Nuts and Bolts
What did you say?
Yesterday’s Bonus Round: Townes Van Zandt covered “Dead Flowers”, a song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. TVZ’s cover was used in the ending credits of the film “The Big Lebowski”.
Today we’re going to take a break from the accompanying music of a song (key, chord progressions, melodies, time signatures, tempo, dynamics, vocals, etc) and focus on the lyrics and lyrical structures of songs.
I usually write lyrics and then I build chord progressions and melody around them. A lot of writers do just the opposite, and the times I have written that way were somewhat successful, but it was excruciatingly difficult for me. Your mileage may vary. Reading a lot of classic poetry helps, even if the language is archaic and steeped in the idioms of the era it was written. Still, the meter, phrasing, rhyme and rhythm structure give insight into writing song lyrics. Some of my favorite poets are of classic poetry (Shelley, Browning), others more contemporary (Frost, Ginsberg [!!]) and many more in between. Reading well allows you to write well (or at least better). Poetry and lyrical music are akin in structure - if you read poetry by some of the greats aloud, you begin to see their phrasing and rhythmic structures, or at least your interpretation of those structures.
That’s an important point - what an author of poetry or a writer of lyrics INTENDED, and what you heard or INTERPRETED, are often, even likely, different things. Songs are meant to be heard, so the singer uses emphasis and dynamics and pronunciation to convey the intended meaning and may be less ambiguous than with poetry. Poets, though, have the advantage of revealed punctuation. Your lyrics, even if you’re singing them, may be interpreted differently, even misheard, by your audience. The point being songs are a shared listening experience between the writer/singer and the listener. Sometimes either, or both, say or hear something different.
Rhyme and the rhyming structure are expected, to some degree at least, by the reader of poetry and the listener of lyrical music. Rhyme in music and poetry is largely a matter (but not always) of the ending vowel sound, often modified by an adjacent consonant sound. Let’s look at the chorus of John Prine’s “Lonesome Friends Of Science”:
‘The lonesome friends of science say
"The world will end most any day"
Well, if it does, then that's okay
'Cause I don't live here anyway
I live down deep inside my head
Where long ago I made my bed
I get my mail in Tennessee
My wife, my dog, and my family’
The first 4 lines end with the long “A” sound, unmodified by the adjacent “y”. The next 2 lines end with the short “e” sound as modified by the adjacent “d” consonant. The last 2 share the long E sound, using the double “e” in Tennessee and the “y” modified by the adjacent “l” consonant.
Would anyone but another songwriter analyze this structure? Probably not - the listener expects the final vowel sound rhyme and hears it. In the verses to the this song, the rhyming scheme is all over the place, sometimes barely rhyming at all.
“Lonesome Friends Of Science” is probably “the hook” - it’s the title, and first line of the chorus, but doesn’t appear in the second verse at all. John Prine, being John Prine, knew the people who love his songs didn’t expect formulaic compliance with the rules, and we all loved him the more for his departure from “the rules”!
An example from poetry (I won’t insert it here, but it’s easily found): Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. What would be the hook analog? It’s definitely not “the raven”, though the phrase appears often. Is it “Nothing more” or “Nevermore”? Both end a stanza often. I kinda think the hook is the ending vowel sound in the lines that end in some variation of “o” modified by the consonant “r”, producing the rhyming “or” sound - lore, door, floor, yore, Lenore, etc, and of course, “never-” and “nothing-” more.
Earlier, I used the words “meter” and “phrasing”. Those concepts establish rhythm structures in lines and the larger structures of verses, choruses and the bridge in a song. Meter usually comes down to a syllable count within a line, that repeats in some series of lines. Here’s a more scholarly explanation relating specifically to poetry: “Meter is a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that defines the rhythm of some poetry.” Pretty much defines meter in songs as well. Count the syllables in a line and emphasis some using melody. Make the lines mostly match the other lines. Repeat that in the other verses. Make things a little different in the chorus, and even more different in the bridge. Break the “rules”, at least a little. Profit!
Phrasing is a related concept. Here’s a reasonably good, if somewhat pompous, definition from Oxford’s Music Dictionary: “Phrase. Short section of music of a musical composition into which the music, whether vocal or instrumental, seems naturally to fall. Sometimes this is 4 measures, but shorter and longer phrases occur. It is an inexact term: sometimes a phrase may be contained within one breath, and sometimes sub-divisions may be marked. In notation, phrase-marks are the slurs placed over or under the notes as a hint of their proper puntutation in performance. The art of phrasing by a performer is often instinctive and is one of the features by which a supreme artist may be distinguished from one of lesser inspiration, whether singer or instrumentalist.”
I was going to edit out the sentence that begins with the words, “In notation” because it refers to sheet music scores (I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to talk about THAT on here). We’re probably only going to get to chord charts and tabs here, though reading the “signature” part of a score will be a topic because so much important information is contained within a few symbols. I left the sentence in because it discusses punctuation. I use a lot of punctuation in this newsletter, but it only works because you’re reading it. If I sang it to you (heaven forbid!), you wouldn’t hear the commas, colons, parentheses, etc. In songwriting, phrasing relates to the internal rhythm of a line, (mostly) though in a larger sense, it relates to how the line complements other lines, through meter and rhyme, and how all the lines of a chorus, verse or bridge work together (or fail to) in order to make the song coherent and meaningful, and if we break the rules the right way, interesting.
So, we covered a lot of ground today!! My hope is you will use these concepts to first analyze the songs of others. What’s the rhyme structure? What rhythms do the meter and phrasing of lines produce? How is meaning portrayed when punctuation can’t be read, only heard? How is the song you’re listening to using the things we discussed providing punctuation through other means? What meaning is the songwriter or performer trying to convey? What meaning are you actually hearing?
To do this, you’ll need to listen widely, even far outside your taste in genre. Get the lyrics off of Genius Lyrics, or Wikipedia or Ultimate Guitar, analyze them, and compare the musical punctuation to the written punctuation where possible. Finally, write some lyrics - they can be silly, nonsensical or heartfelt - doesn’t matter. What’s your rhyme scheme, rhythmic structure, meter, phrasing? Does it work? How can you improve them by following or breaking the rules? Last of all, what melody or chord progression is in your head while, or after, writing?
Have fun with it!
Bonus Round: What’s a “mondegreen”?
Cheers, and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic