There are totally rules and principles to lyric writing and rhyme. Of course, people break them all the time. And that's why we don't know what the hell they mean most of the time. Which I believe is poor communication.

So check out anything by Pat Pattison and you'll dig the rules of lyric writing. I have a list over at my Squidoo lens:
http://www.squidoo.com/songwriting/

Best of luck!

When I was young my aunt told me to have a story to start with and work around it.I have used this advice many times.

Tom T. Hall had a pretty good book on songwriting, THe Songwriter's Handbook.
http://www.shared-visions.com/reviews/review.cfm?ISBN=1558538607
He got a cover blurb from Johnny Cash, and gives a good overview of the country storytelling paradigm of songwriting. I have read some of the other books mentioned here. I don't think there is a single best one.

From what I've read in interviews with Michael Stipe and others, the way to write a good song is to write thirty bad ones. Most songwriters have to crank out a couple dozen embarrassments before they get the hang of it (this is true for me).
Carry a tape or digital recorder everywhere. When a snippet of melody pops into your head or when you wake up with it lingering from a dream, hum it into the recorder so it's not lost.
Most good writers come up with a strong melody, then fit the words to it, then find the right chords. There are exceptions, but most times this way is best. Coming up with a 'cool' chord sequence and then trying to build a song around it is much less reliable. Also, composers who start with the chords sometimes go to the same G C D or whatever they are used to and write a bunch of songs that sound the same. I've seen this, and it ain't good. A talented young lady I saw played three G C D tunes in a row. The first was fine. The second was acceptable. By the third I was looking at my watch. If she started with melodies that she enjoyed without any instrument at all, she would then have been forced to search for chords that fit, which would certainly have led to a more varied sound.

I often ask myself, "If I could write the best song in this particular style/on this particular subject/ etc that had ever been written, what would it sound like?" and just keep picking at it until it starts to resemble something I would actually respect.

Sometimes it's the really simple stuff that works best.

You never know what the magic ingredient is going to be. The guitarist in Radiohead hated the song 'Creep' so he threw in this brutal chopping sound at the beginning of the chorus. It made a great song more memorable and was a huge hit.

An interesting pattern always beats a boring one.

There is only a finite number of possible notes that could be played in a three-minute song, just as there is a finite number of possible books. Vast, but finite. I'm never surprised when someone accidentally rips off a melody they heard somewhere. It's hard, hard not to.

But one way to avoid repeating others is to avoid the sort of patterns they use. Many writers do a 4/4 vamp where they cycle through two, three or four chords, arpeggiating perhaps, and repeat this pattern bar after bar, putting the melody atop that. No wonder they start to resemble each other. I'll wager they started with the chords, which I already warned against. One can avoid this by creating longer melodic phrases out of several shorter ones and then building the structure out from there. One of the more brilliant recent examples of long, perfect melodic phrases is "Love Hater" from the last Outkast album.

A very funny and ironic story about songwriting is by the great Donald Barthelme. It's called "How I write my songs" and it is in his collection "Sixty Stories." It includes the great bad lyrics:

When I lost my baby
I almost lost my mine*
When I found my baby
the sun began to shine.

*not a typo

He was a pretty funny guy.

A lost love and a bottle of Jack Daniel's is a good start !

music criticism as a creative tool
using computer-based content analysis of popular music reviews to guide the music-making process
loren jan wilson
june 2003 - june 2004

Abstract
This project combines a computer science background and a songwriting hobby with an unhealthy obsession for popular music reviews. In it, I attempt to come up with a new computer-assisted songwriting method which takes music critics' opinions into account. By writing software to statisically analyze the content of several thousand record reviews from the Pitchfork music website (www.pitchforkmedia.com), I generate a set of compositional guidelines based on the musical preferences expressed by the critics. I then use those guidelines to write and record a couple of original songs, discussing in detail the relationships between the songs and the data that I have collected.

http://www.pitchformula.com/

I recommend attending one of Severin Browne's songstarting workshops in LA. Brother of Jackson Browne, Severin is an experienced musician and songwriter in his own right. It's a great experience for both seasoned writers and those just beginning.

http://www.severinbrowne.com gives you all the info you need.

I went. It was great.

I've found that the interviews in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" with artists like Neil Young, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and David Byrne are fascinating, intuitive and surprising. There are many more interviews as well. Here's the amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0306812657/qid=1086117685/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-5463424-0788931?v=glance&s=books

Enjoy

Shaun

I have a book called "88 Songwriting Wrongs & How to Right Them" by Pat & Pete Luboff (ISBN: 0898795087).

It was okay, but the authors' commercial bent means that their world view doesn't really allow for the possibility of anything left-field and innovative.

After reading this book, I concluded that you probably can't learn much about songwriting from reading about it. Mind you, with the writers' block I've experienced lately, I think I'd be willing to try anything.

Based on my experience working in bands, I agree with fellow Teessider John Ivison's comment that writing collaboratively can greatly assist the creative process. On a pragmatic level, it also imposes a useful self-discipline because you have to make sure you produce the goods in time for the next band practice.

