Writing better lyrics: five hot tips

Many songwriters struggle more with the words than the music. Here are eight quick tips for writing better lyrics.

1. Let the singer breathe. You don’t need huge gaps between phrases to achieve this, but make sure there is some breathing space when you’re writing the lyrics to your songs. This is slightly less of an issue if you’re dealing with electronica and most of your words come in the form of samples, but if it’s anything that’s every going to be performed live, you have to bear it in mind.

As a rule of thumb, an average singer singing an average song at average tempo and volume needs to take a breath after eight or ten seconds, and will feel happier if it’s every five or six. You should find that breathing spaces fall naturally in the gaps between phrases.

2. Avoid too many hard consonant endings. Lots of words that end in -ed and -ing are a pain in the backside to sing, and are difficult for an inexperienced singer to manage without sounding nasal.

3. Plenty of open vowel sounds, please. Singers love oh and ah sounds in song lyrics. Words like radio are lovely to sing - really wide open and full of rich tones. Think of songs like Video Killed the Radio Star and Radio Ga Ga. You can tell the lyrics to both those were written by the people who actually had to sing them (Trevor Horne and Roger Taylor, respectively, though Taylor only sang backing). Both are full of wide open sounds.

4. Watch out for the clichés. You girlfriend or boyfriend might well have eyes that sparkle like diamonds; love may well have come like a thief in the night; alternatively, his or her heart might be cold as stone. Just try to think of a more original way of saying it. A dictionary of clichés is one of the most useful books a songwriter can have.

5. Play around with half rhymes - you can get some great effects:

I am thinking it’s a sign
that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images
and when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.

And I have to speculate
that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay.

True, it may seem like a stretch
but it’s thoughts like this that catch my troubled head
When you’re away, when I am missing you to death.

Those verses are from Such Great Heights by The Postal Service - a song that’s so well-written, we’re going to come back to it in a couple of later posts. Look at those half-rhymes: sign/aligned, speculate/make, shapes/clay, stretch/catch, head/death. They add to the song’s sense of subtlety and elegance.

By the way, if you listen to the whole thing you’ll also notice lots of those open vowel sounds: ‘when you’re out there on the road/ for several weeks of shows and when you scan the radio…’ Yes, there’s that word again.

Of course, there’s much more to writing better lyrics than just these five tips - we’ll post more soon. In the meantime, what you do think? How do you go about writing words to your songs?

Tagged as: lyrics, songwriting