I've so far been able to get through a decent amount of vocals and even setup my brand new song that I hope will take the world by storm shortly; yes, that's kind of a joke and kind of not at the same time. I don't want to comment too much on this song because I'm 100% convinced someone would steal the idea and run with it, but I will say that I hope to have it done and released within about 2 months from now so it'll be the first ever "fast tracked" song for me. Apart from that, I'm playing catch up on a couple of my older albums that have been "in progress" for a bit too long.
I've actually been spending a ton of time working on lyrics. I have a backlog at this point of, well, maybe 40+ songs that need definitive lyrics? I mean, it's out of control and pretty ridiculous, and I can't keep up usually with the lyric writing versus how easy it is for me to come up with song melodies. What usually happens, unfortunately, is that I reach crunch time, where I want to record the song and, well, I don't have the final lyric, so I sit down, sweat it out, etc. I've basically been painstakingly going through the various lyrics that I need to record and making any corrections and/or finishing them where applicable, and you'd be amazed how long the process takes.
Lyrics are super hard, in my opinion at least. For any new song writers, lyrics maybe start out easy...they did for me...and then you start to notice later on that your old lyrics aren't the greatest, so you up your game, work harder, and that's when it becomes challenging. Writing crappy or so-so lyrics is easy; writing good, thought provoking and rhythmically aligned lyrics, however, is very hard, and for me personally it's about 10-20x harder than coming up with music.
I actually approach lyrics these days in a very film oriented way, ironically. I first figure out the melodies that I'm singing and hopefully a few keywords or at least similar sounding words that will form the bare bones basis for the lyric and possibly even the title. Most of this comes from ad-libbing, and honestly, I don't think I'd ever be able to write any lyrics without ad-libbing during rehearsing so I can't stress enough how important of a skill this is for any singer/songwriter type for it's pretty much essential. Once I get through that, I try to figure out who my characters are, what kind of lyric it is, as in is it a message based song, a story, etc., and then I start filling in key parts. I also look for the stand out rhyming patterns that I like and/or flow well, and from there a basic lyric structure starts to form. The ad libs again play a huge part and I often pull greatly from them because they're almost like a subconscious method of lyric writing. Next, I argue with myself if the message or meaning needs to be more obvious, more vague, more poetic, or more on the contradictory side, the latter being a method I personally really like. I don't really like telling people how to think...I much prefer to setup scenarios and let the situations speak for themselves, allowing personal interpretation. Keep in mind I lean on the artier side, even though I write quite a bit of what would fall under more pop styled rock, but lyrically I usually stay in a different zone than the norm. I also love writing an upbeat pop filled melody and then giving a dark lyric, and then vice versa. It's all part of the lyric experience, and as I've said many times, I take lyric writing very seriously.
Keep in mind that all these elements in the final version have to play well together, match, make sense, roll off the tongue and be easily sung, be scrutinized, etc., and I think it's becoming more apparent now why lyric writing takes so long. Again, it's a choice...you can easily just fluff it and say a bunch of nonsense but I personally don't feel good about that approach anymore for myself, and even when I'm recording old material of mine, I frequently change words or whole lines or paragraphs because the original just sounds too ridiculous to my current self. Some of my really old lyrics literally embarrass me so they're not going onto the recording, hence I keep a pen handy at all times.
Again, I feel like I could teach a course in lyric writing...hell knows I've done it enough...but it's really a to each their own sort of thing, and everyone needs to figure out their own style, their voice, and so on. To me, good "anything" does a dance between following certain rules and allowing your own personality to come through, and lyrics are definitely no exception.
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