When writing a lyric, we songwriters often have trouble answering a very mundane question:

What should I say?

Now, I wouldn’t have even begun writing lyrics if I didn’t feel strongly that I had ‘something to say’. But ‘having something to say’ is a very general idea or feeling. Writing a lyric for a particular song is not general at all – it’s incredibly specific. If it’s good, a lyric will fit its song – and no other. Every job is custom.

Say I’m writing a song… I have a Title, maybe a Chorus, maybe some idea for a story or situation, a part of a Verse that kind of makes sense… in other words, I have a long way to go before I have a real song on my hands. That’s a pretty familiar situation for me, and for a lot of songwriters.

Most good songs are still Title-focused. This is not as prevalent as it used to be, but still – most. 

Most of my songs end up being Title-focused. And, although I don’t usually start with a Title, once I’ve got one, I believe that the DNA of my lyric is usually encoded in that Title. My job is to crack that code.

This is where paying very close attention to the Title can pay off. Every word of it (even if it’s only one) contains ideas and clues that can, in the rest of the song, be worked with, against, and around; in every way from directly to abstractly.

Kind of a good news/bad news situation here. The good news is that I believe there is a code in the Title… and if I can crack it, I’ve got a map that will point me towards my goal – a complete and satisfying lyric.

The not-so-happy news is that, just like science, this takes a lot of experimenting – let’s just call it work. This can be fun; don’t get me wrong. But it can also be quite laborious – getting it right, that is.

In a Title-based song, when it works, everything leads to the Title, like a road leading home. And there are as many different roads as there are songwriters.

For example, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, Hal David, Marvin Gaye, mid- and late-period Springsteen, Adele, and Max Martin usually take a direct approach to the title (as did most 20th century songwriters). Some, like Joni Mitchell and Amy Winehouse, use an approach you might call, ‘direct… but surprising’.

Bob Dylan often takes the direct route but, protean as he is, he also doesn’t hesitate to approach a title from many different angles in the course of a single song. But he always keeps its centrality in mind.

Eminem and Frank Ocean use, and use well, a lot of poetic freedom. David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy, Kendrick Lamar, Sam Beam, or Thom Yorke might be considerably freer and sometimes abstract in their approach, depending on the period in which they wrote a particular song.

For me, sadly, useful ideas don’t fall from my pen like rain from the sky. But there are ideas in me if I keep after them.

I think about the Title and various ways I might approach it, trying out different angles. What does the Title mean to me? What are its possible ramifications? How many different sides does it have, and which one(s) do I want to work with? What are different ways to get to the Title, oppose it, contrast with it, interpret it? Sometimes the lines come quickly and instinctively; other times, not so much.

I need to choose words that fit this song only – hopefully ones that make it as interesting and fresh as I can – and leave out everything else. 

For the songwriter, unraveling the strands of DNA found in the Title can answer a lot of questions about what other words belong in a song.

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