Writing process

There are as many ways of writing songs or orchestral pieces as there are writers. No one way is 'right' but there are probably ways that are 'right' for each individidual. In my case, when I started writing, it was probably a means of releasing teenage angst, of putting feelings onto paper and making sense of my world. In those days, I always wrote lyrics first and then, only when the muse visited. 

I suspect that this was probably because I didn't, at that time, have the musical knowledge to express feelings in notes and harmony & so placing lyrics first gave something to hang the music on. I can remember when I was about seventeen, a music producer said that although I had some talent,  it was not being used to its full extent. His solution was for me to go and live in a garret for several years, penniless & lonely. I'm not sure what good that would have done but I guess he was saying that I was too comfortable to write music that touched people. And I probably was 'too comfortable' back then, although I was already penniless. Around the same time, I'd showed a song I'd written to an orchestrator/composer, fully expecting praise, only to be told in no uncertain terms that music should not be the path I choose.  This was a hard lesson.  Confidence shaken, I did move away from writing but inevitably, I came back to it some years later.     

I mentioned 'the muse'. In the beginning, I had the belief that inspiration came from somewhere outside of me and so waited for the inspiration to come.  This was naive. Even as a six or seven year old child, I had made up 'tunes' in my head but had no means of recording them & no-one I knew had any musical ability to translate them into reality. So they were forgotten and lost to eternity. Occasionally, something does appear , seemingly out of nowhere - but these are the exceptions and not the rule. Rules? There are none.

Writing is a job and it is far better to write lots of 'bad' pieces rather than wait for inspiration to strike for that one  tune. In fact, if you do wait for inspiration, the chances are that what you write will not be very good anyway. In other words, it is about practice. It's about honing what is, essentially , a craft. As such, it means learning at least some music theory and the important aspects of lyric writing - the more tools in your toolbox, the greater opportunities there are to flourish as a writer. Sometimes, it's important to take a break - do something completely different  - but it is also true that the more you do something, the better you tend to become.

Nowadays I almost invariably start by writing a melody or a harmony (a sequence of chords from which a melody arises). Very occasionally, I'll hear a few words or a phrase that encourages me to build music on that but for the most part, the music comes first.   This doesn't mean that I  don't squirrel away words - I have several notebooks full of phrases or just a couple of lines that I will often draw upon when beginning to write lyrics. The more metaphors, sensory words or phrases that you have access to, the better. (more on this later) Furthermore, a good thesaurus and rhyming dictionary are also key tools.

The vast majority of popular music is relatively simple, harmonically.  Sure, there are exceptions to this - but most pop is both rhythmically & harmonically simple. The same is true of melody to some extent. If a piece is too complex, it becomes difficult for the listener to hum along to or remember.   With pop music the aim is to get the hooks stuck in the audiences' heads.

Many of the most popular songs use only two, three or four chords and there are songs that stay on one chord throughout. Many funk songs use one chord and a riff or groove to give the song the feeling of movement . 'Chain of  fools' is based on a C minor 7. The Beatles 'Tomorrow Never Knows'  - emulating Indian drone music - uses just the C chord - which is the sitar's standard tuning. (Technically, there is a point in this song where a Bb Major chord is superimposed above the melody but, in my opinion, it could still be considered a one chord song.)   George Harrison's interest in classical Indian music also led him to create 'Within you without you' in C# with a mixolydian melody. This style of music doesn't really rely on the Western concept of chords or harmony - any harmony is often from a voice or sitar with the backing of a single note drone from a Tambura.   'Pink's 'Get the party started'  remains on a Bm chord. Madonna ('Music'/ Gm) and Kylie Minogue ('Slow'/Bbm) have also had hits with one chord songs. 

Perhaps, the most famous one chord songs were early blues music. The early advocates started out with no accompaniment to the voice & when accompaniment was added, it was often just one chord. E.g. 'Mannish boy' (E7 throughout) or 'Who do you love' (Also E7). This developed into the 12 bar but its roots were on one chord only.

So, how do I start a song?  Often,  if I don't already have a chord sequence or melody in mind, the first thing I choose is a tempo. This commonly changes later in the process but the style of music I'm intending to write will often suggest a starting tempo. For example, dance music - music to dance to, rather than a specific dance genre, is often between 90 beats per minute (BPM) and 120 BPM . With dance music my next task is to choose a beat - commonly 'four on the floor' - or heavy accents on each beat of 4/4 time signature.  Rock music, with some exceptions, generally doesn't fall below 110 BPM and so on, with different timings for other genres. Of course, I don't just write up-tempo music and sometimes, I will play guitar  or noodle on the keyboard until I find a phrase I like, without any real conscious awareness of time signature.

