How do I write good lyrics?
I used to make songs a while ago and I wanna get back into that, but whenever I try to write lyrics my mind just goes blank. What should I do?
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Expert Comments
One of the best ways to become a better songwriter is to turn to the songs and poetry you admire for inspiration. Maybe take a break from writing your own lyrics and listen to your favorite songs again: what is it about them you love? What do you find moving or meaningful about them?
When you do sit down to write, go slow, and don't feel pressured to write a perfect song from the get-go: it may take time, especially if you haven't done it in a while. Brainstorming and freewriting can help you develop ideas to write about. So can changing your environment: take a walk, and take notes about what you observe.
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When you do sit down to write, go slow, and don't feel pressured to write a perfect song from the get-go: it may take time, especially if you haven't done it in a while. Brainstorming and freewriting can help you develop ideas to write about. So can changing your environment: take a walk, and take notes about what you observe.
Just start writing
. Begin. Get the muscle moving. It’s less intimidating once you start, and spontaneity can be powerful. Once a creative, always a creative. You don’t lose that. When you start writing again, that part of your brain activates.
Personally, I don’t write lyrics on paper. I start with humming and melodies. Melody always comes first for me. But some writers are lyric-driven. Think of songwriting like poetry—take The Star-Spangled Banner. It started as a poem by Francis Scott Key before becoming a song. Songwriting is essentially words plus melody.
If you’ve been writing a lot and hit a block, take a break—go for a walk, clear your head. But if you haven’t written in a while and feel blocked, you need to start writing again. It’s like going back to the gym. It might feel hard at first, but once you start moving, the energy returns . It’s all about getting into the groove again.
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Personally, I don’t write lyrics on paper. I start with humming and melodies. Melody always comes first for me. But some writers are lyric-driven. Think of songwriting like poetry—take The Star-Spangled Banner. It started as a poem by Francis Scott Key before becoming a song. Songwriting is essentially words plus melody.
If you’ve been writing a lot and hit a block, take a break—go for a walk, clear your head. But if you haven’t written in a while and feel blocked, you need to start writing again. It’s like going back to the gym. It might feel hard at first, but once you start moving, the energy returns . It’s all about getting into the groove again.
The best thing is to just rip the Band-Aid off and pick up your guitar and just get in there and start. Starting is the most important thing
because if you never start, you never create anything. Songwriters and creatives tend to be very self-critical of their thoughts and their songs and whatever they're coming up with, because a lot of the time it's so personal, because songwriting is personal
. Lots of people use their journeys or their friends’ journeys, and it feels very personal. So, the very first thing would be to just start with anything.
And then, what helps me is knowing that my first song is always going to be my worst. So, just knowing that it is a journey. And who knows? Maybe you write the first one and you're like, “Oh, I thought it was going to be the worst and this is great,” but not really expecting too much. You can sit down and you can write a song and nobody has to hear it, or it could be great and you can let everybody hear it, but you don't have to share it with everybody yet.
Just giving yourself half an hour or even just starting by telling yourself, “I'm going to write for five minutes,” and then that five minutes somehow turns into 30 minutes. I think those are things that helped me when I'm stuck in a rut.
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And then, what helps me is knowing that my first song is always going to be my worst. So, just knowing that it is a journey. And who knows? Maybe you write the first one and you're like, “Oh, I thought it was going to be the worst and this is great,” but not really expecting too much. You can sit down and you can write a song and nobody has to hear it, or it could be great and you can let everybody hear it, but you don't have to share it with everybody yet.
Just giving yourself half an hour or even just starting by telling yourself, “I'm going to write for five minutes,” and then that five minutes somehow turns into 30 minutes. I think those are things that helped me when I'm stuck in a rut.
I think one of the top tips, and it comes across a bit cliché, but is to write what you know
.
It's difficult to understand that concept until you have a sense of what you know. Because what I know makes me unique or different or distinctly able to respond to my own instincts when I write something down. So, to break that down into a tool, that's why we do free writing, journaling, object writing, and sensory writing . And this is something that certainly wasn't born with songwriting. It's fiction writers who really know how to visually write a scene. It's a bit like character development when we write lyrics.
And different song styles value lyrics in different ways. So, for example, if we're simply trying to write something lighthearted that has a groove underneath, think funk, for example, the lyric could be, ‘get up, get up’. And we think that's the best lyric for that moment. So, I think part of writing great lyrics is to understand what great lyrics are in the context of your music. And I think this is where people get stalled; we seem to want to just get to the lyric writing part without knowing where we're going. So, we just know that there is someone who is going to determine whether this is great or not. And often, it really depends on who the personality is musically.
Whenever we write a song lyric, even if we're writing something completely fictional, the words that we choose, the perspective of the character, stem from what we empathize with and what we think is an interesting story, but it's all about the character. And that should be absolutely dripping through the musical setting, as well as the words themselves. Sometimes we think that lyrics are somehow a kind of binary expression, like this word means this. And sometimes that's true, but when there's metaphor and abstraction, it takes on a quality that is layers and layers deep.
So, write what you know, and try to take exactly what you've written in your free writing and transfer that into a song lyric . Because again, we sit and we try to choose what we want to say, and then we somehow feel like we should interpret that and write lyrics that are lyric-y. But when we do that, something gets lost – a lot gets lost.
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It's difficult to understand that concept until you have a sense of what you know. Because what I know makes me unique or different or distinctly able to respond to my own instincts when I write something down. So, to break that down into a tool, that's why we do free writing, journaling, object writing, and sensory writing . And this is something that certainly wasn't born with songwriting. It's fiction writers who really know how to visually write a scene. It's a bit like character development when we write lyrics.
And different song styles value lyrics in different ways. So, for example, if we're simply trying to write something lighthearted that has a groove underneath, think funk, for example, the lyric could be, ‘get up, get up’. And we think that's the best lyric for that moment. So, I think part of writing great lyrics is to understand what great lyrics are in the context of your music. And I think this is where people get stalled; we seem to want to just get to the lyric writing part without knowing where we're going. So, we just know that there is someone who is going to determine whether this is great or not. And often, it really depends on who the personality is musically.
Whenever we write a song lyric, even if we're writing something completely fictional, the words that we choose, the perspective of the character, stem from what we empathize with and what we think is an interesting story, but it's all about the character. And that should be absolutely dripping through the musical setting, as well as the words themselves. Sometimes we think that lyrics are somehow a kind of binary expression, like this word means this. And sometimes that's true, but when there's metaphor and abstraction, it takes on a quality that is layers and layers deep.
So, write what you know, and try to take exactly what you've written in your free writing and transfer that into a song lyric . Because again, we sit and we try to choose what we want to say, and then we somehow feel like we should interpret that and write lyrics that are lyric-y. But when we do that, something gets lost – a lot gets lost.
Reader Comments
Watch a Ralph Murphy lecture on songwriting. He’s been making hits for like 50 years. He has so much good info for writing music. I suggest everyone check him out on YouTube. . . . Me personally, I usually hum and mumble over chord progressions I make and then words start to form in places. I’ll write those down and then start working out from there. I use Ralph Murphy’s tips to avoid pitfalls which has been the most beneficial to my songwriting.
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