Transcription
I got the following letter from songwriter Shane. I can't get started with lyrics, as they all sound stupid. I know I need to push past this, but having poor lyrics come out tends to kill the mood, if you know what I mean.
I do know what you mean, Shane. And what I would like to do is give you five really simple and practical lyric writing exercises that are going to help you write better lyrics that you feel less cringy about.
Firstly, what I want to do is applaud you, Shane, and all songwriters who have this kind of internal self-critical voice. Because quite frankly, I'm very suspicious of people who write something and then think, "I'm so hot." I think in order to make progress and get better at anything, we need that level of self-criticism that shines a light on things that we're not completely satisfied with, and that is really what propels us to do better.
But secondly, within that self-critical voice, there are actually two distinct voices. And I think of them as like little characters on either side of my shoulder. One little character I call the little, the other character is called The Helpful guide. Now, it's really easy to get these two voices confused, but let me help you distinguish between those two voices because this is probably one of the most important moments for songwriters and creators. This is how you really embrace that self-critical voice in a productive way, not in a shutting everything down kind of a way.
So, the little on our shoulder tells us things like, "This is crap. This is stupid. This is unoriginal. Why are you doing this?" And the result of this voice, and the conclusion that this little voice is always trying to draw for you, is: "You should just stop." That's how you can tell that that's the voice of the little. The little is just trying to get you to stop.
And there's lots of psychological reasons why that little unhelpful inner critic exists. It's really trying to do us a service. It's trying to protect us from embarrassment and social exclusion that comes from that feeling of maybe doing something wrong or not doing something to an excellent standard. So, it's there to protect us, but it overdoes it. It really oversteps the line and tries to protect us by getting us to stop doing the thing that we're trying to do.
So, one of the things that I'd like to say to the little on my shoulder is, "Sweetheart, go and sit in the corner and play with the iPad." We don't need to treat it harshly, because the more shame and guilt and anger and frustration we give the little, the meaner it gets, and the more powerful its voice becomes.
Now, this is completely different to The Helpful guide sitting on our other shoulder. This helpful guide, as we're writing something, is pointing things out that we're not quite satisfied with, but its motivation is not to get us to stop. Its motivation is to get us to do better. So, when you have a little voice that writes some lyrics and says, "This is stupid," just pay attention to whether or not that little inner voice is telling you to just stop, which, Shane, it sounds like it is, or if this little voice is telling you, "Hmm, maybe you can do better there. Try this. Try that."
Sometimes the problem is when we try and cultivate The Helpful guide, that we don't know how. We don't know what steps to take. We don't know what processes we can implement to make meaningful and predictable progress in the direction that we want. So, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you five really useful exercises that will help you make progress.
One really important thing I want to tell you, however, is that tastes will almost always exceed our abilities, at least in the first like 10 to 15 years of doing anything. We know what we like. We even know why we like it. And we assume that therefore, we should be able to recreate that thing because we can identify what we like and maybe even the mechanics of why we like that thing. So, it's really frustrating to have that taste, to have that discernment, and then to sit down and try and do it, only to realize we can't do it.
This is the moment where we really need to realize that the things that we really like, those people had to work for that. Please do not fall prey to the mythology that some people are just born with it. And if you're not living up to that standard, that you just must not have been born with it. It is a scientific fact, and you can check out the book *Peak* by Anders Erikson if you want to check out the science behind this, that any human being alive can get better at anything through deliberate and meaningful practice. We just need to know what to practice and how to practice.
And one final thought here about the critical voice before we move on to the five super practical lyric writing exercises, here is that part of practicing is embracing our mediocrity. It's not putting so much pressure on each individual thing to rise to the level of our taste. It's really playing the long game, not the short game. It's understanding that over the course of a year, if I produce a lot, 70% of it is going to be, you know, blindingly mediocre. 20% of it is going to be like actively terrible. But 10% of it is going to be really, really good, if not excellent. It's like we need to play the numbers a little bit more, rather than getting bogged down in putting so much pressure on each individual thing that we create.
So, my biggest piece of advice overall here for Shane and everyone is: make more stuff. And don't put so much pressure on each individual thing. Make more stuff and be delighted when what you create is mediocre, because your best work is ahead of you.
