hey, welcome to 12tone! so… lyrics. we don't tend to talk about them much on this
channel 'cause I'm very easily distracted by cool harmony stuff, but it's hard to deny
their importance. they're the first thing most listeners will
identify with in any given song, and they're the clearest means of conveying your story,
so since, as a singer, I do have a background in lyric writing, I suppose I might as well
address the elephant in the room. lyrics are, in a way, one of the most mysterious
elements of composition: we can talk about how a minor key makes the harmony sound sad,
or how large leaps make a melody sound powerful, and while those are both fairly broad generalizations
and not necessarily true in any specific context, at least they work as guidelines. but for lyrics, it can be hard to even get
that far: sure, mentioning crying will probably make your lyrics sound sad, but language is
so complicated and there's so many different ways to say the same thing that even finding
a good starting point for structural analysis becomes a daunting task. and yet it's hard
to deny that great lyrics and great lyricists do exist, so what's the secret? well, it's surprisingly simple: practice. ok, that's not super helpful, so let's get
a bit more specific: practice writing poetry. I mean, it makes sense, right? lyrics are basically poetry set to music anyway,
but if you strip away all that extra stuff and just focus on the poetic structure, you
quickly realize something incredibly important: words are more than just their meanings. they're also made up of sounds, and those
sounds are the fundamental atomic structure from which we build lyrics. the most obvious part of this is rhyme. I suspect you're already familiar with the
concept of rhyming so I won't spend too long on the basics, but there's actually a lot
more to it than you might think. the version you're probably thinking of right
now is the end rhyme, where you rhyme the final syllables of two different lines, like
in the classic BNL song One Week, which contains the very meaningful line "chickity China,
the chinese chicken, you have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'." and yes, chicken sounds like tickin, but that
line actually contains more than just end rhymes. both those words contain that "ick" sound,
and we can find that same syllable in other words, like "chickity" and "drumstick". this is called internal rhyme, where the rhyming
syllables are buried inside the line instead of just sitting at the end. adding internal rhymes to your lyrics can
help provide a bit more cohesion, making the whole thing feel like one composed piece instead
of just two lines that you haphazardly tied together. you don't even have to connect these internal
rhymes to the end bits: check out the use of "China" and "chinese", whose first syllables
unsurprisingly match as well. that particular example may seem like cheating
if we cared about what the words mean, but from a strictly phonetic perspective, it totally
works. internal rhyme is a huge part of writing more
advanced lyrics, and if you want to learn more about it, the best place to look is probably
hip-hop, where they're so common that they can even replace end rhymes, blurring phonetic
structures across lyrical lines to tie everything together into one giant, complicated rhyme
scheme. it's really fascinating. check out Cardboard Castles by Watsky for
a good example. but we're still just looking at rhyme placement:
what about rhyming itself? from an analytical perspective, what is a
rhyme? I mean, sure, it's when two sounds sound the
same, but what does that mean? well, all the examples I've used so far are
what're called perfect rhymes, where the entire end of the syllable or word is the same, like
boom and zoom. but boom also sounds like dune, which has
no m, and it sounds like bam, which has a completely different vowel. this brings us to what are called slant rhymes,
where the words are kinda similar but not quite as close. we can break these into two groups: assonance,
where the vowel sound is the same, and consonance, where the consonant is the same. liberal use of these sorts of semi-rhymes,
especially for internal stuff, can really help your lyrics sound deep and polished without
limiting your word choices too much. you just have to be aware of it. but rhymes aren't the only way in which the
sounds of words can affect your lyrics. possibly even more important is the impact
of accents. not, like, sounding British or whatever: in
poetry, the word "accent" refers to the specific stress pattern in a given word. for instance, in the word "explode", the emphasis
is on the second syllable, whereas in "syrup", it's on the first. in normal speech, these accents just fall
wherever they want, but in poetry they're often very tightly controlled: for instance,
Shakespeare often wrote in iambic pentameter, which meant that each line consisted of five
iambs, which is a fancy poetry word for the accent pattern of "explode". the patterns don't have to be tied to the
words, though: for instance, in the famous line "shall I compare thee to a summer's day",
"summer's" has the accent on the first syllable, making it what's called a trochee, like "syrup". but it's placed in such a way that it's actually
split across two iambs, so if we zoom out and look at the phrase "a summer's day", it
works just fine. traditional Western poetry tends to stick
very closely to its accent patterns, which gives it a sort of rhythm that you don't find
in normal speech. when I say "shall I compare thee to a summer's
day", the alternating pattern of on and off syllables creates an almost musical quality
all on its own, and the sentence just rolls off the tongue beautifully. but lyrics are different, because music already
has rhythm. that's what drummers are for. this means we don't have to be nearly as strict
with our poetic meter, but it doesn't mean we get to stop caring about accents. whatever melody you're singing, there's going
to be emphasized notes and less emphasized notes, and in my opinion one of the biggest
differences between amateur and professional lyricists is how well they line up those accented
notes with the accented syllables of their lyrics. it's a really big deal: once, in a college,
a friend of mine played me a song they wrote, and the only thing I remember about it is
that they said the word "secret" but put the second syllable on the downbeat. that stuck with me, and not in a good way. finally, I know we set aside meaning earlier
'cause it's hard to quantify, but practicing poetry can help with that, too, or at least
it can help with one of the most important aspects of it: imagery. being able to evoke emotions and ideas indirectly
is crucial. for instance, Ben E. King could've sung "when
we're scared", but instead he went with "when the night is cold and the land is dark, and
the moon is the only light we'll see," and I think most people would agree that that's
way better. poetry, again, strips away a lot of the other
tools that music has to make people feel things, forcing you to invest as much emotional resonance
as possible into the actual words you're using. plus, if you follow the forms we talked about
earlier, it kinda just becomes a lot harder to use the same line over and over. after all, there's only so many words that
rhyme with "sad". so yeah, poetry's awesome, but how do you
get started? well, I'd start by finding something to write
about. something you have an emotional attachment
to, like a loved one, a hobby, or a treasured object. it can be anything you want, just make sure
it means something to you. then you just… write a poem about it. if you need some more guidance, I recommend
writing a sonnet: they're a bit old-fashioned but they've got a great structure for practicing
a lot of the stuff we mentioned earlier. we did a whole video on sonnets a while back,
so if you want to know how they work, there's a link in the description. all in all, the conclusion here is probably
fairly obvious: the more time you spend playing with language, the better you'll get at it. poetry is like the pure, distilled form of
lyricism, and writing poems is like doing isolation training at the gym, which I assume
is a thing people do at gyms. there's no formula for great lyrics, anyone
who says differently is selling something. but if you want to get better, probably the
best thing to do is just write some poems. plus, if they're any good you can just set
them to music later and boom, free lyrics. it's really that easy. anyway, thanks for watching, thanks to our
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