Basically, there are three types of music; instrumental music (no vocals),  strictly vocal music acapella, and then there are songs like what we hear on the radio every day.  In this "chapter",  we are starting with a musical piece that is crying out for lyrics and doesn’t have them. This is the trickier side to composing actual songs as it’s going to be how the music moves the person that’s writing the lyrics, and that’s a variable that is hard to define. While some pieces will scream bluesy type lyrics, or happy happy joy joy kinds of feelings, others aren’t so cut and dried.

However, the basic process will be the same. First, identify the feeling that most strikes you as being what the song should be about. Is it a C&W song where your significant other is flying the coop, or a Top 40 kind of thing, (C&W backwards) where they are coming back. Is it a heavy song with lots of distortion/overdrive, an acoustic piece, or something else entirely.  Is it a drinking piece best suited for in the bar or a driving piece, something that screams about being out on the open road, even if it never mentions the open road.  All these things come into play when you sit down to compose lyrics to an existing piece.  These are all part of the process, and it’s up to the lyrical composer to figure out what type and how they want to present the song. 

Something that has happened to me on occasion and can best be illustrated by one piece on my site is the story behind "Now That I Found You". When this song was born, it was a melody line stuck in my head. I was incarcerated at the time, and while we had guitars in the yard, they weren’t allowed in the "dorm area". It’s frustrating for me to not be able to pick up a guitar and plunk out this kind of thing, so I grabbed my pencil/paper and used a poster I had of Nancy Wilson (from Heart) as inspiration to the riff. I then scribbled down the words that seemed to fit the line and put them on the shelf. The next time I went to the yard, I hooked up with a musician friend of mine, and he went through the lyrics one time and then did something that to this day I can’t believe. He seemed to reach inside my head and pulled the melody line out.  We played guitar together a lot, and it could be that he had enough insight into my style to know where I was going with it. That was a truly amazing experience, though.

You can’t always rely on this kind of inspiration. The best songs are born this way, and when it does happen, it’s simply magical. The way I would do this, though, involves looping a piece over and over on my computer with a pencil in hand. I submitted a poem called "Tribute" here, and it was written this way: I played the piece over and over, looking for the guitar 2 part, and while I was doing that, I scribbled down the words that came to mind. While the poem fits the piece, it was  actually an instrumental that inspired the poem. Sometimes, that will happen - a  lyric will be produced that actually goes with the song but doesn’t actually fit it. In the end, it’s a judgment call for the composer. After all, it’s the composer that has to determine whether or not the piece is right. There is no right or wrong answer to this. It’s all about emotion and what you are trying to accomplish. This may seem self evident, but if it was as easy as it sounds, we’d all be composers.

Once you find the lyric, it should produce the music in your head even when the music isn’t playing. Any time you read through it, it should start the music in your head. This is the best way to know if you’ve accomplished what you set out to do. Think about it, if you hum or sing a lyric to a song you hear on the radio, do you subsequently hear the music that goes with them? I know I do.

Song writing isn’t all that different from poetry.  You just have extra instruments, and the music itself is a form of poetry. The trick is to get the two forms to mix, and that’s where the artistry comes in.