Musicality and Sound are parts of lyric writing that can be easy to neglect, but without these elements a great lyric is impossible.

Content is not enough. A good lyric above all has the quality of being singable – singability. If the words of a song are enjoyable to sing, no matter what nonsense they contain otherwise, you’re more than halfway there.

This is why many songwriters start with just making sounds – sha, la, ooh, ah, and the like – that go with their melody. If you get the sounds right – i.e. they’re easily singable – you have a chance. Not that filling in a story, a situation, a setting, or a character is easy or isn’t crucial, but knowing your song will sing is a great place to be.

If you don’t start this way, and most of us probably don’t (including me most of the time), then it’s critical to sing the song a lot after you’ve written the lyric, even if just to yourself. There’ll usually be phrases or words that don’t easily roll off the tongue and out of your mouth. These words and phrases need more work; they need rewriting.

As an example of what you can discover, say you have a phrase of melody that ends with a held note… and the word you’ve chosen for that note is ‘bird’. It may make perfect sense in your lyric – be profound, even.

But when you try to hold that last note on an ‘rd’ sound – ‘birrrrrrdd’… you’ll find yourself in singing trouble. Most of the time, on a held note you need a singable vowel.

The same idea applies when seeking the right consonant sounds for the beginnings and ends of words if, as is often the case, you need percussiveness or, conversely, a softer attack or landing.

There are many similar traps that one can fall into if words are not sung over and over, to see if they come off the tongue as easily as the song requires (occasionally songs want to sound more angular and knotty and you’re not going for ’easy singability’. But most of the time you are.)

Singers can sometimes have a head start as songwriters because they’re often, by experience or just naturally, tuned into the singability of their song. But however one gets there, it’s necessary to focus on this. It can’t be ignored.

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