Okay, so let's move on to the five super practical things that you can do to get over this feeling of "every lyric I write sounds stupid."
The first thing I'm going to recommend to you, and I know that this might sound a little woo-woo or something like that, but stick with me here, okay? I really recommend doing morning pages. Now, morning pages is something that came out of *The Artist's Way* written by Julia Cameron. So, I read this book when I was 20 and I read about the morning pages. And the morning pages are all about just waking up and for three pages, just writing anything, anything that comes to your mind. And I interpreted that at the time as being about cultivating your creativity and finding your creative spark.
Here's the thing: I did not feel like I lacked creative spark. So, I closed that book, slid it across the table, and honestly, didn't look at it for another 20 years. And then it came back into my attention recently. I was listening to the podcast of a friend of mine, Scarlet Keys. She has a great podcast called *What's in a Song*. So, I was listening to that podcast and her first interview was with Julia Cameron. And I had this revelation listening to Scarlet and Julia talk about morning pages. And I realized, morning pages is not about sparking creativity, really. It's actually about rewiring the brain to bypass the inner critic.
In essence, it's sitting down every morning and writing three pages in a journal of anything, anything that comes out: your thoughts, feelings, observations. You can be random. You can set yourself different parameters for that writing, just writing. But the key here is just writing. And it's not about writing lyrics. It's not about writing stories. It's not about writing philosophy or anything deep. It's literally about doing something that is unfiltered and uncensored. And slowly, what you do is that you train yourself to observe that inner critical, what Julia Cameron calls the censor, coming up and then doing it anyway. And the more you do that, the more you change the neural pathways in your brain that feel that inner critic rise and then shut everything down. So, you're training yourself to become comfortable and familiar with that inner critic and to put it in the corner.
The second exercise I'm going to highly recommend to you is to sit down and write the most cliché song that you can possibly fathom. Like, literally Google cliches to avoid and then avoid them. String them together. Genuinely, just try and write the most trite, cliché, awful song you've ever written. Whenever I assign this task to the songwriting groups that I run, people absolutely love it. They find it liberating. It's like, instead of avoiding the elephant in the room, like going up and giving it a giant hug and realizing that the elephant is very gentle.
The way that I think of this is like, the cliches you're trying to avoid are so present in your psyche that in trying to avoid them, it becomes this force that is almost unavoidable. So, instead of trying to avoid it and then it's like a black hole that grows and grows as it eats more of your energy, just drive straight at it. Just crash through that thing and let it shatter and fall apart. Realize that it's not such a big deal. And let me tell you a secret: a lot of the time, when people write the most cliché song they can think of, they actually end up writing something that they really like.
The third exercise that I'm going to give you is called metaphor collisions. Now, metaphor collisions is absolutely a great exercise for coming up with super great lyrics, great song ideas. But it is also this same type of neural training that helps us look at the world like a songwriter. It helps us make unexpected and totally original connections between two seemingly unrelated things.
So, the way that metaphor collisions work is I'm going to create a list of five random nouns that I'm going to put into column A. And then five random nouns that I'm going to put into column B. I like to find my random nouns using an online word generator called per chance.org. So, p-chance.org has a great list of useful word generators, kind of random word generators. So, I'm going to pick the concrete noun selection and I'm going to ask it to give me five. So, it's going to give me five random nouns. So, here we go. I've got book, whale, back, noodle, and stare.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get it to give me five random emotions. And I'm going to put those into column B. I have remorse, I have satisfaction, I have melancholy, I have fury, and smugness. Smugness. We'll know what that means. Smugness.
So, this is where the magic happens. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a random selection from column A and a random selection from column B, and I'm going to create a metaphor. So, I'm going to use the concrete noun as the metaphor, and I'm going to use the emotion as the thing I'm actually describing. All right. So, let's just start. So, for example, I might take something like fury, and I'm going to make the metaphor. Remembering that metaphor is when we say X is Y. We fuse those two ideas together. We say one thing is the other thing. It's not just like that thing, it is that thing. It's a very powerful combination of ideas.
