Source
r/Songwriting•
FigDramatic

It rarely starts with Lyrics

Just seen a couple of videos recently that illustrate really well how its challenge to try and write lyrics first and then apply them to a song. On this sub we see a lot of folks posting 'songs' as lyrics and a few get quite upset when mods remove them and ask them to go into the dedicated thread.

Each video is timestamped in the URL (but will put the time in as well for those where it does not autoplay at the right time). These all illustrate a technique called 'vamping'.

The first is a famous Irish songwriter Glen Hansard Believe in the Blah (timestamped: 2:19)

The second is one of the greatest song writers of all time, Paul McCartney on vamping together Eleanor Rigby (timestamped: 140)

John Mayer call's it ouija boarding he actually uses phrases here.

Trying to do this the opposite way is incredibly hard, you have fit melody / rhythm around the words. Hope that makes sense.

Posted Jun 5, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

04
chrisbuGgy•

To me both seem approaches seem reasonable and doable. Interesting.

3
PitchforkJoe•

I'm with the other commenters; I've had success both ways around. I probably lean more towards lyrics second, but it's far from the only way to do it

I find the challenge with going lyrics first is that you'll often end up with a melody that doesn't call for a standard four chorder; you have to dig deeper to figure out the actual chord progression to harmonize your melody, which is hard. Or at least it's definitely harder then putting a melody over a 4 chord vamp. I guess that's kinda the main advantage and the main disadvantage of going lyrics first

2
Dry-Librarian5542•

It really depends on your background/style, if you’re familiar with poetic structure then starting with lyrics might be easier. Many Broadway composer/lyricists do it that way.

1
president_josh•

Thanks for the video. It's not easy to find locations in videos where Paul talks about something like that. One time he said the Beatles only covered the songs of others in clubs. They got tired of other acts singing the songs the Beatles were going to sing so they decided to try writing their own songs. Perhaps having had so much experience covering the songs of others, they instinctively knew how songs should sound to get lots of people to like the songs. Paul also seems adept at getting song ideas and phrases from mumbling and playing around with sounds like Sia does. And playing chords at the same time probably doesn't hurt.

Elton John sings music to words he hasn't seen (written by Bernie Taupin) but he also plays piano chords at the same time. And when asked by an audience member how he did it, Elton said "it's in the chords" even though Elton says he has no idea how it happens. Maybe he's a master of chords like the Beatles and that makes it possible for Elton in real time to make up melodies to words he's never seen and get hit songs in the process. The chords. And Elton doesn't have to worry about words because they're all already written in front of him.

1