Career Songwriter

Oh, the horror of coming to the end of a line and knowing we’ve got to rhyme with ‘door’. I’ve been on the ‘floor’ so many times in my lyrics, it’s remarkable I end up with completely different song plots. I’d like to share with you some simple and effective tools for letting your content roam free despite the need to rhyme, and also ways to increase the usefulness of that rhyming dictionary

As Pat Pattison explains in the online songwriting course Tools & Strategies, and the information I’ve stolen from him in Commercial Songwriting Techniques, there are five rhyme types. I’ll briefly review them here, but for the sake of improving your writing in the long run, please refer to Pat’s book ‘Writing Better Lyrics.’ No serious writer should leave the house without that book.

The rhyme type we’re all familiar with is perfect rhyme. These are rhymes like ‘cat’ and ‘hat’. No magic there.

The second type is family rhyme. These words are related, though not born of the same DNA like our fraternal twins, perfect rhyme. Examples of these are ‘trade’ and ‘grate’. The ‘d’ and ‘t’ sound are related sonically, by voiced and unvoiced qualities, and so they are completely acceptable as rhymes. Notice that the vowel stays the same.

The third type is additive/subtractive rhyme. It’s just like it sounds – take something away and you’ve got subtractive. Add something and you’ve got additive. So ‘track’ and ‘packed’ are additive. ‘Glued’ and ‘hue’ are subtractive.
This might be grating on your ears a bit, as we’re well aware that there is something missing or something added on making the union imperfect. But, in the context of a song, this union is completely effective to bond two lyrical ideas together.

The fourth type is assonance. Here’s where rhyme gets a little tricky. Assonance rhyme is where the vowels match but the consonant endings are different. So ‘spade’ and ‘rail’ are assonance rhymes. The ‘d’ and ‘l’ are not related by family, but completely distinct sounds. However, the vowel sound creates a connection here and so the rhyme works in many situations.

The last and weakest type of rhyme is consonance. I think of it like the opposite of assonance. The vowels don’t match, but the consonant endings do. ‘fight’ and ‘bought’ are examples of this type. In many instances we may not feel the rhyme strongly at all, and therefore, we need to be careful when using this type that it creates the kind of closure we’re looking for at the ends of our sections.

The trouble with rhyming dictionaries is that they list perfect rhyme only. We’ve got to sift through lists of words we wouldn’t dream of using in our song, only to come up with the obvious. Now, sometimes we don’t think of all the obvious, and it’s helpful to have that list handy. But, other times we run to the rhyming dictionary and come up with the same old words, cornered in that typical content we always write.

That’s where a good understanding of the rhyme types comes in. I rarely go to my rhyming dictionary anymore because I’ve got all the tools I need right there in my mind when I sift through the different types. The more you practice using these types and noticing the different types in songs you listen to, the quicker you’ll become at thinking of interesting rhymes on the fly.

If you want to use your rhyming dictionary, try approaching your rhymes one at a time by type. Let’s say you need to rhyme ‘stay’. Perfect rhymes include ‘gay, hey, stray, fray, may,’ etc. Family rhyme produces the same list because there is no consonant ending with which to produce a sonic relationship. But if I move to additive rhyme, I get ‘wait, made, hate, fade, break,’ etc. There is no consonant to subtract, and so subtractive rhyme is not an option here either.
Now that I’ve got some additive rhyme ideas, I can go to my rhyming dictionary for pairs. Anything listed as rhymes for ‘wait’ or ‘made’ or ‘hate’ or ‘break’ will work for a rhyme for ‘stay’. I just need to brainstorm to get that first rhyme pair and then I can move to the dictionary to find all other pairs in that grouping.

Use this same technique to find assonance and consonance rhymes. For assonance, the entire list of words with the same vowel sound will work. For consonance, you’ll need to get creative again. You’re not matching the vowel, but the ending consonant. So this time, just filter through your own list in your head, replacing the vowel and keeping the ending consonant the same.

Be careful with trying to rhyme feminine words with masculine words. It’s the stressed syllable of a word that is rhymed, and so when we try to match unstressed and stressed syllables, we’re going to be upsetting the natural stress pattern of one of the words. For more info on this, refer to Pat Pattison’s Writing Better Lyrics, and Essential Guide to Rhyming.

In all cases, keep searching for rhyme that enables you to say what you want to say. Don’t ever let rhyme determine the content, unless you’re using it to brainstorm. Listeners can hear through rhyme chosen for the sake of sonic connection rather than what the word itself has to say.

Happy rhyming –

Andrea