There’s no way around it. I love to write songs—in fact, I have to; I get restless and fidgety if I haven’t written or worked on a song in a few days. But I HATE HATE HATE writing lyrics. Composing is a delicious process with a flow to it. Lyrics are a different story altogether. I rarely feel like there’s a flow to writing lyrics. Quite the contrary. I’m often stuck for days or weeks on lyrics. Many, many promising song starts have withered on the vine for lack of a rain of words.
In the early days, this wasn’t so much the case. I once sat down and wrote lyrics to two songs back-to-back. I’ve had speed writing sessions with other writers that yielded as many as five (weird, but charming) songs in an hour. But, as my standards have increased, so has my struggle finding the right words.
A practice that I now mostly follow of writing the chorus first has helped. You sort of write backwards from the chorus, then a prechorus that ramps into the chorus and a verse that supports the whole towering pile of goo. That, at least, grounds my efforts in the context of a specific theme. But, it’s no panacaea.
I find lyric writing to be like attempting to assemble a dense, multi-dimensional puzzle in the dark while wearing mittens. Perhaps because I’m a giant word nerd and a meticulous, persnickety and detail-obsessed editor, I constantly battle multiple competing tensions: between the banal and the precious, cerebral, intellectual or just plain purple; between the beguilingly circumspect and the plainly vague and confusing; between the sing-songy stuff of nursery rhymes (here’s a mid-thought tip: if children dance to your songs, you are doing something incredibly right–and they don’t even care what the words are) and the puffy ramblings of a self-obsessed poet wannabe. And then, there’s the simple diffuculty of trying to figure out exactly what I’m trying to say.
I’ve heard anecdotes about the second verse being the hardest to write—because if you write a first verse that perfectly pays off the chorus, there’s nothing left to say in the second verse. That’s sometimes a problem, but really, the whole enterprise is fraught with difficulty.
After all the sturm und drang, almost nobody cares what your lyrics are when they listen to your songs anyway. Song lyrics are near-universally ignored as long as the groove is there and it’s fun to sing along with—unless the lyrics are wrong. When the lyrics are wrong, everyone notices. It’s like a sixth sense people have. So, while it seems like a lot of effort for little return (except for the satisfaction of enjoying your own achievement and getting to sing the nice words you made up), you have to at least put in the time to get the lyrics not wrong.