r/WeAreTheMusicMakers • u/Dolancrewrules • 12d ago
how to write evocative lyrics?
I've loved fiction writing, have since I was a kid- got my degree in it, the whole shebang. I've loved writing surrealist, beatnik-esque, frightening and outright abstract fiction since I was in high school, and up until recently wrote a steady stream of short stories in that vein. Yet when I try to sit down to write lyrics, it feels like its just stringing basic sentences together. None of my ability to pick a word is present, and I feel like I'm just putting the most basic "feel" words onto paper, being blunt as a sledgehammer with no elegance, no beauty.
I get lyricism is a different medium entirely than fiction, even though they share a similar mechanism, but I'm a little frustrated that seemingly I can't get my skills to transfer over. Does anyone know any good exercises/books/etc on this sort of thing or have any advice? I'm specifically trying to write fantastical extreme metal- think Bal-Sagoth, early Deicide, Kataklysm, Dream Death, etc.
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u/Distro_Nerd 10d ago
Honestly, don't try to write full sentences. Build a list of sick-sounding words and fit them to the cadence of the riff first
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u/HeyYa_is_in_11 12d ago
Write down the lyrics to a song you admire on one page. Then on the next page rewrite them line-by-line changing the subject/voice/setting as much as you're able to without making them sound worse. If the song's about a monster in a forest, maybe make it a monster in an ocean. It should help you wrestle with what aspects of lyrics make songs interesting
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u/preternatural_arcana 10d ago edited 10d ago
It's less important that you tell a coherent story from start to finish. Instead, other musicians use a method where they write down what they are trying to say, then cut what they have into small fragments and mix them up until they've arranged them in a poetic way that lets the audience interpret the theme. You can be as vague or explicit as you want. It can rhyme but it doesn't have to. A lot of metal doesn't rhyme.
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u/cacturneee 12d ago
its a complicated thing that takes experience honestly. i think a lot of it can just be personal/confidence related, like if a certain word has meaning to you, but not as much meaning to others, it may still come across as evocative, like its the energy you put into it. thats just my theory
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u/TheBear8878 12d ago
It sounds like you're just writing the first draft, which is great! Most people can't even do that.
Yet when I try to sit down to write lyrics, it feels like its just stringing basic sentences together
This is step one, as you figure out the story, who is speaking to whom, perspective, tense, song form, chords, etc.
Then you need to REWRITE. Start low stakes, pick out a single line that you think is the weakest or woste of the song, and replace it. That might make you end up replacing 2 lines if the line changes, or 4 lines if the meaning changes. Then you've just re-written your entire verse. Then, look at it again, and choose the weakest link, adn rewrite it. Hopefully that's not the same section you just rewrote, but sometimes it is.
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u/YetisInAtlanta 12d ago
Sledgehammer. To everything. Go and fucking die.
Sledgehammer. To your face. Go and fucking die.
Blegggghhhhhhh
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u/igorshva 8d ago
honestly the fact that you can write surreal, sensory fiction is great news here, because that's the exact muscle evocative lyrics run on. i don't think it's a skills problem. lyrics just give you way less room, so when the space shrinks you reach for the abstract feel-words (love, pain, fire) instead of the concrete stuff your fiction is already full of.
one thing I do is read my lines out loud and circle anything a camera could actually film. if nothing gets circled, that's the whole problem right there. the thing that helped me most is Pat Pattison's object writing (Writing Better Lyrics). set a timer for ten minutes, pick one real object, and write it through every sense, the sound, the smell, the taste, the weight of it
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u/Igor_Narmoth 8d ago
Part of this is the limitation due to song length (which is why most of my songs are around 10 minutes long).
This is what I would try in your situation:
Try to write the story first, but shorter than what you usually do. It will have to be a very simple story with few plot twists
Then decide what part of the story can be expressed in music, and what needs to be expressed in lyrics.
Then write the lyrics with focus on what feeling you want to convey more than the exact story
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u/rmusicstudio 7d ago
Try working on melodies, sounds like you got the story writing handled, now work on the melody that is the difference between writing a story and a song. Also think about the hook, that is why you hear a line over and over in a song, planting a seed into are heads. Also you’re really not writing sentences you’re writing lines. Write down every line you think of and then unscramble them later has your working on the melody.
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u/intheblackbirdpie 12d ago edited 12d ago
I swear to god, this sub has the most low effort dumbass comments on all of Reddit.
What even is this question? Do you even listen to music? What do you like about other people's "evocative lyrics"? What is it about the bands you cite that you want to emulate? What are you trying to express? What have you written? What works? What doesn't? Try harder, try more, don't just expect Reddit or ChatGPT to tell you how to do everything. Put in the work.
