Nice Little Rhyme You’ve Got There…
Quite simple?
Sorry for missing the Bonus Round yesterday, I’ve been trying to catch up on some pesky “joy of home ownership” projects before spring “outdoor weather” catches up to my limited enthusiasm for indoor projects!
A little review to start out. A couple of weeks ago we were talking about inspiration, where it comes from, and what to do when it shows up. I mentioned my Notes app where I write down thoughts, things that might make a good hook or other lyric, and sometimes just silly stuff. Ya just never know!
I shared one of those that had popped into my head sometime in the past, but why or whatever meaning it had at the time was lost to history now. It was:
“Bad timing my specialty“
So, not a great lyric to rhyme with, kinda awkward meter. Changed it to “Bad timing is my specialty” which had a better rhythm, and 8 syllables instead of seven might fit in 4/4 timing better. Still not great though, and “specialty” is likely a difficult rhyme. So we reordered the wording to:
“My specialty’s bad timing”
which rolls a little better rhythmically, but we’re back to 7 syllables. I think we can work with it though, so the first verse ended up:
“My specialty’s bad timing,
No meter, or lousy rhyming,
But I’ll think of more tomorrow,
So feel free to borrow”
How will we make the meter of that first line work? One way would be to slur the “T” sound in “specialty’s” - so we would sing “My specialteeees bad timing.” We aren’t adding a syllable, just stretching one for an extra beat. A different way would be to “syncopate” the line against the first beat, meaning the lyric would start on beat 2 of the measure. So the line would be sung “(beat) My specialty’s bad timing”. A lot of songs work really well by coming in on the second beat, it allows the chord played on the first beat to establish the basis for a melody line for the lyrics.
The next two lines have 8 syllables and we can either leave them as is, or change them to 7 syllable lines if that’s a more comfortable meter:
“My specialty’s bad timing,
No meter, lousy rhyming,
I’ll think of more tomorrow,
Just feel free to borrow”
So we changed some lyrics, it may or may not flow better, we’ll have to try to sing it a few times to see if we can “feel” a melody start to emerge that complements the new meter.
This seems like a good place to think about a chorus, and as we work through that, we may end up going back to the verse for more changes.
For our chorus, it looks like the line “My specialty’s bad timing” is going to be the logical “hook”, so we’ll use that as the last line of the chorus. I’m going to keep this simple with a two line chorus, so we need to come up with a 7 or 8 syllable line to lead with.
Let’s look at the rhyme structure of the verse before we do. It’s an “AABB” structure where repeated letters denote lines that rhyme, and different letters denote a different rhyme structure. So “timing” and “rhyming” rhyme, so they’re AA. “tomorrow” and “borrow” rhyme with each other, but not the first two lines, so they’re BB. All sorts of patterns are found in songs- ABAB, ABCB (where only the second and fourth lines rhyme) and so on.
For our chorus, since we‘ve decided on just 2 lines, we’ll find a word other than “rhyming” (since we already used that) to rhyme with “timing”.
I usually use wordhippo.com as a rhyming dictionary, but there are plenty of websites that are similar. Wordhippo allows you to filter by syllable count and a number of other characteristics, but not particularly by perfect, secondary and other rhyme forms. Perfect rhymes have identical ending vowel/consonant sounds, secondary and others may be close but not exact rhymes. Often “non-perfect” rhymes result in more interesting lyrics.
I settled on a near perfect rhyme lyric, because it surprised me how few words with an ending “ing” sound fit with “timing” in the context of our song:
“There’s just no silver lining,
When my specialty’s bad timing”
So there’s our silly song verse/chorus:
Verse
My specialty’s bad timing,
No meter, lousy rhyming,
I’ll think of more tomorrow,
Just feel free to borrow
Chorus
There ain’t no silver lining,
When my specialty’s bad timing
So I’ve already changed the chorus!!
Maybe I’ll work on this a little more for next week when we try out some chords to fit with our lyrics!!
Bonus Round for nest week: Elton John’s romantic gift
Cheers, and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic