It’s been said many times – creating lyrics is an extremely economical form of writing. You usually get at most a few hundred words to say your entire piece, tell the whole story. This means you have to leave a tremendous amount of possible lines and words out… and put very little in. There’s just no room.

Offsetting that is the incomparable advantage of having music accompanying your words. Music’s potential to add meaning to language is practically unlimited.

But looking at the narrower function of lyrics – telling a story, putting us into a situation, painting a picture – is where it’s important to remember that the listener is always doing most of the work.

When a line is sung, the listener takes that handful of words and makes up a story, or a possible story, or even several potential stories, about what that line means. That’s one of the things that a human brain does. It immediately goes to work to create meaning and order from anything it’s presented with – in this case, a series of a few words in a certain sequence.

Then the next line is heard and the listener uses its new information to amend their previous suppositions/guesses. The line after that does the same, and so on through the song.

Every listener’s interpretation will be somewhat different, but in any kind of song, if it’s written well, the story, scenario, or effect the listener infers will be close to what the writer intended (it also has to be well performed, of course).

Even non-narrative lyrics have to be carefully chosen to create what the writer intends… even if that effect gives the listener much more freedom to interpret, or many more interpretive possibilities, than in a more conventional narrative song.

Think about it this way – our lyrics are primarily indicators. We’re trying to use the power of suggestion and inference and detail to get the story the listener is making up to be something close to what we have in mind. Our challenge is that we can only include a tiny fraction of the details of the story to get this result.

This is why precision and discipline are so important in lyric writing. Every word affects the picture the listener is painting in their head. This will never be something we can completely control. But thinking about not just the lines, but also the spaces between the lines, can help.

It’s a bit like a comic book. In between every panel of a comic (or graphic novel) there is white space – ‘the gutter’. As the reader makes the transition from one panel to the next, passing through that white space, they’re making choices, mainly subconscious ones: choices about how to interpret what they just read, and then choices about how the next panel relates, and what it all means so far (not to mention choices like ‘should I read the words first or look at the picture?’, etc. – similar to ’should I now primarily pay attention to the words or the music?’).

The listener makes similar transitions and choices from line to line in a song. A lyric is participatory; a team effort.

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts, additions, disagreements in the Comments section below:

And please share on facebook etc. by clicking these tabs –