You can have a great lyric and a so-so melody; it's going to be a tough sell.
I like to get a vibe first, then a melody and really beat up the melody for a while, then try and find a lyric that really suits himher.
Every single lyric I've ever written I meant.
The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.
I don't have some songwriting formula that I kinda go by. Usually it just comes by way of inspiration. Sometimes I'm inspired by a melody first and sometimes I'm inspired by a lyric. Typically, I'm inspired by an idea for a lyric and then after we get the lyric going then we write a melody to it.
I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.
Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.
A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.
The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness.
Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.
[Kino] worked really well as a song title, and to build into a lyric, and also how we embraced mulit-media at the time.
Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.
Some songs started from a bass line, some started from having the full lyric and Jim, my drummer, who's also the first guy I've been in the studio with him since 16, sometimes he'd have an idea and I'd put a lyric to it and then the track evolves, there's no set way to write a song.
Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.
I don't spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself - and if other people like it, that's great.
The lyric deals with love and sorrow, the aphorism with contradiction and deceit.
The simpler songs are just done when the lyric has been stated; the more complex or band-oriented stuff can go in a million directions.
What makes a great song - you dont put it into words. You feel it. The perfect lyric. The perfect melody. It makes you feel something.
Sometimes it starts with a random lyric idea that sets the tone for the whole song. Chords and sounds build from the lyric and rhythm, kind of. Sometimes it's a track I fall I love with. . . but writing my own songs, I rarely write on tracks.
