Lyrics

What is a lyric? Does it have to rhyme? How is it different from a poem? Does a lyric have to be deep and meaningful? Does the music give it meaning? Do the music or the words come first? Does it have to be stiffly structured so it fits the music, or the music can fit it? If the words are written first then do the song lyrics carry a natural melody with them or can you fit any melody onto the words once you lay down a rhythm? What is the difference between melody and rhythm? All these things are extremely important when you are writing a song, but it is like playing, you know. If you have to think about all these things when you are doing it then you are not going to be able to do it well.

And I am invoking the picture of Jake Holmes (and other people here) because I think Jake is a great lyrics writer.  And Tupac Shakur, and Jim Morrison and Curtis Mayfield.  And me.  I mention me because if I want to write at all I have to do it without self doubt.  Put your own name and picture in that list.  Or make up your own list and include yourself.  You can’t be wishy washy about stuff like this.  If you want to write at all you have to put your name in there.

The actual writer doesn’t think about any of this.  All those detaily questions have to be internalized.  The ideas have to flow and you can’t be worrying about all those structural details if you want those ideas to come out. Otherwise you are just hung up on a whole bunch of meaningless details. That’s why they say “those who can’t do, teach.” Those who do it just have all that stuff internalized and they don’t know how to explain it to other people. The teachers are the ones who struggle with the whys and the whats, who have studied the details and tried to figure out how to get stuff perfect.

I like to use the example “I didn’t like my woman because she wouldn’t help me with my mind. People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time.” I mean, what simple sentences. They don’t even rhyme. But you put Ozzy’s words to Tommy Iommi’s rhythm and you get the song Paranoid. They were supposed to have written and recorded that together in just a couple hours at the end of a recording session. I always like to promote Ozzy as a songwriter and a harmonica player. But I don’t think Ozzy can teach anyone anything. He is a pure soul. My point is, keep things simple. Don’t think too much about stuff, and the most unexpected things will become wonderful.

We had our first writer’s group yesterday and those questions came up, among other things.  Fiddle the word inspiration. Inspiration is only an excuse for people who don’t carve themselves out some time to write. Yeah, writing well is about having emotions and ideas, but you have to carve yourself out regular times to give those emotions and ideas time to take shape. And it isn’t easy. A lot of the time you just end up staring at vast white emptiness, a reflection of the undefined clouds that hang over your soul. A dreary day. The weather in the little cubicle of your mind is always terrible when you assign yourself time to write. And worse still, the weather outside is ofter wonderful and you would much rather be out playing.

Writing lyrics is like writing anything else. At least, it is for me. It means doing something really unnatural, sitting down in front of a piece of paper or a keyboard and trying to turn emotions and ideas into letters and words. I just think about the whole process of speech and then writing and trying to do something as complicated as tying that with music. Music, something which comes from our heartbeat and breathing and the rushing of blood through our bodies. How in the world do we manage to join that with something as unnatural as writing?

So, in answer to the question of whether writing poetry and lyrics is the same, no it isn’t.  I am told that Jim Morrison was a wonderful songwriter and a terrible poet.  I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, it answers the “what” but not the “why".  I don’t know if there are any “whys” actually.  Maybe we all have to make ourselves simple minded like Ozzy if we want to write.  You know, get an education so we actually know how to do stuff and then kill that education because it is cluttering us up and getting in the way of us actually doing it.

I couldn’t tell you. By my own reckoning there is no way anybody should be able to write decent lyrics. Nobody should be able to. But somehow we do, sometimes.

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