Let’s just start by saying that when I teach songwriting, I focus mainly on the music part of writing songs. I work mainly with late elementary school and middle school kids; they have lots of crazy ideas and it’s best not to get in their way. In other words, I get a lot of songs about things like exploding tofu and unicorns pooping rainbow poop. It would be a great disservice to them to put an end to that, basically because it would just shut them down and then we wouldn’t have any songs.
It’s more important to have a “stupid” song that sounds like a song, than to be totally blocked from writing songs because the lyrics need to be “perfect,” whatever that is. I lost a student over this — no matter how much I encouraged them to just write anything because it can be tweaked later, they froze up and quickly decided writing music wasn’t for them. (I suppose the inverse is also true: having great lyrics and then not being able to write a song because all the melodies are not “perfect.” But I have not encountered this, yet.)
My goal is to get students to understand how to put melodies to words, regardless of the meaning of the words (within appropriate-for-school boundaries, natch). But we have to get words from somewhere, i.e., the inner recesses of our minds. The process of generating lyrics I rely on the most heavily is free-writing. I am a huge fan of free-writing. Free-writing is what enabled me to write a dissertation. It is what enables me to write this blog. It’s actually a big part of my composition process for writing chamber music.
What is free-writing, you ask? You just write whatever comes to mind, as it comes to mind, as fast you can. It does not matter what it’s about. If you have a topic in mind, definitely write down all the things that have absolutely nothing to do with that topic. If all you can think is, “This is stupid,” I want to see that on the paper, as many times as you think it, until you think of something else, that you will then also need to write down. I always explain to students that you will produce a lot of stuff that you will never use, but the process frees your mind to give you the best stuff that you will use. My free-writing dissertation diary had so much variations on “why the #%^&(%$! did I think getting a doctorate degree was a good idea, this is so stupid, I hate this” the document is like 500 pages. But within seconds of writing those things, I’d write some insight that made it into the final document.
When you do free writing, it often feels like a waste of time, and therefore you resist it; but the real waste of time is sitting staring at a blank page and writing nothing because you are judging everything as too crappy to be seen. You must allow yourself to do “bad work.” When you do that, it clears out the system for the good things to flow out. Write stupid lyrics. Write banal melodies. You are still practicing the skills you’ll need to write good songs — you’ll be practicing putting melodies to lyrics. As you gain the skills, you can tweak your free writing and your melodies for the better.
I do not require my students to write songs that make verbal sense. I do not require them to rhyme — I do present that as a future challenge, but only after we’ve written a lot of non-rhyming things (we’ll discuss this in a future post). I do require the lyrics to fit musically and will coach the student to make changes, sometimes to the words, sometimes to the melody. I will talk more about creating melodies in a future post.
Here is a basic method:
After we learn a song, we use the same chord progression and write new lyrics and melodies to go with it. I simply say, “You have two minutes to write down ideas for lyrics.” After two minutes, they read through what they have and circle 3-5 things that they like — salient ideas, I call them (I always thought this word came from “salis,” Latin for salt, but it actually comes from “salire,” Latin for to jump — either way, salty ideas that jump out at you…). Then those ideas are prompts to write for another two minutes. More circling, and then we usually have enough ideas to get started. I have them put their ideas in an order that they like. We look for any unusually long sentences — you know, the kind I’m always using on this blog — and break them up, because songs work better with short ideas. Then we start seeing how they fit in the phrases of the chord progression we are working with.
I read somewhere that this was basically how Talking Heads wrote their biggest hit, “Burning Down the House.” [This isn’t where I read it, but it does the job.] There you go — tried and true.