I just go into the studio, look at the lyrics for the first time when I put them on the piano, and go. If I haven’t got it within 40 minutes, I give up. It’s never changed, the thrill has never gone, because I don’t know what I’m going to get next.
In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.
After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.
If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that’s a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don’t like the melodies, and vice versa.
My most revered hero is Robert Johnson. His lyrics are so consistent with rap: the danger, the boldness, the creativity.
Writing is a very intimate thing, especially when you write lyrics and sing them in front of someone for the first time. It’s like a really embarrassing situation. To me, singing is almost like crying, and you have to really know someone before you can start crying in front of them.
It’s no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don’t sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.
The most difficult thing for me as an artist, as a creator of music, is lyrics. But everything else, I just do it.
I usually like listening to music that only have melodies and no lyrics.
Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines – I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn’t mean they’re more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.
What really surprised me was that we had released the song ‘Kondoram’… without any video and it still garnered so many views. The song had only lyrics and no visuals.
To write lyrics and sing stuff used to be a real chore for me, especially before this ‘Diamond Eyes’ record. I was spending years making records.
I’m not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that’s more what entertainment and music should be.
Hindi film songs are the best of everything – whether it is lyrics, melody and talented singers.
The most common time I write lyrics is the middle of the night.
Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.
I consider myself a lyrics guy.
Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.
Usually what I do is I write my vocal melody over guitar parts and then I come up with lyrics.
I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.
‘Chandelier’ took, like, four minutes to write the chords, then, like, 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics. Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals.
I think anyone who suffers from chronic pain can agree with this – you feel this great significance. What I wanted to capture was that significance, and as a matter of fact I think that’s one of the lyrics on ‘Conflict,’ on the split. I touch on the significance, and really it’s a selfish thing, in an offbeat way.
I don’t understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?
My band, Miles Long, is a jazz-funk spoken word band. There’s jazz sensibilities, but I’m a bass player, so I’m very much into the head-bobbing vibe with sophisticated lyrics.
There’s no set way to do anything. Sometimes you have to go outside the box; sometimes you can do things the standard way. Like, you don’t have to have a beat to write a song: sometimes you can write lyrics without the music.
I don’t spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.
Lyrics have become so dumbed down nowadays. People don’t want to have to think about lyrics anymore, they just want to be told something. Until these great things started happening with us, I’d really given up on reaching people like that.
All my early lyrics were about confidence.
‘Spring Day’ – I wrote main lyrics based on my personal experience with old friends. It is about my sad memories with him, and it makes me sentimental whenever I listen to the song.
When I first was putting out music, I was like, ‘I don’t want to be overly sexy or do too much with the imaging or show too much skin, and I want to make sure my lyrics are balanced.’
When I was a youth, to be called ‘African’ was a diss. At school, the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game, and I’m saying lyrics like, ‘I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/ My bars make you push up your chest like bras,’ that was a big deal for me.
I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it’s very easy for me.
I’m not into solos, I’m into lyrics.
I grew up learning Russian and translating English songs when I became a teenager, we got to listen to West Germany radio stations, and learning lyrics with picture book. These are my first experiences with the English language.
It’s also crazy how Shakespeare has that cadence, and it’s about locking into the jazz of the language, just like locking into the rhythm in N.W.A’s lyrics.
Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about me. Time created a distance.
There’s a long tradition – certainly with country, but in all kinds of genres of music – to have humorous lyrics. Certainly with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and, if you look at country, Roger Miller and Jim Stafford.
I was totally involved in Bobby’s World from the time we started the idea to sitting with the artists on how he would look, to the script meetings, the music, the lyrics, the songs.
There’s this one song called ‘Final Warning’ that I’m really excited about because I love the contrast of my vocal sounding very soothing and my harsh lyrics.
I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style – the best sword-style of martial arts. And the tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
I recorded my first song at 15. But I started rhyming a few years before that. At first it was trading lyrics at school. We’d get in a circle in the playground with a beat-boxer and spit rhymes. Then it would turn into a big gathering after school.
I think that Chad Gray is one of the most honest, emotional, real vocalists there is; he really takes a lot of pride in writing the lyrics, takes a lot of time with them. He writes and re-writes more than just about anybody I’ve ever been around.
I’m far more interested in putting a little more meat into the lyrics than some people are.
Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it’s a tribal thing – country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.
The Smiths hasn’t been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye’s best lyrics match Dylan’s prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.
A song’s lyrics can’t be held culprit for the overall change in society.
Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus’ worth of lyrics, and so there’s a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn’t qualify as ‘great literature.’
We all love to sing along with our favorite songs. We sing in the car, in the shower, and at the karaoke bar. The problem is that half the time we don’t know what we’re singing. We’re making up lyrics as we go along and hoping no one will notice.
My songs used to be significantly more bizarre. I used to play a big electric piano and a loop pedal. I was really into Regina Spektor, and I liked her narrative lyrics that were quite off the wall. I used to layer things up and try and replicate what I’d been doing with my bedroom recordings.
When I sit down and try to write lyrics first – I’ve definitely done that in the past – but most of the time, they come off as a put-on, or less genuine than you would think. I’m the kind of guy that if I overthink a sentiment or I overthink a statement, it’s weird.
A great composition or lyrics no longer decide whether something is good. What matters is, how much has it been seen.
Country lyrics often reference the NRA and firearms ownership as a way of life. Artists such as John Rich, Toby Keith, Sara Evans and others regularly play shows at the NRA Annual Meeting, which thousands of NRA members attend.
Elton John himself never seems pretentious but Bernie Taupin’s lyrics often do – sometimes pretentious in a clever sort of way, but pretentious nonetheless. There is a conflict between Elton’s and Bernie’s personal styles, no doubt about it.
