Lyrically Speaking

Hi all,

I'm just meandering around Writing.com and I happened to chance upon this cool forum. I was wondering what people thought about this...

One of my close friends, I've known him since kindergarten, is an excellent writer. He's done a lot of free lance work since finishing college and has been working for the past couple of years to prep for grad school. Anyway, as gifted a writer as he is, he really isn't very good at writing song lyrics at all. We discovered this when he asked me to put his song lyrics to music. In my experience, there are a couple of standard ways to write songs (maybe others have differnt methods). The first and most common way is to write the music first, then write the lyrics to the music. The second way--mastered by Jim Morrison--is to write the lyrics first, and then write music to those lyric. The latter tends to naturally be more focussed on the lyrics and the melody and other musical components can sometimes be so dynamic to fit the dynamics of the lyrics, that the song becomes more like a rock opera song than anything else. I find that method a bit more difficult and usually less successful (that just could be my personal taste, though).

Anyway, the point is...I think people get the wrong idea about lyric writing. Song lyrics, IMO, are meant to be heard, not read. Rhyme schemes (if the lyrics happen to rhyme as most do) that work in poetry don't always work in songs, and visa versa. I'm really pleased to see Writing.com make mp3 sharing an option. Hopefully it will open the door for songwriters to be able to share their work within the Writing.com community.

Any thoughts? Comments?
Thanks for reading my rambling.

Philthy