Part 2 of this series
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Unlike musicianship, a certain mastery of which can come to a person at an early age (we all know, or have read about, or deeply envy, musical prodigies), lyric-writing is another matter altogether. Language skills are complex, a marrying of the literal and the abstract, and something that develops with time and, more importantly, practice. There’s a very good reason why there are child prodigies in the world of music, chess, mathematics, and sports but none in the world of writing: no seven-year-old poets; no nine-year-old novelists.
But, like we said in the previous installment, imitation is one of the best and fastest ways to learn. You copy the techniques of other guitarists until you begin to refine and develop your own, and that same type of mimicry can help you find your voice as a lyricist. That, and your rhyming dictionary.
Of course, while your rhyming dictionary can often help you out of a tight spot, as we talked about last time, it can also lead you astray. (Recall from our previous installment Bruce Springsteen’s flagrant act of rhyming dictionary abuse, otherwise known as Greetings from Asbury Park.)
Here’s an example of wrong-headed rhyming that’s always had a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard effect on my ear. On Billy Joel’s famed 1973 album Piano Man and the B-side to that hit single is a modest, pretty love song called “You’re My Home.” Unfortunately, there aren’t many good rhymes for “home” that are suitable for a love song. “Roam” would work (though for some reason he doesn’t use it) but “comb” would be a stretch. “Foam” and “gnome” would most likely transform it from a love song to a fetish song. But Joel gets around the dearth of “home” rhymes by using near-rhymes:
Well I’ve never had a place
That I could call my very own
But that’s all right my love
Cuz you’re my home
In the same fashion in another verse, Joel near-rhymes “alone” with “home,” and this strategy works nicely. Then, alas, we get to the final verse and things unravel:
You’re my castle, you’re my cabin
And my instant pleasure dome
I need you in my house
Cuz you’re my home
I don’t know what an “instant pleasure dome” is, and I’ll wager that Billy Joel doesn’t either. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the misguided fellow originally wrote “You’re my castle, you’re my cabin/And my geodesic dome” until someone advised him that even though intended as a metaphor, geodesic dome is just not very sexy, however functional a structure. In any case, the whole problem could have been avoided if he’d have just abandoned “dome” and reused one of his earlier rhymes.
That doesn’t mean that one can’t get away with bad rhymes once in a while or just some weak lyric writing in general if the song is powerful enough. Remember this: anyone who has ever written a song has at one time never written a song. You’ve got to start somewhere. There’s a pretty good chance that your first song (or at least your first set of lyrics) probably won’t mark a milestone in rock history, or even make it as a track on your first studio recording. But you never know.
When The Doors were recording their self-titled debut album in 1966, Robbie Krieger came to the band one morning with a new song, the first he’d ever written: “Light My Fire.” He showed everyone the chord changes to the verse and the chorus. Krieger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and drummer John Densmore began to tinker a bit with Krieger’s first draft. According to Manzarek, the tune started out strong musically, A minor to F sharp minor, but in the chorus it was a bit pop sounding, “like a Sonny and Cher song,” he said, which they modified after a little brainstorming -- Manzarek had a classical and jazz background, Densmore was a jazz drummer, and Krieger was a flamenco guitarist.
But Krieger only had one verse to the song and the chorus. They needed a second verse, so Jim Morrison, who was anyway the “poet” of the foursome, stepped up:
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love becomes a funeral pyre
Now “Light My Fire” is certainly the most famous Doors song and an iconic piece of rock music, and with good reason. It’s not easy to do, but if you just look at that quatrain that Morrison wrote and disassociate it from the tune, just try to read it on its own merits, it just seems bombastic and weird. “No time to wallow in the mire”? Maybe Jim Morrison was capable of appealing to a woman’s passionate side by suggesting that the two of them avoid wallowing in the mire, but I can’t imagine how such talk would work for some 17-year-old kid in Midwestern America.
In the end, however, it didn’t matter. The verse, as odd and overly literary as it is, is nevertheless woven so deeply into our perception of the song that it’s basically incidental. “Light My Fire” is really about its interesting chord structure, its Latin groove that transitions into a hard rock chorus, about Manzarek’s adaptation of John Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things” for his solo section, as well as his nifty piano riff based on a Johann Sebastian Bach circle of fifths that they used as the song’s introduction as well as the turnaround after the solos, and about Morrison’s final vocal crescendo. It’s not that the lyrics are unimportant; “Light My Fire” wouldn’t be the song that it is without them. But they’re just one part of a piece with many other strong parts.
Which brings us to the most important, or at least most useful, truism: music is about collaboration, and one shouldn’t avoid the input of others when making it. Unlike many of the visual arts and all of the language arts, collaboration is essential to musical composition. The varying skills and influences of other musicians/songwriters/music professionals help deepen and broaden one’s musical ideas. Soliciting the input and help of others is as much of a learning process as it is a worthwhile practice. Collaboration doesn’t make the work any less yours.
A final note: one of the differences between songwriting and other kinds of writing that I’ve always found interesting is that songwriters don’t often write very much about the process of writing songs. Probably because these wouldn’t make very interesting songs, I expect. But other types of writers – novelists, short story writers, and poets – frequently write about writers and writing. Being the solitary and lengthy practice that it is, the consuming process and that life is what they know best: writers don’t get out much, believe me.
Singer-songwriters and bands tend to write about life on the road; that’s where much of their time and energy is expended and, subsequently, where they have to do most of their songwriting. But there are the occasional exceptions. There’s a breezy fluff of a song on Elton John’s 1975 Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy called “Writing” that plays with the subject. But on The Who’s 1978 recording Who Are You, Pete Townshend was plainly thinking about the whole process quite a bit. From the opening track, “New Song”:
You need a new song
I'll set the words up so they tear right at your soul
Don't take me too long
But there's a danger that I'll plagiarize something old
My fingers kill me as I play my guitar
'Cause I've been chewing down at my nails
My hairline ain't exactly superstar
But there's one trick that never fails
This never fails
I write the same old song with a few new lines
Everybody wants to cheer it
I write the same old song you heard a good few times
Admit you really want to hear it
Six tracks later, as if to give us more explicit insight, is a song called “Guitar and Pen”:
When you sing through the verse and you end in a scream
And you swear and you curse 'cause the rhyming ain't clean
But it suddenly comes after years of delay
You pick up your guitar, you can suddenly play
When your fingers are bleeding and the knuckles are white
Then you can be sure, you can open the door
Get off of the floor tonight
You have something to write
Never spend your guitar or your pen...
Amen, Pete.
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Related Articles:
In the Grip of Words: On Lyrics, Pt. 1
In the Grip of Words: On Lyrics, Pt. 2
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Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire, was published last year.
