Finding the Perfect Musician to Bring Your Lyrics to Life

Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.  What future songwriting team will you become part of?  If you write lyrics, it’s entirely possible that a musician out there needs your skills.  In the same way that many people can express themselves better through speech than writing, many musicians express themselves better through melodies than lyrics.  These musicians need your lyrics!

Why team up with someone else?  Because music publishers rarely accept submissions consisting only of lyrics. They want to hear an entire song.  That song can then be made into a demo whose music and lyrics can spark the attention of producers, publishers, record labels, or other artists who will pay for use of the song.

Teaming up with a musician also makes sense because you need to conform your lyrics to a melody.  Remember, poetry and lyrics aren’t the same thing.  Although poetry and lyrics do share some characteristics, many good poems usually make very bad lyrics, because they’re designed to stand on their own and don’t need to smoothly flow with musical patterns.  Here are a few qualities poetry and lyrics share:

•     Poems and lyrics both use strong imagery.

•     Poems and lyrics both use literary elements, including rhymes, plays on words and metaphors.

•     Poems and lyrics both emotionally engage their audiences.

That’s where the similarities between poems and lyrics ends.  Lyrics usually have only three or four minutes to grab a listener’s attention.  Lyrics need to immediately connect with listeners, and they need to do it clearly and concisely.  Although there are exceptions to every rule, lyrics typically can’t be bogged down with long phrases and obscure words that could confuse the audience and tangle themselves around the singer’s tongue.  Read your lyrics aloud to test whether or not they flow smoothly.  Lyrics should make a point, instead of being open to interpretation.  Lyrics can repeated, especially in the chorus, which is the song’s hook—the part of a song listeners can’t get out of their minds.

Learn by example.  Listen to your favorite songs to detect the patterns of the lyrics:  the verses, choruses, refrains and bridges.  Try to initially write similarly patterned lyrics until you find the structure you’re most comfortable with.  You might also want to take a class to learn about writing lyrics, or read several “how-to” books about lyrics.

Now you’re ready to collaborate.  Where do you find musicians to team up with?  You might want to initially offer to write lyrics for local bands or garage bands.  The pay may be minimal—or nonexistent—but you’ll get comfortable writing lyrics for other people’s melodies, and you’ll get the experience necessary to seek collaboration on a more professional level.

To move up to that level, you can search for your songwriting soulmate on the internet.  There are many websites that are great resources for finding a musician who can work compatibly with your lyrics.  Check out record stores to see if anyone there is a musician—or knows one—who might be interested in your skill with lyrics.  You can also scour the music departments of local colleges for a collaborator.

Once you find someone, keep in mind that this is a relationship, and like any relationship, it may take a little time to feel at ease with each other.  But once you’re comfortable, the music and lyrics will flow, and a demo—or more—could be on the horizon!