Occasionally, I get a riff or beat in my head which I'll work out with a metronome or click track in a digital audio workstation (DAW).  The bottom line is, as I said at the start, there are a plethora of ways to start and no one way is right or wrong.

Assuming that I have a melody or chord sequence, adding lyrics is a process that, for me, involves multiple re-writes. I rarely just write out words one time. They are changed, abandoned and tweaked multiple times before they are ever properly recorded, although I sometimes use voice memo on my phone to capture a snippet of an idea. I will listen, multiple times, to the music in front of me and ask myself what it  is saying, emotionally.  This part is crucial. In order to develop a metre for lyrics, many writers will put nonsense words or use just vowel sounds to get an idea of where emphasis needs to fall before putting words to a piece. Paul McCartney' s 'Yesterday' started out as 'scrambled eggs', for example. 

In crafting lyrics, for it too is a craft, it's important to remember the basics of story writing. Stories need a beginning, middle and end. If you give the story away at the beginning, the listener has no need or desire to listen to the middle or the end, unless there is also something compelling in the music.  So, it's common practice  to use a first verse to intrigue or surprise the listener to peak their interest in finding out what the song is really about.  Another strategy is to use a non-obvious metaphore at the beginning, to later  be revealed, often in the final verse or chorus. Metaphores, such as a song about 'rain' can be later shown to really be about profound loss or grief. We need to keep in mind that the listener sometimes asks themselves 'Why should I care?' So, the opening should give the listener a reason to want to hear the outcome. The beginning doesn't always have to be surprising but it does have to leave some element of doubt. For example, Graham Gouldman wrote the Hollies hit 'Bus stop' - Here the boy meets girl part is clear from the opening lines... But will they stay together?  What happens as the seasons change? Gouldman, using a metaphore of a shared umbrella for togetherness, says, at the end of verse one, that: 'By August she was mine' . In the chorus he builds on this with 'someday my name & hers are going to be the same' but he leaves it to the very last line to say 'Nice to think that that umbrella led me to a vow'.  Whilst, the last line feels a bit clumsy to me, I'd listened to the whole thing by that point.

In 'Fire & rain', James Taylor sort of gives the game away in the first line 'Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone' but it's not clear if she's just left town, left him or she has died. So we want to find out. In fact, the answer is never explicitly revealed except to say he says 'Thought I'd see you one more time, again'. In fact Suzanne, died whilst Taylor was in a rehab unit.

Another method of capturing listeners' interest is to use imagary to relate to their dominant ways of thinking. There are several distinct types of imagery; Visual, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory and kinesthetic. Some split kinesthetic into 'tactile' related purely to the sense of touch or feel  and 'movement' referring to movement by objects or people.   Many images deal with the five senses, which help us create mental images of whatever we are hearing in the lyrics. Visual imagery appeals to the sense of sight . It describes what a scene or character looks like. For instance, “The moon peeked from behind the clouds.” 

 Auditory imagery describes specific sounds in the lyric. For example,  Dylan wrote: “When your rooster crows at the break of dawn" . Here he continues with a visual image:  'Look out your window, and I'll be gone' ('Don't think twice')

Olefactory imagery relates to the sense of smell. For example: 'The heady scent of jasmine in the air' 

Gustatory imagery is concerned with the sense of taste and is often closely related to the olefactory sense. For example: 'The sweet taste of cherries' might be combined with the olefactory sense to yield: 'The heavy scent of Jasmine filled the air but the sweetness of the cherries overpowered it'  We could combine the cherry idea with a visual sense by saying: ' The sweet taste of bright red cherries put the jasmine scent in the shade.'

Kinesthetic imagery relates to touch or feel, action or movement. For example: 'The velvety touch of her hair' 

Imagery in writing is really about creating a sensation in the listener. More broadly, it might make a listener feel nostalgic, sad, happy or fearful - but the  important part is that the listener identifies, in some way, with the lyric. It can be particularly effective when the listener re-interprets the meaning of the lyric to fit their own circumstances.  

Finally, in this precis of my approach to writing lyrics, it's worth saying that lyrics do not follow the rules of schoolbook English  grammar. They are much more conversational. A key skill is to get rid of unnecessary words. So, the sentances: 'I thought that it was kind of forward. I thought that it was kind of wierd' Could become: 'Thought it kinda forward. Thought it kinda wierd' . It's really about focussing on the essential elements and removing any fluff. Here, it''s  often the case that conjunctions such as 'and' or 'but' are dropped and maybe the 'I' or 'You' at the start of a phrase can be removed. 

It can be worthwhile to analyse how other writers approach lyrics noting some of the points above.