Steve Cooke
Teesside, UK

The starting point for the creation of great lyrics is an understanding of things around and the emotional effect on us. Many songs are written in response to strong emotions may of them negative rather than positive experiences that demand an expression.

The process of creation releases tensions and the therapeutic effect helps you grow as an individual. As that expression is released, it becomes refined as the process is repeated. We get better and tapping into the subconscious part of ourselves that enables us to bring out what is hidden inside our spiritual dimension.

An important part of the process is the application of lyrics in a song and the reaction of the audience which gives the writer courage and fulfilment.

The above explains why collaborative teams who write songs are often more successful than the individual members since that feedback is a continuous part of collaborative works.

Hope that helps

John Ivison
Vancouver and Teesside

Thanks for the tip on Tunesmith.

Check out 'Tunesmith' by Jimmy Webb. He talks about lyrics, song structure, cliche, rhyming, the market and also makes reference to various other books on the subject. Excellent.

Good stuff Michele and Steve. I ordered the If They Ask You book and it looks good.

just got this via tara calishain's (google hacks author) blog:

If you need some help with your songwriting, check out the Muse's Muse Songwriting Resource at
http://www.musesmuse.com/ . There are a variety of resources here, including a newsletter, featured reading resources, and a message board, but we're going to concentrate on the links at
http://www.musesmuse.com/muselinks .

There are over 4600 links in this directory and it's set up like a Yahooesque searchable subject index. Categories include awards, directories, record labels, and workshops and courses. Listings include pretty good annotation most of the time as well as the date of the addition, number of hits on that URL, rating (if any) and votes (if any.) Nicely done; plenty to see here.

Hi Kevin,

An old aquaintance of mine was a guy who attended the VIneyard Church in West LA in the 80's -- Al Kasha. He won several Oscars for his musical scores. I don't recall which ones he wrote but I think he was connected with Disney. Anyway, he wrote a highly readable book entitled, "If They Ask You, You Can Write a Song." It's a morale booster and very practical. I just check with Amazon and there are a number of used copies still floating around in cyberspace.

I'm a friend of Randy Bohlender and a Burner like him. He told me he has been in contact with you. Love your site. I'm going to order a number of your recommended products -- I'm a gadget nut too. My site was an attempt to do something like what you have done, but it pales in comparison.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Steve Sjogren

I just read "How to Have a Number One," and learned a whole lot. Thanks for the tip.

Hi Kevin

My advice is don't go anywhere without looking at Drummond and Cauty's work of meta genius "How to have a Number One - The Easy Way". This is not about 'art', this is about writing the *right* stuff for the UK pop charts. Check out (http://www.instrumentality.com/themanual.html) for an indexed version - or elsewhere online the full text is easy to find. Go to the section on 'chorus and title' for specific lyrics advice.

James

Wow. What a hard question to answer. Especially if you're talking about genuine artistic songwriting, as opposed to commercial/industrial songwriting.

The best I can offer is to turn to the late Jeff Buckley, who was one of the greatest songwriters and performers of his generation.

Here are three quotations that always inspire me when I am writing:

"I have notebooks everywhere I go. I'm always day dreaming. Or things that happen to me...It's just about being alive, my songs. It's about the voice carrying much more information than words do."

"Relentless, endless joy peaking into tears, resting into calmness, a simmering beauty. If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground. Your soul can fly outward, stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness."

"Do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a taste or a feel of something, maybe an object, but the feeling is so bizarre and imperceptible that you just can't quite get a hold of it? It drives you crazy. That's my musical aesthetic, just this imperceptible fleeting memory... It's like there's a guard at the gate of your memory and you're not supposed to remember certain things because you can only obtain the full experience by completely going under its power. You can be destroyed or scarred. You don't know, it's like dying."

The last two are a bit esoteric, but they are meant to be about how he viewed his art and his process.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Darren and Joshua. Good suggestions both.

This, I have found, is a tricky thing -- there aren't really any rules of lyric writing -- not even rhyming (as Thom Yorke of Radiohead could tell you). I've personally found that songwriting is something you do at first by imitation, and improve upon later.

Having said that, the one book I always turn to when I'm stuck in my songwriting is Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen, which is a collection of his lyrics and poems:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679755411

Mainly because Cohen is one of the best pop lyricists working out there. Formally speaking, you could ask for no finer a set of lyrics than those to "Famous Blue Raincoat".

Hope that helps.

The best songwriting book I've read is called 'And Then I Wrote'. The blurb from the book says it best:

An entertaining look at the craft of songwriting, in the words of songwriters themselves: a collection of anecdotes and quotations from well-known songwriters, past and present, on their influences, work habits, and how they came to write particular songs now ingrained in the popular psyche.

Here's the publisher's page: http://www.arsenalpulp.com/select_book.php?book=66 and here's the book on Amazon.com:
http://tinyurl.com/e0mm

One of the book's editors is Sylvia Tyson, one of Canada's most influential folk singers. Cheers. DB.