Career Songwriter

Over the years, I’ve had several students pose the question, What is the difference between lyrics and poetry? People keep telling me I write good poetry, so how can I use this skill to strengthen my lyrics?”

Sometimes the line between poetry and lyrics is hard to define. If we read the lyrics of some popular music, the looseness of the rhythms and rhyme schemes certainly seem to involve some of the elements I think of when I ‘define’ poetry. Not an avid poetry reader myself, I’m going to take a stab at answering this question from the viewpoint of a lyricist.

Instead of talking theoretically, I’d like to compare poems to various lyrics. I’ll try to pinpoint a few of the major differences, but before I do, I’d like to talk about the most obvious characteristic that sets them apart – music. The musical framework of a song determines the way the lyric sings. In the overall form of a song, we generally need a chorus, a verse, a bridge, and sometimes a pre-chorus. The chorus section repeats, sometimes three or four times in a commercial format. That element alone sets lyric apart from poetry because all roads lead to the chorus which contains the main message of the song.

Melody is made up of phrases, and the lengths of these phrases determine the lengths of our lyrical lines. The rhythms of the melody determine the rhythms of our words, and so instead of free-form language, we conform to a rhythmic pattern that is dictated by the musical phrasing.

Jeff Hardin is a friend of mine whose poetry has been published in several magazines, books, and newspapers. A teacher and lover of language, his poems just captivate me. Let me share with you one of my favorites from his collection, Fall Sanctuary.

From Here to There

My father wrestles with the chain, slams it
tangled toward the truckbed where it catches
tailgate, slither-clangs to a heap beneath
his feet. Like a serpent of heavy links.
like the unwieldy weight his bogus life
has been, his trying to move it from here
to there. He curses God, who made him fail.
he turns, commands me pick up what I can.

I do: his stubborn will, his quiet code,
the all day bouts of walking through the yard
to find out what the moles have thieved. The stare.
The muscle pulled. The knife slammed down to hush
the dinner talk. I’ve heaved to get to here,
mid-life, his life, to pack it up for good.

What I notice first about this poem is the breaks in the lines. Before a line comes to a conclusion with a comma or period, the author leaves the thought dangling, as if to draw extra attention with silence or pause to the thought we just left. This idea is very similar to the idea of prosody, the songwriter’s tool of using form to reflect meaning. When the knife slammed down to hush….the dinner talk, the pause after hush allowed us to experience the meaning of the words. We use music and phrasing in the same way, reflecting the meaning of our lyric. However, when we write lines of a song to match the phrases of a melody, we try to match the lengths of the melodic phrases with each lyrical thought. Another way of saying this is when the music cadences, our lyric idea comes to a close as well. This is typical of songwriting, but certainly not a rule. There are lyrics that are snapshots of experiences, fragments of thoughts like slivers of time flung across a melodic idea, combining to create an experience for the listener rather than tell a story.

Along with the breaks in the lines are uneven rhythms that do not create a consistent rhythmic pattern. There are lyrics that follow extremely loose patterns, such as Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do”:

“All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die,”
Says the man next to me out of nowhere
It’s apropos
Of nothing
He says his name’s William but I’m sure,
He’s Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy
And he’s plain ugly to me
And I wonder if he’s ever had a day of fun in his whole
life
We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday
In a bar that faces a giant car wash
The good people of the world are washing their cars
On their lunch break, hosing and scrubbing
As best they can in skirts in suits

They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks
Back to the phone company, the record store too
Well, they’re nothing like Billy and me, cause

These kinds of lyrics require such character and insight from the vocalist. They are conversational, as if the singer and audience are connected along a stream of thought rather than a carefully-crafted lyric. But in most popular music, the rhythms of the language follow patterns that repeat over and over, just as the melody and harmony repeat motivic ideas over and over.

One similarity I notice between the poetry and Sheryl Crow’s lyric is the type of content that is used. Notice the sense-bound descriptions such as ‘the man next to me’, ‘plain ugly’, and ‘drinking beer on a Tuesday’. That same type of language is used here in Jeff Hardin’s poetry: ‘wrestles with the chain’, ‘tangled toward the truckbed’, ‘clangs to a heap beneath his feet.’ Sometimes we classify poetry as purely metaphorical, and abstract. But this can be just as true in songwriting, with lyrics such as ‘I’ll Be’ by Edwin McCain:

The strands in your eyes that color them wonderful
Stop me and steal my breath
And emeralds from mountains thrust towards the sky
Never revealing their depth

And tell me that we belong together
Dress it up with the trappings of love
I’ll be captivated, I’ll hang from your lips
Instead of the gallows of heartache that hang from above

Though there are sense-bound elements at work here, the overall effect is an abstract picture painted of metaphor. It’s a beautiful picture needless to say, as this song continues to capture thousands of listeners.

From a lyric-writing point of view, what seems to me to be the biggest difference between poetry and lyric is not the content, but the way the content is structured. Rhyme, as we can see from Edwin McCain’s song, follows specific rhyme schemes that correspond to the phrasing of the melody. Many songs follow just a few different schemes, such as XAXA, ABAB, XXAXXA, and so on. These schemes can be found in just about any songwriting book on the shelves. The rhythm of the lines follows consistent patterns, as dictated by the melody. Because melody is composed of so much rhythmic repetition, the rhythms in our lyric are also composed of that same repetition. Songs almost always center around one main point, one chorus or refrain that sums up the message. Poetry frequently seems to ride on the gentle stream of consciousness, weaving a thin thread through an experience rather than summing up that experience into one overall moral or lesson.

If you are a poet looking to write more song-friendly prose, I encourage you to think about these structural elements and rework your existing material. As we saw in Sheryl Crow’s ‘All I Wanna Do’, free-form conversational language can work in some song situations. But all songs need a main message that leaves the listener singing the song all the way home in the car – and that’s the chorus that follows those tell-tale lyric elements of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition. Try lifting out a word or phrase from your poetry that can serve as the main message. Repeat the phrase, setting it as the first line, middle, and last line of the chorus section. Fill in the developmental lines with ideas related to this main message. You’ll find that simply sticking to the common structures of choruses will shed new light on your writing. I believe that with the structural elements in play, poetry can be transformed into lyrics, and very effective ones at that.

As always, take 15 minutes every day and research your craft. If you desire to write better lyrics, spend that time reading lyrics of songs you love. Read them out loud, just as you would your poetry. Feel where the rhymes fall, notice how the rhythms repeat and then use these as patterns for your next verse or chorus section. For more information, please refer to my blog about brainstorming. The process of ‘destination writing’ may be similar to the process you go through while writing poetry. Take heart – you’re closer than you think to turning your poetry into great lyrics.

Andrea