The Art of Songwriting

let your lyric say what it needs to say – you can’t help but write something that’s great.

Mastering something as subtle and awesome as lyric writing isn’t just having plenty of tools and tricks at your fingertips – it’s deciding when and where to use them. It’s being confident making a call on which ones to prioritize at any given time. It’s knowing sometimes it’s OK to sacrifice a bit of a conversational feel to make way for a great metaphor. It’s knowing prioritizing simplicity can mean sacrificing detail and prioritizing detail can mean sacrificing simplicity. It’s knowing – like we discussed in Chapter 1 – there aren’t many perfect choices.

these details help your lyric pack a punch because they’re about what people do and not what people say. Actions speak louder than words – in lyrics as well as in real life

And talking about what real-life people do when they think or feel something is a great way of injecting the real world into your songs like we talked about in Chapter

And a lyric tends to be most interesting when those ideas are specific. Just like specific choices for what your song is about matter. Just like specific choices for your song’s musical style matter.
In a lyric, this means finding specific images, details and ideas. There are as many ways of doing this as you can imagine, but they turn something bland and generic into something distinctive and really worth paying attention to.

n a lyric, words matter. But it’s the ideas behind those words that matter most.

Think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do

But whatever you do, there’s one thing that always matters most: what those words mean.

you uncover what it sounds like by imitating other songwriters and learning from how they do what they do. And the more you imitate them, the less you end up copying exactly and the more your own personal style comes through

But you get the idea: you’re trying to get the music of your song to capture your song’s big idea in some way. You’re trying to make it so that someone who didn’t understand the words of your song would still get a sense of what it’s about from the music alone.