10/6/2015 4:03:13 PM
Difficulty of Lyrics

10/6/2015 4:03:13 PM

Difficulty of Lyrics
Hey everyone,

My name's Travis (aka PEACHY CLEAN) and I'm very new to IMP but felt like expressing some views on composing original lyrics. I've been writing songs for a few years and definitely get immense enjoyment out of coming up with lyrics, but also feel the perpetual dissatisfaction that comes with most things artistic. I feel like one of the biggest challenges any songwriter faces is the ability to express lyrics that are absolutely honest. I'm definitely inspired by the experts like Neil Young and The Beatles, but modern musicians too such as Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco. On the other hand, writing lyrics that tell a super insane or fictitious story can be just as fun as anything serious...anyways, wanted to say hello! Peace.

-Travis

10/6/2015 6:33:54 PM

Welcome to the pipeline!

This site is pobably more attuned to lyrics than most places, there are many fine lyricists on the site. I recommend checking out Jillianne whenever she shows her face, she even had a spoken word poem make our featured songs list a few weeks ago.

10/7/2015 8:06:12 PM

And yet you haven't put your lyrics on your page ... I'd love to know what the words are to Divorce - great tune!

10/8/2015 1:17:13 AM

I think the best rules in art are made to be broken.

10/8/2015 12:45:59 PM

Fred is right, rip up that pattern, throw it in the garbage, make your own rules.

10/9/2015 10:11:45 AM

Hello Travis.
I am American Lesley Jane.
I myself am very old. I am though relatively new to IMP, and I'm happy to be here.
It certainly is the coolest indie site ever, period.

Well as you mention the art of lyric writing...
you know, I always say, 'whatever you want to build, there's the right engineer'...
and usually, nobody knows what the hell I mean.

Okay let me put it another way. Once upon a time there was a very magic girl
with a very magic voice named Lesley Gore. She was my mentor.
And believe it or not---yes she was---and believe it or not,
it is she, who clued me into how to write lyrics.

You don't write lyrics like you're writing a song. Amateurs do that.
To do it right, it's more like, a combination of a shopping list
and mumbling to one's self when standing lone in an elevator.

Or you can do what I do, and just channel her...
Yeah, give her an hour, she'll come up with some amazing shit.
Very underratted, nobody knows Lesley Gore kicked Dylan's ass...
sadly, she didn't even know it. Only now does she see how Vast & Fantastically
Grand She Is. Only now.

Nobody ever cared to be so honest with me
My folks said life was fair but that was fantasy
The harder that I tried, seemed the less I got done
Going through the motions but not having fun
I'd walk around not knowing what the hell to do
And I was nowhere baby until you.

Until You, by Lesley Gore and Lesley Jane.

Maybe it's getting 'round time to do another version of that one.
Lost count of how many I've done, still have yet to do
the one that is 'it'... doubt I'll get it now.

But one never knows, do one.

But Travis, to return to the original point,

the key, I think, not even just for lyric writing,
but singing in general...

people will call it singing and lyric writing, because that's what they'll see...
But if you're doing both actually correctly, it's just, you know, speaking.

In a language with beat rhythm and melody.

Absolutely honest? You think that's the problem?
You must not spend much time being honest then.
It's a thing you have to do a lot and then it gets to be second nature.
I am at the point where I sort of cannot lie, I'm basically incapable of it.
Which is why the damnedest things will at times escape from my lips.

You know, Half Chewed Men, trying in vain to escape...

Yummm.

No.

I'll tell you right now, your biggest challenge.
Anyone's biggest challenge.

Listening?

It's when you say to yourself

"Waaa!!! I can't do it!"

It's not your fault you do that, everyone of us has that in,
and only a precious few of us have learned to hose it off
the sidewalks of our minds.
It is there, because of the incredible amount of lazy-ass basically inert
life forms who instead of try to do something amazing,
insist on doing something absolutely mundane and predictable,
because someone told them to.

Do you get it?
Here it is some more.
Mediocrity is Beaten into Us All. None Escape The Beating.

It's only some of us, who nurse ourselves back to health,
does it help if Lesley Gore shoves her tit in your mouth and breastfeeds you?
Well honestly, yes, it does. But you can do it anyway. Trust me.

Any questions ask, but my breastfeeding schedule is very tied up these days.

The problem isn't honesty... let me rephrase that...

There is, no problem.

The challenge is not honesty, nor the lack thereof,
one is as honest as one wants to be.

Honest is naked. And we cover up, that was beaten into us as well.

No, it's all reachable...

The thing is, decide, what's more important.

To fit in as a member of the mediocre world,
or to say fuck that, and go for incredible. And then you're an outsider.
And everybody knows it.

I know. It's a bitch of a choice.

But once you're used to being naked.
And once you realize that the best song isn't so much a song
but a statement with a melody...

the rest is just trial and error....

and honesty can be found and made into a habit,

just write something,
and tell yourself, if it sucks.

"hey, you know this sucks?"
"I was trying to think it doesn't... do you mind?"
"No not at all go right ahead"
"well now you've ruined it... what's wrong with it?"
"you need to figure out who exactly you're talking to."
"I wasn't talking to anyone"
"EXACTLY!"

~L

10/9/2015 7:29:55 PM ---- Updated 10/10/2015 12:17:36 PM

Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen describe themselves as writers...Dylan wrote a book "Chronicles..." that won the Pultizer Prize.

Check out William Blake, the poet, perhaps Jim Morrison's biggest poetic influence. "End of the Night" was based off a blake poem.

William Butler Yeats, very musical e.g. "What Crazy Jane said to the Bishop," "Like a road that men pass over/my body makes no moan/but sings on/all things remain in God."

Often, the melody comes first. Or, maybe lyrics or an idea. Either way, a long walk is helpful, for aerobics, for heart, for health, and maybe help find the groove, or melody, or phrases, moving along is a kind of music lol...

Music is where it's at, and words are a part of a song, except for instrumentals of course.

Viva music!!! Or like said in "Shoot the Piano Player, "music is where it's at."

10/10/2015 6:38:52 PM

For me the hardest part is not being able to express lyrics that are honest. The hard part for me is finding a way to say what has already been said millions of times differently. I am inspired by Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley. Those songwriters always seemed to find a new way of saying something old. I strive to be more like that even though I fail at it a lot. In his hay day, Smokey Robinson was writing songs for everybody including himself. His gift will go down in history as one of the greatest because of the sheer volume of hits that he wrote. The lyrical gift is very unique. The marriage of the lyrics with melody and song structure is quite a phenomenal union. I think great songwriters have expanded musical vision. Rather than they finding the words, the words seem to find them. It's like they have musical magnetics. They write something and the rest of us sit listening and wondering how in the world did they come up with something so brilliant.

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