@spiralganglion@merveilles.town
Post #1327498
2026-04-16 15:52 UTC
Replies (16)
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@RosaCtrl@social.vivaldi.net 2026-04-16 15:56
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I used to be a lyrics are the cherry on top of music, but now they are really important to me. Sure music makes me feel dizzy just because, but lyrics make me relate. My currently singer songwriter now is Florence Welch. When my ex dumped me I rediscovered the How big, how blue how beautiful album. Now I know that I always related to those lyrics, but I couldn’t admit it. That relationship was already doomed 😅
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@jack@berlin.social 2026-04-16 15:57
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town O god it’s so hard
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@neauoire@merveilles.town 2026-04-16 15:57
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I love lyrics, I think I like the worldbuilding stuff most of all. I tend to favor french musicians for that, but I think Purity Ring writes some of the most evocative stuff for English speakers. https://genius.com/Purity-ring-lofticries-lyrics I think I feel a pretty specific pull from lyrics that are like "take my hand and come into this crazy ride with me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQ_zgn9ck4
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@akkartik@merveilles.town 2026-04-16 16:12
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town @jack@berlin.social "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no no no." "And the walls came tumbling down in the city that we love." "There's a picture opposite me of my primitive ancestry, which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck-free."
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@surprisetalk@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 16:41
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town Random non-hip-hop favorites: https://joannanewsomlyrics.com/album/2-ys/15-sawdust-diamonds_as_sung/ https://genius.com/Fall-out-boy-xo-lyrics https://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/amy_irving/why_dont_you_do_right.html https://genius.com/City-and-colour-what-makes-a-man-lyrics https://genius.com/Noah-gundersen-cigarettes-lyrics https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/punchbrothers/julep.html https://genius.com/Bo-burnham-that-funny-feeling-lyrics
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@trenner@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 16:51
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I watch the work of my kin, bold and boyful/ Toying somewhere between love and abuse” Hozier isn’t my kind of music (I’m a rap fan, very different kind of lyrics!), but he is certainly my kind of lyricist
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@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca 2026-04-16 16:58
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town General pointers for writing song lyrics: Sing your lyrics, full voice, as you work on them. Figure out which syllables stumble as you're singing, or where the natural spoken melody/accents clash with the musical melody you're trying to fit to them. Decide what you want to say, but then decide how important it is that you hold true to that. Are you writing a memoir, or fiction? Are you OK with letting the melody, rhyme, & word play lead the song in unexpected directions? Or is the message more important than clean sound? Don't worry too much about perfect rhymes. Vowel sounds and patterns of emphasis are usually what comes through when singing, while consonants fade a bit. (So, "far", "heart", "stark" could make a passable pseudo-rhyme group.) What matters is that it sounds right when you're singing it. Same with exact meter/number of syllables. If you can maintain the melody timing & emphasis while working around some extra or stretched out syllables, that's what matters.
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@swordgeek@mstdn.ca 2026-04-16 17:27
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I'm not much of a songwriter, but I took a free course on Coursera (taught by Pat Pattison) that provided some incredible i sight into songwriting. He also has writen 'THE' book on songwriting/lyrics.
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@livcomp@hachyderm.io 2026-04-16 19:23
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town "making too much sense" I have trouble getting myself out of contexts that I've written myself into, leading to unusable boring crap, when in retrospect anyway, I'd've been better off just jumping somewhere else
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@samir@mastodon.functional.computer 2026-04-16 19:26
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I mostly don’t hear or understand lyrics until I’ve listened to the song 200 times, but then they come through and they’re very important to me. (And yet, I keep listening to System of a Down, who have some great lyrics in a few songs but mostly nonsense.) I don’t think I have favourite lyrics but the ones that stick with me the most tend to be the choruses from angsty (pop) punk. “The Kids Aren’t Alright”, perhaps, or “Basket Case”. The vocals to “Iris” have stuck in my head since I heard them on repeat once. My favourite songs tend to be the more instrumental ones. I love “Nothing Else Matters”, but I couldn’t tell you any of the words, and I prefer the Apocalyptica cover, which has no vocals, just cellos. When I listen to rap I have no idea what anyone’s saying, I just enjoy the feeling. I apologise if this is completely unhelpful.
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@xavier@sunny.garden 2026-04-16 19:38
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town c • My favourite lyricist is still Spencer Krug (saying "still" because this was already true 10 years ago). He writes songs that feel both abstract and very specific, and he turns all stories into epics. No idea how he does it. At the moment I'm also big into Hozier, Rosie Tucker, and The Beths, when it comes to inspiration for songwriting. b • I love good lyrics. The music is what invites me in, the lyrics are what makes me stay awhile. a • In terms of doing the writing myself, I've had better results recently with first writing (free-form) poems, and then adapting them into songs. I find writing a song from nothing to be excessively hard, and it tends to generate very formulaic songs. If I have a poem to start from, then I can use rhythm of the words as a basis for the melody, repeat important parts to create choruses, and so on. I might change much of the poem in the process, but that's fine. I got this way of working from an interview of Patrick Stump on Song Exploder, where he explained how Fall Out Boy wrote their early songs. Pete Wentz pulled scraps of lyrics and poems out of the ether and threw them into notebooks, and then later Patrick would shape these into songs. And if you need a tip for writing (bits of) poems, my usual technique is to visit this website: https://wordcounter.net/random-word-generator. I generate 2 words at random and use them as a basis or theme for a few lines. Rinse and repeat.
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@psc@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 19:42
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town a. My most successful algorithm was: (a) make a melody first and then (b) write lyrics that sound about right, and iterate a ton. I won't say I'm beaming with pride from what I made, but this was furthest from shameful that I came up with. b. From a creator's perspective, not liking the lyrics makes liking the entire song impossible, even if you love the instrumental.
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@muhanga@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 21:16
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town a) tell the story. Retell it using less words. Repeat until you can't remove words. Try to sing your story only using vowels. Now you have a lyric melody that you can play around. And match with music or other way around. c) Encumbered forever by desire and ambition There's a hunger still unsatisfied Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon Though down this road we've been so many times Pink Floyd, High Hopes.
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@Mustbetuesday@sunny.garden 2026-04-16 21:29
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town 2 of my favorite methods of starting a song/coming up with an idea: - Take a line that doesn't make sense (it came to me in a dream, or a misheard lyric from another song) and then write a song around it that makes the line make sense - Imagine I'm given a weird songwriting/improvising task on Taskmaster or Whose Line is it Anyway
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@entailment@woof.tech 2026-04-17 08:58
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town b) i'm like others who don't automatically pay attention to lyrics, though i think for me that does depend a bit on composition and the mix of the track. in any case, when i do know the lyrics of a song, seeing words or phrases from it elsewhere will instantly make it pop into my head
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@arcade@merveilles.town 2026-04-17 21:07
@spiralganglion@merveilles.town I have no experience with a, but b&c: I love lyrics. Without lyrics, I can't sing along to a song, which is a big part of most of the music I listen to. As for favorite lyrics, I'm a sucker for any old union songs, so put all those down, and I really like what Cheekface does with "talk-singing"