What is the story you want to tell? Let’s find some new angles to writing the deep, poetic or silly song you always wanted to write. Are you stuck writing your song?
Send in your idea at lieven@justinguitar.com and I will suggest his improvements during the stream!
I’m no Pulitzer prize winner but I do like to tell stories.
Who am I to tell you WHAT you should write? serious songs? emotional stories? crazy, fun and unhinged stuff?
I DO have tips on the HOW though:
I have some structures and tricks to show with you, like how to evolve from middle school rhyming or flat story arcs.
Stuck on an idea yourself? let me know and I can show you and many others in the Live Club how I would approach it. You are free to mention a fake name if you prefer not be be mentioned by your real name
I watched the recording and thought it was a great insight into some ideas to assist the songwriting process. There were some points that I made some notes on to carry forward into any future exercises.
Having recently posted a collaboration born out of my first storytelling exercise I have another that I have been struggling with but will use some of your guidance here to assist with completing it.
In the future I would certainly love to see a club based on how to put a rhythm and progression to lyrics to achieve a certain feel or genre.
I dipped a little into this. Interested to see Karma Police pop up. I had clocked there were no perfect rhymes in the song (excluding repetition), but only noticed now that ‘ma’ pops up three times in the first two lines
Just stumbled across this quote from poet/lyricist Leonard Cohen:
“I’ve never found it easy to write. Period. I mean, I don’t want to whine about it or anything but…it’s a bitch! It’s terrible work. I’m very disciplined in that I can settle down into the work situation but coming up with the words is very hard. Hard on the heart, hard on the head and it just drives you mad. Before you know it, you’re crawling across the carpet in your underwear trying to find a rhyme for ‘orange’. It’s a terrible, cruel job. But I’m not complaining.”
Even when words flow easily/spontaneously, they usually benefit from crafting, putting aside and reworking in stages
This reminds me of a story I heard about Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan talking songwriting. Cohen was famous for laboring over the lyrics of songs, almost to obsession. Supposedly, he wrote something like 80 verses for Hallelujah over a period of 10 years, or something crazy like that.
Anyway, when Cohen met Dylan, he was curious about the '80s Dylan song “I and I”, which he admired a lot. He was wondering if Dylan struggled over lyrics as he did and asked Dylan how long it took to write the song. Dylan responded “Oh, about 10 minutes, I guess. How 'bout you, how long did it take you to write Hallelujah?” Cohen sheepishly responded, “Oh, a long time, about 2 years” (in truth it had been closer to 10).
As we often say around here, best not to compare yourself with others
I wrote ‘Show Me the Way’ in the morning and wrote ‘Baby, I Love Your Way’ in the afternoon of the same day. I’ve been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!
Sometimes it just comes easily. And other times it doesn’t. My wife came up with an idea for a silly song recently that we both find entertaining. Currently suffering a bit from “too many ideas” syndrome, plus I’m trying to overcome my tendency to polish so much that the humor would be lost. We’ll get there eventually.
Oh, nice quote! Because “Baby I love your way” came easily to my inner ears, I looked up to referesh my memory “Show me the way” and found “2022 in the Royal Albert hall” - and it’s a gift to be able to just look this up and take part in this nice moment. As much as I don’t like quite a few things in today’s world, others are really nice!
And I can relate - these moments were very rare to me (can we work at it to make them happen more often?), but a few times, I felt things just went together easily and during recording a few bits, I felt like floating
I’ll have to look up that video. I had Frampton Comes Alive on vinyl, back in my teen years and still have the music book in my music room but can’t claim broader familiarity with his work. His autobiography Do You Feel Like I Do? was really interesting; he reads the audiobook and the sincerity comes shining through. He seems like a great guy.
So, my recent lyrical moment that came to me whilst undertaking a somewhat, I guess, thought provoking task has led me to another set of potential lyrics.
However, in juggling them into some kind of order I notice that each verse does stick to a AABB or ABAB etc format (as discussed in the Club) in fact some follow say the former, and some follow the latter
So, here’s the dilemma, what do people think about the, sticking to a pattern/format over the meaning vs damn the format, its the words and emotion in them thats important??
Nothing wrong with that.
AABB has the most risk of being exposed as ordinary when the rhymes are too strong or feel forced. It is also the go-to rhymeform for kids or people writing a rhyme on a retirement party or something :p. ABAB is easier to make it sound “organic” because of the alternating endings.
What really helps in making an AABB more organic (IF it feel forced right now) is “half rhyme” or “slant rhyme” where you rhyme sounds or parts of words.