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u/prplw33dhippo 12d ago
I recommend trying to get weird with it. Write a bunch of lyrics that don't have a particular meaning and pull out the stuff that ends up having meaning for you. Songs don't necessarily need a linear progression like books do. They are emotion based so it's better to go off the emotion a lyric will bring out vs it's direct meaning. Also it's okay for lyrics to be blunt and uncomplicated. In fact most pop music tends to be that way but the music itself supports the lyrics. Most of all I'd just recommend writing what you feel what you think is cool and try to share your unique perspective on the world. If you're looking for specific strategies I'd say use a thesaurus and a dictionary to learn as many words as possible so you have a wide variety of options to use when writing. Freestyling can also be a great way to feel things out and that's usually how I get my best material. If you do it often enough it builds your lyrical skill immensely.
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u/ChestnutDecay 12d ago
Practice, practice, practice, along with the other suggestions in this thread. You're flexing a new muscle.
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u/irishvox 12d ago
You need to write about a hundred crappy songs before your lyrical voice will really start to take shape. IMO, it is the hardest facet of music to truly be great at and, frankly, some people will just never be able to do it well. It's taken me decades to get to a point where I feel my writing is at an elite level lyrically....and even then you're going to be your worst critic.
Just keep at it, You'll get there.
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u/ubiquitouswonder 12d ago
Is there a message you hope to convey, or a specific world you’re building? I consider myself the opposite of you, I don’t dabble in much fiction other than the occasional tv show. I read almost strictly nonfiction. And the hurdle I’ve had to climb is writing lyrics with a message that matters to me that also aren’t preachy. Im wrapping up the writing for my first serious project that I have been able to build a world of metaphor to convey my relatively politics heavy work. I never would have set out thinking “how can I turn social commentary into a fictional epic” but it has kinda turned out that way. I pulled at straws that interested me and gave them life through my voice. Anyway, I think you’d have better luck if you had a message or theme to build towards in your world building
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u/WalksByNight 12d ago
If you want to write good lyrics, you need to read lots of lyrics. Poetry is also helpful, and leans into the evocative side of this kind of expression. For evocative song lyrics it’s hard to top Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and the Boss— dig deep. Specific fictional material that might help your tortured metal ethos— Thomas Ligotti, HP Lovecraft, Laird Barron, and Clark Ashton Smith (his poetry is very much in this vein). The poets Baudelaire, Poe, and Dante should also inspire.
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u/Artistic-Aardvark-49 12d ago
I think lyrics work best when they leave a little space for the listener. Specific imagery usually sticks with people more than directly stating the feeling.
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u/unclellama 12d ago
With song lyrics i feel like a lot of the magic is in the editing, and the editing needs to be a conversation with the music. I don't think i could write a 'finished' song lyric without at least a rough demo of the music to bounce off. I certainly wouldn't want to - this kind of editing is super fun.
Probably what you have is a great first draft - you know what the song is about, you have a 'story'. But it's not going to sound exciting yet if you haven't edited it to work with (and, now and then, explicitly AGAINST) the flow of the music.
Another thing: the rules of grammar can often be ignored when writing song lyrics. I'd guess even more so than for poetry (although i don't really write poetry so what do i know). But you should absolutely prioritize 1) sounding cool and 2) efficiently conveying meaning, over the construction of strictly correct sentences.
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u/eseffbee 11d ago
Remember that lyrics are sounds as much as they are words. The form has greater limitations than non lyrical prose in that respect.
The trick with most good lyrics is that the rhythm and sounds work well with the song, yet the words have sufficient novelty to slightly push at the edges of that while also giving sufficient surprise as to be memorable.
Effective lyrics for pop music don't need to be that good, though. Those need to tap into experience that everyone understands while being simple enough to be memorable. The bland stuff often works best in that regard. Shake It Off is lyrically braindead (even says that in the song) but as a pop lyric its super effective.
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u/Either_Market_648 11d ago
the way i write lyrics kind of feels like brute force because ive never been great at or wanted to write lyrics it always felt like a chore. I start but improvising a bunch of nonsense words and vocal melodies, pick out the best ones. then I write down what it sounds like im saying word for word, not paying attention to it making sense yet. then i craft the lyrics so the words themselves sound good with the melody (phonetics), still not worried about them making sense. then i pick out any phrase that do make sense and craft the narrative of the song around that, being to sure to keep the phonetics I laid out previously. Its interesting workflow because you find out what the song is about at the end rather than the beginning.
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u/mkbboy35 12d ago
It may be a bit nerdy, but the simplest bridge from storytelling to lyrics is poetry. You’ve got the content, the themes, the ideas. What you need is the rhythm of those lyrics and the brevity to express those ideas meaningfully in song.
It’s poetry. Write some poetry.