Here, “hallelujah and “shooter” are near-rhymes that work because of the internal “oo” sound followed by the pronounced “uh” at the end of them. The point being, as long as it sounds good to you, it counts.
You can also use internal rhymes, where words rhyme in the middle of the line as opposed to the end. You’ll find that all the most prolific rappers do this in addition to end-of-line rhymes, as do many singer songwriters.
Here is a color-coded breakdown of the rhymes in Lose Yourself by Eminem, a great example of how to combine perfect, near, and internal rhymes.
5. Keep it Simple
Good news! Writing better lyrics does not require you to know complicated words – in fact it may serve you to dilute your songs sometimes to avoid them feeling lyrically dense. Keep it simple and don’t over explain your subject matter. Writing lyrics demands selectivity in your word choice. It is much better to show, not tell. Complex words are welcome in some cases, but make sure not to lose your audience in the process.
Similarly, avoid spending too many lines lingering on one description or idea and instead move to an adjacent thought. It’s easy to lose interest as a listener in these cases because the flow of the storytelling is overshadowed by the need to keep up with the “thinking” of the song.
6. Avoid Clichés
If you want to write lyrics to a great song, it’s better to avoid the classic clichés we hear so often in mainstream music. Some words and ideas are just simply overused, so challenge yourself to come up with other ways to say the same thing in your own lyrics.
“I need you”, “tonight will be the best night of our lives”, “you drive me crazy”, “girl” rhyming with “world”, are some examples of lyrics or ideas that we’ve all heard a million times. Though they represent relevant and familiar feelings, some writers forget to dig deeper. If you’re writing about a very widely understood sentiment, try to describe it in a way that hasn’t been done before.
It goes without saying that sometimes a well-placed cliché is just what we need, though.
7. Study Your Genre
If you’re grappling with the idea of what your lyrics are “supposed” to sound like, remember the lack of rulebook. It may help to study your genre if you’re lost. Look up lyrics of 1) the biggest songs in your genre, and 2) lyrics by artists similar to you and see if you can apply anything to your own songs.
You may find patterns that’ll inspire you or give you guidance regarding recurring themes in subject matter, how descriptive artists get, and what common song structures are used within that realm. For example, R&B is mostly about love and relationships, Folk music goes in depth descriptively while Dance music remains very surface-level, and almost all Pop songs follow the same song structure (first verse, pre-chorus, chorus, second verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus).
Now that you have an exceptional songwriting toolkit to pull from, try your hand at it yourself! Remember to be patient and ignore the perfectionism – your progress will be exponential.
—