The Revelation Hypothesis
This is an article about how to write song lyrics.
But it is not based on years of experience of writing song lyrics.
Rather it is based on the Revelation Hypothesis, and additionally on various other subjective observations I have made about the emotional characteristics of song lyrics.
If indeed you follow this advice, and you succeed in writing some good lyrics for your song, then this will count, I think, as positive confirmation of my hypothesis.
Bonus: An Analysis Framework
The hypothesis and observations I give here do more than provide advice about how to write song lyrics – they also provide a framework for the analysis of song lyrics that other people have already written.
Even if your primary intention is to write your own song lyrics, I would strongly recommend that you apply the ideas in this article as a framework to analyse existing song lyrics, so that you can understand exactly how they apply to song lyrics, especially how they apply to song lyrics that "work" well.
(Don't ask me which lyrics work well – if something works well for you, then, for the purpose of theoretical analysis, it works well.)
Recommentations
1. Lyrics are not normal prose, so you have to sing in order to write
Song lyrics are similar to normal prose, in that they are made up of words, and the words are assembled into sentences according to the grammatical rules of the language.
However lyrics are also different in certain specific ways from normal prose, ie any normal prose that you might read in a book or on a web page, or even any normal spoken content that is not part of anything musical.
The Revelation Hypothesis can help us understand what this difference actually is.
One corollary of the special nature of song lyrics is that it is very hard to know how to write good song lyrics unless you actually sing them as you write them.
Also, to get the full musical effect of what makes your intended lyrics "work" (or not work), you have to sing them in-tune, preferably against a backing track or accompaniment.
And if you can't sing in tune, well real-time pitch correction (aka Autotune or any other brand of the same functionality) is your friend.
(What works reasonably well for me is SoloistFX and AUM on an iPad together with a microphone, USB audio interface and small speakers.)
When it comes to analysis, a similar logic applies.
In particular, you can't analyse lyrics just by reading lyrics off a page.
You need to be hearing the lyrics as they are sung.
However, it is also useful to be reading at the same time. So the ideal combination is to watch lyric videos. (YouTube or any other major social media site is your friend here.)
2. A stream of emotional revelations, at least one per line
According to the Revelation Hypothesis, music is not about expressing emotion per se.
Rather, music makes a statement that an emotional revelation is occurring.
That is, information is being revealed, and the content of that information has emotional significance.
The music itself does not reveal the actual information. But your lyrics can do that.
And they should.
3. Lines
Song lyrics are almost always composed of lines.
Lines are usually defined by the rhyming scheme, where each line is ended by a rhyming word that rhymes with some word at the end of some other line (either before or after).
To achieve maximum revelatory effect, each line should contain at least one emotional revelation within itself, even if that line is not a full sentence.
Additionally, the effect is usually stronger if a substantial part of the emotional content of the line is contained within the final rhyming word. (The Revelation Hypothesis as I have so far developed it does not actually explain why, but it is something that I have observed to be the case.)
Appendix: How to Write Rap Lyrics
The Revelation Hypothesis doesn't have anything specific to say about rap, so what I present here is some more subjective observations I have made.
All the stuff that you do in song lyrics, in rap you apparently have to do more of it.
So:
- There should be as much emotional revelation as you can squeeze into the space. Multiple revelations per line is good.
- There should be as much rhyming as you can squeeze into the space. Multiple rhymes per line, if you can manage it.
There does seem to be a difference in the emotional quality of rap lyrics, which mostly has to do with the rapper revealing information intended to impress their audience.
A lot of the time, if I'm a rapper, and I'm rapping, my rap is about me.
My rap reveals information about me, and you will be very impressed by what it says about me, and that will be your emotional reaction to the rap.