One way to combat blandness in a lyric (a battle worth fighting) is to increase what’s at stake in a song, make it more dramatic.

I recently was working on a new song called ‘The Bridge’.  I had the music and words for the Chorus, the lyric of which was:

We came to the bridge and we walked across
Till we got to the middle
You go your way and I’ll go mine

This worked for me.  It suggested a lot of possibilities for the Verses – almost anything could happen before, during, and after the people in the song come to the bridge. And I liked the idea, the image and symbolism, of the people parting ways in the center of a bridge.

I thought the words went with the music I had… but in kind of an odd way, which may have subliminally suggested to me that I go a little outside the box in the Verses.

I started out writing a breakup song, which seemed like a reasonable way to work with this Chorus.  But what I was coming up with was unexciting and overfamiliar to me.  At some point I asked myself, ‘What if something more dramatic happens between these two people at the bridge?’.

This eventually led me to the story I ended up with which, lyrically, would probably fall into the ‘murder ballad’ area (so I ended up with a breakup song anyway, but of a different type… and the song itself is not a ballad).  I’m not saying that this particular solution would work for anybody else – or for me in another song – but, in this case, I liked it (and I’m the boss of my songs!).

I also feel it helped me be less specifically autobiographical.  I’ll get into this in another post, but more and more these days I find that I can be just as invested emotionally in songs that are about characters who are, externally at least, quite different from me.  This is exciting and freeing to me as a Songwriter and storyteller; it opens up a lot of new possibilities.  And the songs can feel just as authentic to me, if not more so.

And Yes, I know I did ‘bury the title’ in ‘The Bridge’, which I don’t usually do… but it felt right in this case!