A big problem that songwriters have is after they’ve come up with their first verse and refrain or chorus, they don’t know where to go from there. And a big reason for this is that they’ve said everything there is to say in the very first verse and chorus. They’ve left nothing else to say.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. This is a verse and chorus that I just came up with off the top of my head. Forgive how had it is. It’s 7:16 in the morning on a Saturday.
“There was this girl that I really liked
I just had to have her for my wife
So I asked this girl to marry me
And be with me the rest of my life”
Chorus
“And we lived happily ever after
We lived happily ever after
We lived happily ever after
Until the end of time”
See what I did? I essentially told our whole story in that one verse and chorus. There was this girl I liked. I asked her to marry me, to which she obviously said yes. And we lived happily ever after.
There is nothing left to say. I have said it all. Oh sure, I can just go on about how our lives were wonderful and what we did, but it’s just more of the same. There is no real development of this story possible. And this is what most beginning songwriters do. They say everything they have to say right up top and there is no where left to go.
And even worse in this case is that the chorus is so final, that even if the first verse wasn’t complete, there is no place left to go with a chorus like that. This is about as bad a lyric as you can get. Yes, I’m very good at writing bad lyrics. I’ve had lots of practice.
Okay, how can we make this lyric better aside from throwing it in the scrap heap? Well, what we want to do is map out kind of a story board. One instructor I had called them boxes and each box had to be able to fit in the box that came after it so that the story had room to grow. So if boxes work for you, we’ll use boxes.
What do we put in our first box? We want to basically tell the same story about how a guy met a girl, really liked the girl, wanted to marry the girl and eventually did get the girl of his dreams. But we can tell that story in a way where we don’t say everything we want to say right up top.
Let’s try something like this.
Box 1
Guy meets this girl. Really likes this girl. Wants to go out with this girl but doesn’t know how to go about it. Dreams of being married someday.
Box 2
Guy tries every trick he can think of to win this girl but nothing works. Still dreams of being married.
Box 3
Realizes that all he had to do was be himself and the girl falls in love with him. He no longer has to dream of being married.
There you go. The story now has a natural progression from the time when he first met the girl to when he finally does get the girl and he no longer has to “dream” of being married, hinting that they did in fact get married.
I’ll leave it to you to write the actual lyric. There should be at least 3 verses and a chorus after each one. Shouldn’t be too difficult for you to write.
Let’s do another one.
“My son went off to war
He was such a brave son
But then I got the news the other day
My son was gone”
Chorus
“He was gone, gone gone
He was gone, gone gone
He was gone, gone, gone
Forevermore”
Again, nowhere left to go. Son went off to war, died and now he’s gone. Another example of a really bad lyric. How can we improve this? Well, let’s go back to our boxes.
Box 1
I remember when my son was born. Seems like yesterday
Box 2
I remember him growing up. Seems like yesterday
Box 3
I remember him going off to war. Seems like yesterday
There you have it. A natural progression. He’s born, he grows up, he goes off to war. And each box can dive into the life of this boy in some great detail until finally he goes off to war and it all comes to an end.
Not the happiest song in the world, but at least it tells its story in a nice sequence of events.
If writers would use the box idea and map out their songs in advance, they’d find that their songs didn’t run into dead ends so fast.
But the main reason why this happens is because, usually, the main idea is flawed to begin with. The songwriter will pick a subject from a particular starting point and there’s just no place to go with it. They’ve boxed themselves into a corner before they’ve even started.
Unfortunately, recognizing these dead end subjects and starting points is not always easy. Sometimes you don’t realize that you have no place to go until after you’ve completed the first verse and chorus. And this is a very common problem when the chorus basically says “and this is the way it ends.” When you do that, you leave yourself very little room to wiggle out of that corner.
This is why a lot of pop songs either don’t really say much of anything at all (it’s easier that way) or they come up with a chorus that is just a lot of catchy words but don’t really have any meaning. They rely on the music, and not the lyric, to drive the song and turn it into a “hit.” This doesn’t mean that the song is any good artistically. Yes, I’m a snob. Deal with it.
If you want to be a good writer and not just make money, think about how you can make your songs better. One way to do that is by thinking about where you’re going to go from here.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim