Gotye

Improving Your Verse Lyric By Reading It Aloud

You’ll often hear that the verse is where you tell the story in your song. Most of the time, however, a song verse tells its story in a roundabout sort of way. There are the songs we call story songs – the ones that give a specific account of events in a sequence we’re used to when we […]

Singer - Songwriter

Singing Nonsense Syllables (i.e., Gibberish) to Get a Song Going

Sometimes you need to hear your own music before you know what your song is actually about. There’s something about the chords you choose, and then the melody that gets created above them, that implies a kind of musical meaning. But occasionally it’s hard to get going because you can feel the melody starting to flow, and […]

Justin Vernon - Bon Iver - 22, A Million

Turning Your Poems Into Song Lyrics

Have you ever had the experience of feeling that you write pretty good poetry, but every time you try to come up with a melody and chords that makes it sound like a good song lyric, it just doesn’t work? There are any number of reasons why that might be happening. Here are some possible ones: […]

Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are

What Makes the Best Kind of Love Song Lyric?

To write a love song lyric means different things to different songs. You can write about how nobody understands your relationship, or you can write of simpler things: how much you love the other one. Or perhaps you’ll use imagery: your love is like a flower garden, a walk in the park, a sunny day… that sort […]

Songwriter - Lyricist

Rhyming Lyrics: What’s Best in Today’s Songwriting?

There’s an obvious problem when it comes to writing lyrics that rhyme: the more diligent you are in creating a rhyme, the more limited your choice of words. The other side of that is this: creating a rhyming lyric that says exactly what you want to say can be quite a treasure. The strength of […]

8 Tips for Making Melodies and Lyrics Your Songs’ Best Features

Songs are vehicles that take a listener on a 3-4 minute journey. However interesting and captivating that journey is, that’s the measure of a song’s success. Since songs are partnerships of many different elements all working together — melodies, lyrics, chords, instrumentation/production, tempo, time signature and more — it can seem to be a daunting task […]