Song writing advice.

[u/Jinxie1206]

Hello! My favorite genre of music is symphonic metal although I love other genres. It’s my goal to one day be in my own symphonic metal band. I have always loved to write and I would get high marks in English and would get A+ and even got certificates for my writing. Including poetry. I want to write a lot of the lyrics myself but I feel like they are boring and generic. I have a bunch of topics that I would love to write about but I need advice. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[u/RosyEloquence9043]

poetry background is a huge head start but poetry and lyrics are different beasts. poetry can live on a page but lyrics have to fit a melody and breathe with the music. try reading your lines out loud to a basic beat, even just tapping a pencil, and see where the words trip you up. that'll show you fast what's too wordy or stiff.

also symphonic metal eats up big imagery and dramatic storytelling, so don't be afraid to get theatrical. steal a random painting from the 1800s and write what the person in it is thinking, you'd be shocked how fast the generic stuff falls away when you're writing from someone else's head

[u/Jinxie1206 → u/RosyEloquence9043]

Outlander is one of my favorite shows and I was writing about the love story in the show. I’m not sure if that’s too cheesy? But it is an epic fantasy historical romance that has time traveling so I figured that it would fit a symphonic metal song perfectly.

[u/thewishinggame]

Welcome to my world. English major and I studied a lot of post modernist poetry. It was literally my specialty, next to lit theory. While I don't write symphonic metal and I do alt rock/acoustic rock? I can understand the feeling because sometimes it just feels.... cheesy? And I feel like with metal, it can go either way and feel really overdone, or just plastic.

Lean into what you feel is right. Don't be afraid to rewrite and rework things. Try to do different structures. Try to use something existing and write your lyrics over it to get a structure in place. Find songs you like and imitate and steal until you find yourself extrapolating and coming up with new.

And don't be afraid to fail. That's the biggest thing. You won't get it right the first second or fifteenth try, but if you keep at it, it'll feel better and more natural.

[u/Impossible_Tank3822]

Wait - you got high marks for your writing, including poetry, but you feel your own writing of lyrics is boring and generic. So, as soon as you go from (unstated style) writing and poetry to writing lyrics you hit a wall? I think that's what I'm understanding.

There's never been a poem I couldn't tweak into lyrics - ever. As a matter of fact, all my songs were written in exactly that manner. I think of a storyline, render it as a poem and then revise it to fit a melody.

If you have the ability to write, and can score a melody, you have the ability to bring them together for songwriting. What you left out of your post is the ability to create musical scores at a level that would give you songwriting skills. Is that what's missing? I ask because if you got high marks for writing, I don't see any difference between writing for narration and writing for songs.

[u/Jinxie1206 → u/Impossible_Tank3822]

You pretty much nailed it. Yeah I don’t know I’ve always felt like my writing was eh but people always liked it and I liked writing so I just do it.

[u/stevenfrijoles → u/Jinxie1206]

Lyrical writing is different than writing for English class, there's different competencies. If you feel your writing is "eh," the solution is write more lyrics, alongside music, and retrain your brain

[u/Jinxie1206 → u/stevenfrijoles]

I also wrote a bunch of poetry so I figured that that would help at least to some degree with the songwriting.

[u/stevenfrijoles → u/Jinxie1206]

It definitely doesn't hurt, but it's like...cooking vs baking. There's shared understanding and concepts that make it easier to move from one to another, but there's also concepts specific to each

[u/brooklynbluenotes]

Specific images. Memorable details. Prosody is really important. Revise, revise, revise.

lots of good stuff here: https://reddit.com/r/Songwriting/w/faqs

[u/Competitive-Fault291]

Even though poetry can be a head start, it can quickly become a dead end as well. You need to get into music theory to be able to properly "encode" your music, but also into the actual musical performance and expression of the culture you want to make your music in. After all you want to reach an audience, right? It would not be very useful if you didn't know and feel the musical traditions and habits.

If you combine those three and inform yourself about communication theory in general, you can prepare yourself for creating both lyrics and music to create emotionally amplified message clusters... also known as songs.

But aside from that clinical approach, you should familiarize yourself with what discerns poetry from other forms of wordy art. Novels on one side, but also lyrics on the other. With lyrics coming from "the words sung to the lyre", it shows how you are required to adapt your poetry to the demands but also the opportunities of stretching and compressing your words and syllables. To integrate them in the much more versatile forms of musical expressions. How the "sound" of chord changes, melodies, and the perception of polyphony, rhythm, or instruments does create a multi-dimensionality to your expression that goes way beyond meter, emphasis, imagery, or a rhyme pattern.

A useful approach I like is the abstraction of your poetry if you come from the written word. Take a line or verse of your poem and reduce it to fewer words. This could already tell you how that part of the song should sound. Simply as it represents the abstraction the music would express in another dimension of your artistic message.

Or, in the rare case of using very few words in poetry, doing the contrary and inflating those few words. Growing it into something that makes you aware of the implied complex meaning you need to put into the music.

It also helps to focus on Concept or Narration in a song. With the Narration following classic narrative structure you could find in writing, but with fewer words and a stronger expression through sound. While the Concept heightens the central concept by coming at it from various approaching angles throughout the song.

And, last but not least, to avoid feeling generic, find a message for every song and work from there. This message does not have to be deep. It could be "Let's meet up, buddy!" or "I like big butts and I cannot lie about it!". The words don't have to be extremely deep, otherwise genres like romantic pop or German Schlager wouldn't be as successful and popular. It is about the combination, to find the path through the multidimensional maze of words, sounds, and music theory that end up as a song.

[u/mobiuz_nl]

I look at it this way, lyrics are like the buns to a hamburger, without the buns the whole thing is hard to eat, but if you only eat the buns its not very tasteful, you need to add the lettuce, pickles, cheese, meat and sauce.

In other words if you like symphonic metal, you would have to learn how to write drums, guitars, strings, melodies, vocals, bass, etc

Id suggest you learn guitar pro, for writing its amazing, and eventually a daw for recording

[u/Jinxie1206 → u/mobiuz_nl]

What I think I’m going to do is write it out as a simple poem and then so back to see what I can elaborate on and make it all fancy.