While scribbling away on our pads or pecking away at our iPads, as we write and revise lyrics, it can be easy to forget that lyrics are for singing… even when we ourselves are the ones who have to sing them! Lyrics are not for reading off a page or reciting. They’re musical words, made to be sung.

Last December I looked closely at the sly and sexy lyric to the holiday standard “Let It Snow’.  But what I’m noticing this year about the words to ’Let It Snow’, written by Sammy Cahn, is just how easily they sing. Whether sung by Ella Fitzgerald or by you or me, they’re a breeze. I believe that this more than anything is the key to Cahn’s success as a writer of scores of hits. And I think it’s something many of us (definitely me) could be better at.

Compared with his peers from the ‘Great American Songbook’ era, Cahn’s lyrics don’t have the wit of Cole Porter, the bruised romanticism of Lorenz Hart, the sentiment and social message of Oscar Hammerstein. Cahn’s lyrics are clever, fun, and romantic when called for, but they’re especially marked by focus, simplicity, and directness… And above all by how easy and elegant the words are to sing. Cahn wrote many hits for Frank Sinatra, and it was said that Sinatra changed everyone’s lyrics but Sammy Cahn’s.

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow

It doesn’t show signs of stopping
And I brought some corn for popping
The lights are turned way down low
Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow

Etc. Sing it yourself. Every word sits on its note like it was born there – which it was (and what notes! – by the great Jule Styne). The rhymes are perfect, consistent, and all in the right place, and the words fit the melody like a glove. No muss, no fuss. Looks easy?… Try it!

Of course you can’t really write a song like this nowadays, unless you’re being intentionally retro. People sing differently now, talk differently… Now there are so many different styles from everywhere in the world; Cahn wrote his lyrics in an incomparably more homogeneous environment.

But I think the basic idea still stands: All other things being equal, Easy To Sing is a damn good thing.

(For Part 1 on ‘Let It Snow, click here.)

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