What Makes a Good Lyric?

Making a good lyric requires quite an amount of creativity as well as of narration technique that will relate to your listener. A song lyric that is needed to be examined and look closely before it can be understood often doesn’t make it. No one remembers them and if there is, only a few. Because a good lyric must be clearly understood and that upon hearing it, the public will be able to relate to it. Either because they are going through the same thing or it happened to them before.

However, the process of songwriting is long and tiring. It requires a quantifiable amount of patience and persistence in writing and rewriting until such a desired outcome will be able to achieve.

Now, in achieving that, here are some of the questions you need to ask first to figure out if you are on the right path of making a good lyric:

●     How it should draw a listener in?

Lyrics are very powerful if used well. It has the ability to engage your listeners and to put your listener into a situation where you want to place them. In order to draw your listener in, you need to engage them. You need to make them feel what you wanted them to feel using the power of words. Entice them with emotions until your audience is not just your audience but a participant in the story.

●     How it should be memorable?

How to make lyrics memorable? Rhyming words can help in catching your audience attention and helping them retain the lyric itself. But if you are having a hard time making it sounds rhyme, then just try to write a lyric. Just spill all your ideas and don’t judge your writing. Don’t try to assess it as you write. Just let the ideas flow in and make a mark on your paper. And when you’re done, try to read it out loud. And the rhyme will surely follow. Or perhaps you really don’t need a rhyme. There’s beauty in an irregular measurement of words, too.

●     The use of literary devices

These are the techniques used by the songwriter to add texture, energy, and excitement in order to ignite the audience’s imagination and lead it to the proposed feeling or emotion and a way to convey the information.

What are these literary devices?

●     Diction

Or the writer’s choice of words. It is important to further convey the message to his or her audience depending on the level of emotion being required.

●     Metaphor or Simile

There are instances wherein it is really hard to describe a certain thing or to find the right exact word to describe it. Thus, the use of metaphors or simile or the technique of describing a certain thing by comparing it with something relatable is usually used to fully convey the message.

●     Personification

It is the technique of giving life to certain objects or animals to make it more relatable to us. Giving these objects or animals a human-like behavior to project more your thoughts or feelings.

●     Hyperbole

When you wanted to make a creative exaggeration

Now, here are some of the best lyricist you can look up to get a little pinch of inspiration:

●     Tom T. Hall

He is an English major. He came to write songs by osmosis. His masterpieces are enumerable but most of it is levied with literary irony with the use of simple language. One of his works, “Trip to Hyden” is a journalistic tale of a drive to the scene of a mining disaster.

●     The Bee Gees

Australian brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb were massively successful songwriters for decades. Their earliest hits, the “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “To Love Somebody” were melancholy music based on the feeling of psychedelia.

●     John Prine

He is known for his innate skills to emphatically capture the highs, lows and occasional humor of everyone. According to him, the songs that you think is socially or religiously prohibited to be revealed, when you sing them to other people and they immediately relate to it and recognize that they, too are experiencing it. One of his works is “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and the centuries-long ballads “Paradise”.

If you are aspiring to write good lyrics and be a songwriter, you can start now. Do not be afraid to be embarrassed because there is no ‘born songwriter’. Only those who persevere in becoming one becomes entitled to the title.

If you are looking for a place online to sell lyrics and make money out of it, then you can try to visit songbay. It is a marketplace for unique, creative and original composition of your music, lyrics, and poems. You can browse a wide variety of music and poems which are written and made by artist all around the world. They promote diversity and authentic form of art and music. Their users may purchase any kinds of music or lyrics and use it for any conceivable purpose.