Exercise

​Step 1: Find a voice recorder and set the timer for 10 minutes.

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​Step 2: Close your eyes and imagine you’re sitting in a café with your best friend, a family member, or someone you feel comfortable talking to. Tell them, as if they were sitting across from you, the story you want to tell in your song. What did you see? What did you learn? What did you think? What did you feel? Keep talking into the voice recorder until the timer goes off after 10 minutes.

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Step 3: Listen back to the recording and write down all the sentences you could use when writing or rewriting your lyrics. Don’t forget to write down all the “yeahs” and “uhms” as well. Because lyric writing has a conversational tone of voice, these words can actually help create this type of speech.

 

Theory

Bell (2017, p. 89) argues the following: ‘Your job as a lyricist is to capture how people sound when they talk. There’s an art to expressing big and interesting ideas in a way that sounds easy and conversational, and that is what lyric writing is all about’. Besides, Bell (2017, p.88) states: ‘When we speak we also do things you don’t usually do in writing. We repeat things for emphasis. We add words like ‘yeah’ or ‘um’ if they feel natural. We tend to use fewer long or complicated words in speech and we tend to speak less poetically than we write’.

 

Sources

Bell, E. (2017) The Art of Songwriting: How to Create, Think and Live Like a Songwriter. New York: The Song Foundry.