How to write lyrics!!

 hey, welcome to! so… lyrics. we don'ttend to talk about them much on this channel 'cause I'm very easily distracted by coolharmony stuff, but it's hard to deny their importance. they're the first thing most listeners willidentify with in any given song, and they're the clearest means of conveying your story,so since, as a singer, I do have a background in lyric writing, I suppose I might as welladdress the elephant in the room. lyrics are, in a way, one of the most mysteriouselements of composition: we can talk about how a minor key makes the harmony sound sad,or how large leaps make a melody sound powerful, and while those are both fairly broad generalizationsand not necessarily true in any specific context, at least they work as guidelines. but for lyrics, it can be hard to even getthat far: sure, mentioning crying will probably make your lyrics sound sad, but language isso complicated and there's so many different ways to say the same thing that even findinga good starting point for structural analysis becomes a daunting task. and yet it's hardto deny that great lyrics and great lyricists do exist, so what's the secret? well, it's surprisingly simple: practice. ok, that's not super helpful, so let's geta bit more specific: practice writing poetry. I mean, it makes sense, right? lyrics are basically poetry set to music anyway,but if you strip away all that extra stuff and just focus on the poetic structure, youquickly realize something incredibly important: words are more than just their meanings. they're also made up of sounds, and thosesounds are the fundamental atomic structure from which we build lyrics. the most obvious part of this is rhyme. I suspect you're already familiar with theconcept of rhyming so I won't spend too long on the basics, but there's actually a lotmore to it than you might think. the version you're probably thinking of rightnow is the end rhyme, where you rhyme the final syllables of two different lines, likein the classic BNL song One Week, which contains the very meaningful line "chickity China,the chinese chicken, you have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'." and yes, chicken sounds like tickin, but thatline actually contains more than just end rhymes. both those words contain that "ick"sound, and we can find that same syllable in other words, like "chickity" and "drumstick". this is called internal rhyme, where the rhymingsyllables are buried inside the line instead of just sitting at the end. adding internal rhymes to your lyrics canhelp provide a bit more cohesion, making the whole thing feel like one composed piece insteadof just two lines that you haphazardly tied together. you don't even have to connect these internalrhymes to the end bits: check out the use of "China" and "chinese", whose first syllablesunsurprisingly match as well. that particular example may seem like cheatingif we cared about what the words mean, but from a strictly phonetic perspective, it totallyworks. internal rhyme is a huge part of writing moreadvanced lyrics, and if you want to learn more about it, the best place to look is probablyhip-hop, where they're so common that they can even replace end rhymes, blurring phoneticstructures across lyrical lines to tie everything together into one giant, complicated rhymescheme. it's really fascinating. check out Cardboard Castles by Watsky fora good example. but we're still just looking at rhyme placement:what about rhyming itself? from an analytical perspective, what is a rhyme? I mean, sure, it's when two sounds sound thesame, but what does that mean? well, all the examples I've used so far arewhat're called perfect rhymes, where the entire end of the syllable or word is the same, likeboom and zoom. but boom also sounds like dune, which has no m, and it sounds like bam, whichhas a completely different vowel. this brings us to what are called slant rhymes, wherethe words are kinda similar but not quite as close. we can break these into two groups: assonance,where the vowel sound is the same, and consonance, where the consonant is the same. liberal use of these sorts of semi-rhymes,especially for internal stuff, can really help your lyrics sound deep and polished withoutlimiting your word choices too much. you just have to be aware of it. but rhymes aren't the only way in which thesounds of words can affect your lyrics. possibly even more important is the impactof accents. not, like, sounding British or whatever: inpoetry, the word "accent" refers to the specific stress pattern in a given word. for instance,in the word "explode", the emphasis is on the second syllable, whereas in "syrup", it'son the first. in normal speech, these accents just fallwherever they want, but in poetry they're often very tightly controlled: for instance,Shakespeare often wrote in iambic pentameter, which meant that each line consisted of fiveiambs, which is a fancy poetry word for the accent pattern of "explode". the patterns don't have to be tied to thewords, though: for instance, in the famous line "shall I compare thee to a summer's day","summer's" has the accent on the first syllable, making it what's called a trochee, like "syrup". but it's placed in such a way that it's actuallysplit across two iambs, so if we zoom out and look at the phrase "a summer's day", itworks just fine. traditional Western poetry tends to stickvery closely to its accent patterns, which gives it a sort of rhythm that you don't findin normal speech. when I say "shall I compare thee to a summer'sday", the alternating pattern of on and off syllables creates an almost musical qualityall on its own, and the sentence just rolls off the tongue beautifully. but lyrics are different, because music alreadyhas rhythm. that's what drummers are for. this means we don't have to be nearly as strictwith our poetic meter, but it doesn't mean we get to stop caring about accents. whatever melody you're singing, there's goingto be emphasized notes and less emphasized notes, and in my opinion one of the biggestdifferences between amateur and professional lyricists is how well they line up those accentednotes with the accented syllables of their lyrics. it's a really big deal: once, in acollege, a friend of mine played me a song they wrote, and the only thing I rememberabout it is that they said the word "secret" but put the second syllable on the downbeat. that stuck with me, and not in a good way. finally, I know we set aside meaning earlier'cause it's hard to quantify, but practicing poetry can help with that, too, or at leastit can help with one of the most important aspects of it: imagery. being able to evoke emotions and ideas indirectlyis crucial. for instance, Ben E. King could've sung "whenwe're scared", but instead he went with "when the night is cold and the land is dark, andthe moon is the only light we'll see," and I think most people would agree that that'sway better. poetry, again, strips away a lot of the othertools that music has to make people feel things, forcing you to invest as much emotional resonanceas possible into the actual words you're using. plus, if you follow the forms we talked aboutearlier, it kinda just becomes a lot harder to use the same line over and over. after all, there's only so many words thatrhyme with "sad". so yeah, poetry's awesome, but how do youget started? well, I'd start by finding something to writeabout. something you have an emotional attachmentto, like a loved one, a hobby, or a treasured object. it can be anything you want, just make sureit means something to you. then you just… write a poem about it. if you need some more guidance, I recommendwriting a sonnet: they're a bit old-fashioned but they've got a great structure for practicinga lot of the stuff we mentioned earlier. we did a whole video on sonnets a while back,so if you want to know how they work, there's a link in the description. all in all, the conclusion here is probablyfairly obvious: the more time you spend playing with language, the better you'll get at it. poetry is like the pure, distilled form oflyricism, and writing poems is like doing isolation training at the gym, which I assumeis a thing people do at gyms. there's no formula for great lyrics, anyone who says differentlyis selling something. but if you want to get better, probably thebest thing to do is just write some poems. plus, if they're any good you can just setthem to music later and boom, free lyrics. it's really that easy. anyway, thanks for watching, thanks to ourPatreon patrons for making these videos possible, and extra special thanks to this video's mysteriousbenefactor, Duck. if you want to help out, and get some sweet perks like sneak peeksof upcoming episodes, there's a link to our Patreon on screen now. you can also join our mailing list to findout about new episodes, like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rocking