I was in a songwriting consultation session recently with a talented writer. We were going over a lyric to one of his songs.

I was having trouble understanding what was going on at the beginning of the lyric, where you ‘set the table’ for the song. It’s a particularly bad place for lack of clarity because it muddies the rest of the song for the listener.

The first Verse is not only where you get the story or situation going, it’s also where you set the song’s terms – the context, the language, the narrator, the vocabulary, things like that. You create expectations, which you can then fulfill, confound, deny, surprise…

It turned out that this writer was confronting what can be one of the hardest parts of writing lyrics (and it sounds so simple): As Doc Pomus once put it to me, “Just say what you mean”. This writer wasn’t doing that here.

We went through the lyric line by line. When I got to phrases that confused me and asked him what he was trying to say, he repeated his original line and then said, “In other words…” and explained what he was trying to say… which was usually very clear, much clearer than the actual lyric. And often my response was, “Then just say that”.

Of course he’d have to do some work to get the thought to scan with the melody and sing easily, but at least he now knew what he wanted at that moment in the song.

I’ve said before that one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever heard came from author Barbara Kingsolver. When asked how she got her writing going when she was stuck, she replied that she simply asked herself, “What am I really trying to say here?”. And then she wrote down the answer.

Why is it sometimes so difficult to sing or write down the actual thought that comes next in a lyric? Where does the instinct, the impulse, to obfuscate, to be indirect, to beat around the bush, to not get to the point, come from? I wish I knew!

I grapple with this in my own writing. Sometimes saying, as did the writer I was working with, “In other words…” or asking myself, “What am I really trying to say here?” can help provide the right line or phrase.

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