JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum How important are lyrics in a song?

I'm working with a composer right now, who has some very catchy pop music and has been looking for the right lyricist. He told me he looked at scores of peoples' work until he found my website. We're working on a first song now, to see if we can find the right vibe together.

I wrote a lyric for the track. I had to spend a week just listening and breaking it down into sections, learning the structure; and trying to hear what the music was 'saying' -- to find the right lyric for it. I spent hours constructing a lyric and then rewriting it.

He liked it, but he wanted a very different tone. While he admired what I did, it wasn't the feel he wanted. So I tried again. Another week to get the old lyric out of my head and come up with a new title and idea. And hours to write a new lyric.

This one wasn't as good, and still wasn't the tone/style he was hoping for. So I tried again.

Another week of kicking ideas around. A good three hours in a bar to develop a lyric, and another hour or two the next day to finish it and give it a first polish.

He really liked this one. But now we want to use a different hook, the hook he had lodged in his mind. So I'm currently working on taking the style/tone I captured in version #3 and writing something to a different story and hook idea.

Besides the obvious point that it takes quite a while to write a solid lyric, with a lot of false starts, underlying this whole process is the notion that while the music is very, very, very good, without the Right Lyric it won't get where it needs to be.