From the early sixties, when Dylan released The Times They Are a-Changin’, this third studio recording and the first to contain all original compositions, the notion of the poet-troubadour captured the imagination of aspiring musicians. Suddenly and thereafter, it wasn’t quite enough anymore to be a musician (not enough, at least, for the record-buying public): now one also had to be a poet. For the youth culture of the 1960s embracing emerging popular music, the notion of folk-slash-rock-n’-roll -slash- guitar-rock performer composing his own songs became pervasive.
And we posed the question: so what’s a songwriting guitarist to do? Get thee to a poetry writing workshop?
Probably not the most useful idea. While some of the songwriting troubadours that we’ve talked about may incline one in that direction, the truth of the matter is that poems, per se, don’t necessarily make great song lyrics, just as perfectly enjoyable song lyrics often can’t stand alone compellingly as poems. As a writer by trade (and a very amateur musician by desire), I’ve written poems, stories, articles, novels, essays, reviews, speeches, advertising copy, marketing material and even technical manuals, and I can safely say that none of these skills alone or taken all together leave one any better equipped at writing song lyrics. Song lyrics are a different beast all together. Why? Well, for one thing, none of those aforementioned pieces of writing involve a melody, a chorus, a hook, or a time signature.
What writing song lyrics or writing a song in general does have in common with those other forms of writing is that everyone, from Irving Berlin to Ryan Adams, goes about the task of songwriting differently. Everyone develops his own method, whether he’s working with a collaborator or holed up in a garret with his guitar, pen, composition book, and overfull ashtray.
Songwriting, just like all forms of writing, is a craft as well as an art. Working at the craft, however inexpertly, is the principle means for developing skill. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also one of the surest ways of learning technique. We imitate other guitarists to learn and ultimately develop techniques of playing; we should imitate the habits of preferred songwriters to gain a more precise understanding of their lyric-writing techniques.
A rhyming dictionary is an essential tool. Don’t head down to Nashville or Austin without one. Your rhyming dictionary could make the difference between a finished song and a folder full of unfinished ones. It might not yield the greatest song ever written, but you should never find yourself stalled for want of a rhyme.
Bruce Springsteen’s first recording, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, is an object lesson in the practice of imitation and the value of a rhyming dictionary. In addition to the album’s unabashed similarities to Dylan and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the entire recording plays like a series of love songs to Springsteen’s rhyming dictionary. “Blinded by the Light” is rife with multiple internal rhymes as well as end rhymes (“Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat/In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescents pumps his way into his hat”) like Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (“Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”). The song “Blinded by the Light” had more words than most reviews of the entire album. In almost all the songs on the recording, Springsteen opts for rhyme-rich stream-of-consciousness and evocative image over actual sense; in other words, a lot of GFAP is incomprehensible, or we’re left to attach our own meaning.
And yet despite these excesses, one sees glimmers of the powerful songwriter that Springsteen will eventually become. The album’s fifth track, “Lost in the Flood,” a ballad that seems to be about a Vietnam War veteran and contains lots of religious imagery and street-racing references (Springsteen’s trademark escape metaphor, to be further and more stirringly explored in subsequent records), contains one of my favorite quatrains in rock music: “And someone said ‘Hey, man, did you see that?/His body hit the street with such a beautiful thud’/I wonder what the dude was saying/Or was he just lost in the flood.”
I like to imagine Springsteen writing this song with his rhyming dictionary open to the one syllable entries for “flood,” having already used “mud” and “blood” to maximum effect, not feeling the necessary import to “dud” and “spud,” and pondering that one remaining candidate, “thud,” until a magical bit of inspiration descends. Because it’s not just the rhyme alone that’s good, it’s the wonderful, gritty, evocative juxtaposition of the light, three-syllable adjective “beautiful” with the dark, onomatopoetic “thud” – a bit of music within the music.
When you listen to a recording like GFAP, you almost get the sense that Springsteen was trying to get as many words out of his system as fast as possible, and there’s probably some measure of truth to that as well as a bit of strategy. GFAP has three album’s worth of lyrics crammed onto one, like he’s trying to climb the songwriting learning curve as quickly as he can. It’s not a bad approach.
Springsteen’s song-writing matured fairly quickly – he succeeded in getting many of those words out of his system. But his vision also sharpened dramatically as did his themes. A number of different factors fueled this transformation. Springsteen continued to pursue his interest in American history. He was profoundly influenced by the work of historian Henry Steele Commager, particularly his Growth of the American Republic, at the same time he studied the work of mid-century folk icons like Woody Guthrie, and other classic American texts like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The American vastness, the metaphor of the open road, the blue collar ideal, and the yearning for a better life: all these themes, influences, and ideas are eventually reflected in songs that told specific stories, gritty and spare. It would be rather difficult to believe that Greetings from Asbury Park and Nebraska were composed by the same artist if you didn’t listen to the recordings that came in between, charting that progression.
Whether a writer of stories or a writer of songs, we’re trying to accomplish several things at once when we take up the process: to discover what we have to say, to figure out just how to say it, and to somehow cultivate and develop that voice which is ours and ours alone. Practice is the only certain way of getting there.
And we all know how to practice.
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Related Articles: In the Grip of Words, Pt. 1
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Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire , was published last year.
