Originally Posted by John Walradt
Hi, Andrew. You go about songwriting as I do...melody comes first. If it's a hit, it comes easily. But I struggle with words. Well, I'm not a lyricist, I write words. Anyway, I have to wait for the melody to let me know what the title is. Sometimes I know right away, sometimes takes months. My words are conversational. I've had some songs take me up to 20 years to write! In some of those cases, I found someone to write the lyrics or to finish the song. But most important, the words have to feel like the melody. It has to have the mood because the melody fills in the spaces between the letters of the words.
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I usually have a formula for most things I do like writing melodies or painting pictures...but lyrics? My situation is like yours and what I really try to do is to try to find out what the melody feels like, what emotions does it bring up?
Thanks John! It sounds like we do have similar challenges. Your comments make me think I should do a study of the relationship between the music of a selection of songs and their lyrics to see if the relationship is clear. I have a song project on my list to write an Elliott Smith-like song and I am sure the lyric/music relationship for a lot of his songs will be quite clear.

I note you drew a distinction between lyrics and words … I am assuming you mean that lyrics have more metre/prosody to them, whereas words are just words with rhymes (or not)?

Andrew

Regards,
Andrew D
Adelaide, Sth Aust
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