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Is anybody here serious about writing? Does anybody even have a clear idea about why they write the way they do? The point of devoting so much time and energy towards it?
...because I'm left here asking myself, Did they not understand what this thread was about? Do they really have no idea about their aims as songwriters, and how their writing style relates to their aims?
Because this thread had NOTHING to do with whether one style is better than another. Even the most banal, cliche pop-lyrics have a purpose.
Seriously...I keep waiting for something...anything to be posted which relates to the thread, but it's like nobody even read the question properly. *sigh*
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You're right, We have been sidetracked a lot by griping. As you can tell, for a bunch of us here, our aim is to convey a story to music, using language which is simple enough that our story doesn't get lost in the vocubulary.
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Seeing as this forum is about song writing, I guess it's not inappropriate to veer from reviews and onto some meta-writting topics.
I was just wondering what people's personal thoughts on lyric writing were (why you do it? personal aims in writing a song? way you go about it? personal inspirations?), and what kind of music you tend to like or emulate.
Just thought it might be an interesting point of discussion, because I imagine it would be wildly varried across writers.
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The way that I go about songwriting is like this...
1. With my band we come up with a guitar riff, from which we develop a complete band backing and write most of the instrumental part to the song.
2. While we're writing the rough instrumentation to the song, I'll be singing different vocal melodies over the top, until I hit upon a particularly effective one (or a few)
3. From the best vocal melodies, I'll come up with a selection of lyrical hooks for the chorus melody.
4. I'll keep a number of these chorus melody/lyric combinations stewing in my head for a few days... what I'll usually do is have no set topic for the song and will come up with a lyrical topic for the whole song based on the chorus hookline.
5. Once I've set myself on one topic I'll write the verse lyrics for it pretty quickly and will prune them to fit the music.
6. This is how I write about 80% of the songs for my band, most of the others were written on acoustic (lyrics and music simultaneously) and only one was written before being put to music.
My reasons for writing music is purely that, to write music (because I love music and love writing it), although for writing lyrics I try to do two things:
1. Write about a topic that I've at least thought about it enough to have enough creative missiles to throw at it.
2. Write about something that a lyric hasn't been written about before.
And achieve these things I do, mmmm.