Notes on writing lyrics

Sometimes people ask me how I write songs, and I usually give cagey, unspecific answers. This is mostly because I can ramble endlessly on the topic, and partly because the writing of songs is, in my experience, a lengthy and frustrating process that I don't imagine would be as interesting to others as they might suppose.

However, because I am in the midst of a songwriting frenzy, I thought this might be a good time to organize some thoughts on the subject - specifically, on writing lyrics.

In these current sessions with Joe and Jonathan, the composition process has been very collaborative. We usually begin with instruments; it is rare for us to begin with a vocal melody and to write instrumental parts to accompany it. In the beginning, we usually have a rather bare-bones musical arrangement, and maybe some idea of what the song could be about. Sometimes we have a title, and sometimes the title determines the lyrical content of the piece. Other times the original title ends up being discarded after the lyrics are written.

On Monday, we began writing the song provisionally titled "Slinkitzer." We started with a wandering Wurlitzer/guitar/walkietalkie jam. Joe had mentioned to me that he wanted to have a song about capillary action. To paraphrase, he said we should have a song about things being pulled through other things. So I looked up related terms on Wikipedia: capillary, capillary action, wick, and I followed all of the "See Also" links. I wrote down words that interested me from the entries, words like "perfused" and "everted." I looked at pictures of frost flowers (ice formations that are formed as the result of capillary action in plants) and from there I looked up other types of frost: hoarfrost, hard rime and soft rime. I went through my notes from the last few months to see if I could grab words or images (no dice there, this time, though usually this kind of synchronicity does pop up). I wrote a list of words that I liked that day, words like wish and asp and aluminum. I wrote a list of colors that have been mentioned in the songs we have already written for the album, and then a list of colors that have not yet been named. I wrote down this question: Would you draw me through?

Another resource that I tapped was a book that I recently started reading: Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. There were a surprising number of instances of the term "capillarity."

I also grabbed some phrases from Joe's notes. "It pushed back" and "radiator smell." We have agreed that we can steal words from one another. Don't worry.

We came back to the "Slinkitzer" recording on Thursday, and made some structural decisions about which chord progressions would comprise the verses, choruses, etc. These decisions made, we put an audio file on my iPod and I spent much of Thursday and Friday listening to the song on repeat while trying to organize my lists of words into lyrics.

So far as I can tell, there are no rules for lyric writing. Sometimes the lyrics and melody seem to spring from my mind fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Upon further reflection though, I have to admit that those moments that feel like inspiration are usually the result of months of verbal accumulation - ideas, notes taken, things people have said. Other times, it takes ages for lyrics to sit right in the song. Sometimes I write the whole thing out in sequence on a piece of paper and the words stay that way. Other times I shuffle things around.

For this song, I did a lot of shuffling. To make it easier to switch things around and organize, I used a program called FreeMind, free mind-mapping software that I usually use to outline essays and papers. You can see an image of the song in progress at the top of this post. This song is a lot more wordy than my lyrics usually get, so using this software really helped me to play with/refine meter and phrasing, without wasting tons of paper. I also find that switching up writing media can help me get through blocks, so going from pen & paper to computer can loosen up the ol' word machine.

Finally, after two days of focused work, I had a draft and was ready to sing a scratch vocal (the scratch vocal is a rough performance that is not meant to be kept, but is used as reference for the other parts, and so I don't forget the melody in my head). Performance-wise it was a little bit rough, but all in all I think the song is going to be really strong, and having the vocal melody in place sparked other ideas and has allowed us to move on with the song - this is what we are doing tonight.

For me, melody is almost always the easy part. Words are hard. But for some reason, this is the only thing that I am compelled to do year after year, even when it is difficult, when it feels impossible, when I think I suck, when I think I'm all tapped out and I have sung everything I have to sing. The words are out there. I just have to discover them.