Three super tips to help you write lyrics, even if you don’t know where to start.
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Lyrics. Some songwriters love them, some songwriters struggle with them, but no matter which side you are on, in this video – which is part 4 of my songwriting video series, I’m going to give you a couple of super easy ways to start getting your head around lyric writing.
Often the biggest obstacle to lyric writing is not knowing where to start. You may have a melody or you’re staring at a blank page and you feel like you have to come up with some epic topic to write about or be really cryptic and clever with your words.
And this brings us to Super Lyric Writing Tip #1: Do a brain storm
If you have absolutely no idea what to write about, you want to get rid of the blankness of that page which is staring up at you. So just start writing words that you like, and that reflect the EMOTION that you’re trying to capture or the topic you think you want to write about.
The key thing here is to not think about it too much. Just start writing because even if you’ve picked a topic, just going through this process can help you to come up with things that may make that original idea so much better. So just brain dump.
Then start stringing your words into sentences. One thing I like to do, is listen to a bunch of songs that have a similar vibe to what I’m going for and I listen for the descriptive words they use. If I hear something I like, I add it to my brain dump. And after a while certain sentences with certain descriptive words and emotion will speak to you will be able to start structuring them or seeing how they fit with your music.
2. Many songwriters like to reflect on personal relationships – the classic example would be getting your heart ripped out and then writing either a really sad song or a really angry song to express how you’re feeling. However- you probably don’t get your heart ripped out every other day – or at least I hope you don’t or you’re not in one of those toxic relationships that keeps you down the whole time…. Or if you’re not in a relationship at the moment what you do, and this is Super Lyric Tip #2: you get inspiration from your friends instead.
I was staying with a friend while I was on tour over in Sydney recently and she was telling me all about her relationship problem – as friends do, but a couple of words she said really resonated with me and she said “I was seeing this guy and he was my small love and I didn’t really care when that ended, and then along came my big love and I wanted to stab him with a knife…” she did actually say that… but I’m sure she didn’t mean it literally….
Anyhoo – my little brain was ticking away and then next day I had a songwriting session with another singer songwriter and when we were chucking ideas around for a song I said why don’t we call the song Big Big Love and talk about waiting for that really big love, that big important relationship to come along.
And because we had title, and we already knew what we wanted to say (thanks to my friend), the song just wrote itself and we smashed it out in a day.
3. Super Lyric Writing Tip # 3 – use Google.
If you want to say ‘we went to the castle’ but you don’t want to use the word castle because it doesn’t rhyme with the line before then hit up Google and type in ‘Castle Synonym’. Google will give you a whole bunch of other words that mean the same thing that you can choose from.
You can do the same thing for rhyming words to find something that fits.
Google always knows.
So there are just three methods to get you started. Have a go with them which works for you and I hope that it helps you to come up with something FANTASTIC.
Nicola x
Nicola x
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