It’s good to remember that writing melodies and words for songs relates very strongly to something almost everyone does without consciously thinking about it – that is, talking.

In songs, in most cases we simply want the listener to hear and understand the words and the added feeling that the melody brings to them, and vice-versa.  But, if we think of singing as conversation, it’s amazing how stilted and unnatural the (sung) words we write can sometimes be.

When we speak our sentences come naturally out of our mouths with the emphasis on the most important words.  We rarely even think about how we’re emphasizing our ideas.  We go for the most direct way to get our thoughts and feelings across – which is usually exactly what we’re trying to do with words and music in a song.

But in writing a song, this natural expression does not come naturally to most of us.

If we’re saying the sentence, ‘Get the hell out of here!’, we might say it as ‘Get the HELL OUT of here!’, or ‘GET the HELL out of HERE!’, or ‘Get the hell OUT of here!’

We would NOT say, ‘Get THE hell out OF here!’.  Yet it’s amazing how often one hears lyrics that take the most unimportant word, like ‘The’, ‘And’, or ‘Of’, and match it with the most stressed and important note in the melody.

I can’t tell you how important understanding this concept is to a well-crafted song.  (You don’t always want a song to feel ‘well-crafted’, but that another story for another post.)

Having words lay on the melody in a way that allows them to be sung naturally – more or less the way you would speak them in a conversation – is simply the best way to be understood in both a conversation and a song.

Unless there’s a good reason not to, the best songwriters – from Irving Berlin to Rodgers and Hart to Bob Dylan to Lennon & McCartney to Eminem and beyond, to almost anyone you can mention – have kept their words singable… and that usually means sounding and feeling natural and conversational – even if sometimes it’s an extremely heightened conversation.