I grew up the biggest fan of the Cure. Knew every lyric, had every album, B-side, single, poster, everything. Then cut to fifteen years later, and we’re working on songs together. Ridiculous.
Some of the songs on the radio are really outrageous. I listen to the lyric. If the lyric doesn’t make sense, I don’t like the song.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That’s why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
I write a lyric, but when I reread it, I think it’s awful and either hide it or crumple it up.
Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.
Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.
Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.
In my fiction, there’s a lot that’s borrowed from music. It’s never like I’m taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. ‘The Boy Detective Fails’ was like listening to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.
I have never been able to remember the number of my driver’s license, and there have been times when I couldn’t even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.
We have such fantastic talent in India, and there are some great Marathi singers, great sound producers, great sound engineers, and a great breed of lyric writers. But the problem is that you need a platform.
I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.
What I love is when I play gigs, it’s just me and a guitar – very simple, very direct and intimate, and you hear every lyric, and you hear every detail.
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed – from song lyric to tragic speech – must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
I try and journal every day, and that’s where a lot of my lyric comes from.
The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s were written by veterans – mostly men who’d had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven’t really lived life?
The title song of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
No matter what road I take, I can never get too far away from the conscious lyric and the socially conscious content.
Gangnam is a territory in Seoul, Korea. I describe it as noble at the daytime and going crazy at the night time. I compare ladies to the territory. So – noble at the daytime, going crazy at the night time – and the lyric says I am the right guy for the lady who is like that.
As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that’s what I do, too.
That’s one of the reasons I got into country music: because of the craft of that lyric and how much you could put into three minutes.
Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.
It helped my lyric writing so much studying poetry. I thought I knew what poetry was before I immersed myself in it. Poetry is meditative. It’s reflective.
I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.
I just want people to listen to the music and get something from it, whatever it may be. Whether it’s a catchy lyric or a whole situation.
I’m always creating. Whether I’m writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I’m doing something.
My mum was no pushy parent. She would drop me off for auditions when I was in my teens at the Lyric Theatre, then give me my bus fare and say she would see me later at home. She wasn’t hanging around in the wings geeing me on. I had to do it on my own; it was up to me.
You know when you hear a lyric and you can tell that the person means it? That is really hard; that is so much harder than it seems: to find the topics that you’re passionate about and have it come across as like, ‘Yeah, that guy needed to sing that song.’
The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own.
When I write a song, that process is sort of entwined with a lyric or a chord progression that suits the vibe, and that’ll work off each other.
After using four different languages on an album, it’s tough to decide which one I’m gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I’m singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible.
There’s been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it’s used as a joke – isn’t it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.
It blows me away the number of truck drivers or macho guys that will call, and then I start peeling back the layers, and I find out they’ve been listening to me for 10 or 15 years, and they know every lyric to every sappy song.
It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.
Growing up, I was listening to a ton of Motown music, Otis Redding, Aretha, and then there was the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. These were all people that I felt as though they truly felt every single lyric they said, and they weren’t afraid of imperfection.
Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it’s much easier; but when you’re standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it’s a very, very intense kind of focus.
The first lyric on ‘Sex Playlist’ is ‘I can’t believe I got her all alone.’ I’m already putting myself in a situation of vulnerability because I’m excited that I’m actually about to share a moment with a woman I’ve been dreaming to share a moment with.
If I’m writing the music, and I don’t feel like its really connecting inside, then I’ll know there’s no reason to really put a lyric on it; it’s a waste, and I’ll throw it.
A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.
There are parts in albums where I wrote a lot of the lyrics. There are parts on albums where Steve wrote a lot of the lyrics, even albums where Steve did the majority of the lyric writing. Then there were albums like ‘Coming Home’ where I did most of the chorus lyric writing. But it was always split.
‘Dawn (Go Away)’ is a sad lyric, but the melody is so happy and fun.
I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.’ I’m thinking, ‘That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.’
I’m a real stickler for a great lyric, or what I think is a great lyric. It’s almost impossible for me to sing a song I don’t love. My thing is: If it’s a great lyric, you can do anything with the song.
When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, ‘Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.’
How can a song all about struggling with the afterglow of fame thrust someone into fame? How can a lyric like, ‘I’m just a singer who already blew his shot,’ give a singer another shot? I don’t know… but it’s funny.
I can’t bear a trite lyric: sometimes this can be overlooked, but rarely.
I’ve always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I’ll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.
I always take notes on my phone of lyric ideas.
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it’s gonna sound like a lyric.
I don’t really love to perform in music. Some people like it more, but it’s not my thing so much, but just the writing, when you get the lyric, and the lyric just goes just the right way, or you find the right bridge that takes you to the solo, and those moments are tremendous, and it’s difficult to portray.
