If money is one of your main motivations for writing then it could very well be that writing song lyrics is the most lucrative, word for word, than any other form of writing, even beating out copy writing.
The problem or the “gotcha” so to speak regarding writing song lyrics is that of course you are going to need an excellent musician with a lot of vision for what can be done with lyrics to work with.
One of the most famous examples is the writing team of Bernie Taupin and Elton John – they coordinated together on numerous hit songs and albums.
It is very interesting to learn a little bit more about how they worked together. Basically as I understand it Bernie Taupin would submit the lyrics to Elton John and then he would have the freedom to do whatever he wanted to with them from there.
If you look at most of these song lyrics just by themselves, they don’t really make a lot of sense. But when you added Elton John’s vision for what to do with the lyrics, then they came to life, almost literally, and became something tremendously more than the sum of their parts.
If you take something like part of the chorus for the song Tiny Dancer for example, it says “Hold me closer tiny dancer, count the headlights on the highway.”
I don’t even know what the next line is, but then after that it’s something or other “day to day.”
I’ve always liked the song even though I’ve never even looked up what the third line in the chorus was. The song just evokes this feeling of longing…
Most likely this could very well have been a strategy that the two of them came up with together, where Bernie submitted lyrics that evoked something, whether they made any sense or not.
The whole idea was to give a word palette for Elton John to launch from.
You can imagine that if the songs and their lyrics were meant to be about very specific things, such as a social justice issue or something happening in politics or anything concrete like that, then the lyrics would have to “make sense” a lot more and they would be much more restricted in how they could be interpreted.
Elton John couldn’t take lyrics, just to make a wild example, of a situation in South Africa and turn it into a vague love song, it just wouldn’t serve the purpose that the lyrics were written for and it would make no sense on any level whatsoever. So if you write lyrics and they don’t seem to make sense to anyone, maybe that’s a good thing!
Of course if you are also a musician or you play an instrument to some extent and you can sing well enough to get a melody across for the song, then there’s the possibilities of making demos of your lyrics plus melody plus chord progression or having someone else record those demos, having been given those bare bones to work from.
Because of the explosion of home studios using digital audio workstations, music publishers nowadays are expecting truly excellent demos of songs even if they are to be ultimately re-recorded by some other band or recording artist.
The demos themselves have to be so good that they could be a release themselves.
So that really sets the bar rather high for the singer-songwriters trying to do it themselves entirely, and makes it more of a necessity to find singers and musicians to work with.
Or simply being a lyric writer and having an agreement with a singer musician that they would take your lyrics and develop a song from there.
There is a development in recent years where if you look at who wrote the song quite often it is a very long list of people.
The situation is such that if a group of people are in a room writing a song and someone back in the corner says something like you know if you insert the word and in between those two other words, then that line will be smoother, something like that and they use that change, then that person has just become one of the people who get credits for writing the song.
Because of that factor it is most likely to be financially more rewarding to have it be divided up between two people such as Bernie Taupin and Elton John, and 10 other people like you often see these days. They actually have to figure out the percentage of who gets what – sounds crazy to me.
The flexibility of submitting quite poetic, evocative lyrics to an artist that will then develop them into a unique song sounds quite interesting though, doesn’t it?
I can see a lot of motivation for finding people like that to work with, on both sides of the aisle, lyrics writing and the singer musician side.
It is a simple fact that the huge percentage of popular bands and recording artists out there don’t record their own material. They put the word out that they need songs and work through music publishers to choose what they are going to use for their newest recordings. This is a huge range of different artists and musical styles, with new material is constantly needed. Anything in a range from songs for little kids up to Gothic heavy metal.
You might find this inspiring what you could do as a lyric writer. Who do you know that is a really good singer and musician that needs more material? Almost all of them do. You just have to somehow stand out from the pack of everyone else trying to get their attention. You also probably need to make it clear from the start that you would be an easy person to work with and that you are a veritable fount of ideas!
If it is any consolation to you at all, the trend is for the amount of lyrics in a song to be very pared down, not many words per line song at all.
Very simple.
So it would be a good idea to study about hook writing and chorus writing because that is basically what it comes down to nowadays.
Sounds pretty motivating to me. Just think about all the great stuff you could get out into the world by working through this genre with your writing.
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