So, I'm going to say, "Fury is a noodle." The cool thing here is that this seems totally random and slightly silly. The brilliance of this exercise is in the way in which I'm going to explain, develop, and describe the way in which one thing is like the other thing. I am practicing making a novel connection between two seemingly unrelated things. I have to force my brain to figure out, "How is fury like a noodle?" What is a quality or characteristic of noodle or noodles that is related or comparable in some way to the emotion of fury? And this is where metaphor collisions is this incredibly powerful way to train your brain to see like a songwriter every single day. To stop seeing objects and people and things and moments and ideas as just the thing that they are, but to start creating connections and layers of meaning with those things.
So, let's give it a go here. So, I like to set a timer for myself. I'm going to set a timer for eight minutes and I'm going to see how many combinations I can do in eight minutes, really spending like two or three minutes on each one. So, I'm just aiming to create like a sentence or a couple of sentences that explains and describes that metaphor combination.
So, let me read one of these out to you so that you can get a flavor of it. So, here I have, "Remorse is a whale trapped in the net of nostalgia, and regret is the song it sings, drowned out in the sea of possibilities, misted, lost, and forgotten." I don't even know what a lot of that means, but part of this is just the practice of combining those ideas, fusing them together, exploring the ways that one thing is like the other thing, and using language from the pool of whale and wetness to describe remorse and regret and related ideas and emotions and experiences attached to that feeling.
This is an exercise that you can do in five minutes a day. And in five minutes, you can see how much you can achieve. You can see how many original ideas you can come up with.
Like, like that exercise. Number four for getting over the feeling of all your lyrics being stupid is an exercise called image stacking. Image stacking is really a way to convert cliché or general ideas into much more specific imagery. So, let me give you an example of image stacking.
Let's take a really kind of cliché expression or just something really general, something that I feel like for Shane and others, if you wrote that down on the page, you might have that feeling of cringiness, like, "I can't believe I couldn't come up with something better than that." I'm going to show you how to instantaneously come up with something better than that.
So, let's say you have a line like, "You are just the best." So, you're trying to write a song about someone you really love or you really appreciate. And you're struggling. And it's like, well, that's the feeling, but boy, that lyric sucks. Image stacking is a way to take a cliché or a generality like this, and you just spend six or seven minutes converting that abstract idea or that generality into really vivid, sense-based description or examples. We're just going to write single lines. And you can think of each of these lines almost like little snapshots, little photographs that really show this rather than just telling it.
So, I immediately think about my partner and all the wonderful things that he does. So, I'm just going to spend like a couple of minutes stacking images that really exemplify this feeling.
So, some of these are better than others, for sure. But all of them are moving the general cliché idea towards specifics that draw on my experience. And it turns out, when you actually use your experience to craft after your lyrics, they become more relatable to people, not less relatable.
The fifth and final exercise that I'm going to recommend to you is an exercise called odd rhyme pairs. And essentially, what we're going to do in this exercise is find two words that rhyme or rhyme loosely with each other, and then reverse engineer the writing of two lines of lyric that turn it into a rhyming couplet.
So, in this list, I find the words "dark" and "scarves." I'm going to give that a go. So, I've got dark and scarves. My goal is to write lines that turn these two rhyming words into a rhyming couplet. So, let's give it a crack. So, I ran out of room on my page, but the lyric I have here is: "The stars poke holes in the midnight dark. Subway steam rises like windswept scarves."
And again, the most important thing here is not actually the words that end up on the page. Even though there's some fairly evocative imagery there, as far as a lyric goes, it's probably a little bit wordy and a little bit sound-filled. So, I might massage that when it comes to the act of actually writing a song. But no one else has ever written these words in this combination down on a page. And that happened because I gave myself 30 seconds to look up an interesting rhyme pair and then challenged myself to turn that into a rhyming couplet. So, it might not be the best lyric, but it's not a stupid lyric. And I promise you, if I can do it, you can do it too. All it takes is practice and the willingness to try.
I hope that that was helpful, guys, and gives you some really practical exercises on how you can actually practice writing better lyrics. And I'm also really curious to know what your biggest challenges are with writing songs. Feel free to let me know in the comments. Thanks, guys. Happy writing. Bye.