Songwriting Solitude: Week 3

For the sake of consistency I'm keeping the title but this week it's completely erroneous. I've been back in Brisbane this week. Not by choice, but because we've had gigs which require rehearsal. I suppose the cool thing about that is we're rehearsing songs that I've only just written in the previous two weeks which is sweet. But I wasn't going to commute everyday. Seriously, I don't know how people do it. I had to come up one day to be in brisbane at 9. I left the coast before 7 and I didn't get into town until after 930. That's two and a half hours!! Can you imagine doing that everyday? I can't. Anyway, beside the point.

We're premiering a couple of the new tracks at our shows this weekend ("Comets" and "Between The Rafters" to be precise) and so after having written music for a while it was down to lyric writing this week.

Sometimes people seem to underrate lyric writing. I'm not exactly sure why. I guess it's because people assume that the "hook" in a song is what makes it successful. I would say that's not 100% correct. Lyrics are 50% of a song. If you were to delve into the copyright records of songs you'd see that the ownership is taken up by an "Author" and a "Composer" and sometimes an "Arranger" but that third one's not important right now. Just imagine your favourite song. Now imagine swapping out the lyrics for prose from the book you're reading right now. See how much you like the song after you do that. My point is, whether you might see it or not, lyrics are really important. And if you're reading this going "duh" then cool, but you'd be surprised how many people say something like, "I mean, how hard can it be to write lyrics".

So that's what I've been doing, writing lyrics. Sometimes I wish that songs could have a whole bunch of lyrics, because it might take the pressure off getting every word right. When you've only got 12 lines to work with in an entire song you really have to make every one count. There can't be any throwaways.

A question to finish this one. If for some reason you were only able to write one song in your whole life, what would you write it about? Let me know.