All them lyrics

How I create my lyrics

When writing my lyrics, I’ve decided to watch out for two things. One: never, ever will I insult someone or a group of people directly. This goes against my beliefs of respecting humans the way they are, and that’s why I can’t write lyrics which could be considered as a racist statement. And two: Never, ever will I let AI write my songs. As I explained in my previous article about the usage of AI, it’s a difficult balance between making my songs sound more realistic while still keeping my personal part in the songs. If AI were to make the lyrics as well, would you consider the song still mine? I don’t think it’d be fair to claim the song.

So, since I’ve clearly chosen to always write my lyrics myself, I’m constantly looking for words or sentences which sound well or carry a beautiful message. The result can be summarised as an overloaded mind, constantly looking for words. Combine it with everything happening in my private life, and everything happening in the world, and one would get a person with regular headaches (that’s a joke, by the way).

With this in mind, I can tell you it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time. Focusing on my real job becomes harder, but sometimes results in very good lyrics. Or, watching the news can become really tiresome for me, but it also results in good texts, like the lyrics in the song Time to Unify. Even waiting for the train can result in writing a good text when I just see two guys joking and fooling around. Everything helps, and, contradictorily, everything doesn’t help.

Sometimes, my lyrics are quite simple. Although I like writing lyrics with a hidden message, it’s better sometimes to just say directly what I mean. A lyric like ‘The room is full, there’s a lot of stuff present’, written in the song Love for Nothing, can be considered direct, clear and easy to understand. The next sentence in the same song, ‘But it’s your heart that’s actually absent’, is in my opinion already a bit more floaty. Why is the heart absent? How do you live without a heart? Where did the heart go? Those questions can be asked when reading or hearing such a lyric.

The mixture of writing direct lyrics on the one hand, but more cryptic or describing lyrics on the other hand, makes songwriting a complicated but interesting process. Balancing out these two elements in writing lyrics is an interesting challenge, which sometimes is pretty easy, and sometimes almost impossible. But who said that writing lyrics that way is an easy job?

Lyrics are fascinating, and I feel like they’re just as important as the music. Some tunes can be considered as great songs, but the lyrics don’t say anything. This is especially visible in music nowadays. The message has disappeared, it only has to ‘sound nice’. That’s too easy for me. That way, I could also write songs. Easy hits, with no real meaning.

The same goes for deep lyrics, combined with monotonous music. A ballad with only a piano talking about, for example, how someone lost his or her cat can be a deep text, but the music isn’t really appealing. Finding the balance in appealing music and deep lyrics is a difficult balance as well. One could define it as being perfectionistic, and that person would partially be right. It’s a bit perfectionistic to always look for that balance, but it also can be seen as trying to get the best result for a text.

AI does help here. That doesn’t mean the first result it presents, is exactly what I’m looking for. In fact, I have to give AI the lyrics several times before it gives me exactly what I’m looking for. The song The Silence of Solitude from the album “Anastacia” is a good example. I needed to fill in the lyrics three times, which equals to six songs (two songs per request for generating). One of the versions had a very poor audio quality, resulting in me having to delete it. The other four versions were okay, but not really what I was looking for. The fifth result was what I was looking for; a soft ballad without any drums and a floaty, even slightly spiritual, female voice, telling her lover she’d come to him. And that’s the version that’s online on YouTube and which can be found below this article.

So, in short, there are two components which are tough to balance out, but at the same time a challenge worthy of recognition. First, there’s the balance of simple lyrics versus cryptic lyrics. And secondly, the balance of appealing music versus music that fits with lyrics. These two make a song stand or fall, I’d like to believe. While simple lyrics may be easy to remember or resonate more, cryptic lyrics often require a little more thinking. And, as stated before, finding such a balance isn’t always easy.

The same goes for the music. Appealing versus fitting, it’s always a tough decision. Even I take the ‘appealing’ way sometimes, but I always try to keep the message in the song as well. Is it easy? No, absolutely not. Is it worth the effort? Without a doubt. Because it generates songs with a meaning, but also with good music or music that’s simply nice to listen to.