Listen to the lyrics from your favourite song. Those words speak to you in ways that others may not be able to decipher. Songs these days have a variety of lyrics.
Party lyrics are the type to get you pumped up. These songs are telling you how to live your life that night on the dance floor. When you hear The Macarena, you immediately start doing the dance moves. Or when you hear YMCA, your arms start making the letters. Or when you hear the Cha Cha Slide, you start listening to the instructions. Even if you absolutely despise these songs, you are probably going to dance.
Next are the songs with more profound lyrics. These ones are my favourites. They can range from joyful content to more sorrowful themes. The ones that are happy are best described as “victorious.” Angra is a band that does this the best. There might be a sense of sorrow in it but there still seems to be a sense of joy. On the dark side, you have lyrics that are based on sadness. This is the type of music people see as “raw.” However, I have a problem with people that see this as the peak of lyric writing. When people write sorrowful lyrics, they’re usually in a dark period of their life. Rather than people feeling sorry for the artist, people instead celebrate it.
Then you have lyrics that are super corny, which can be about anything that was listed above. This is easily my least favourite kind. Let’s start off with the kind where the positivity can be a little too much. This kind of party lyrics ends up sounding super uninspiring to the point where you want to leave the party. This is the type you hear from a lot of pop artists who are clearly only in the music industry without any care for music at all. They only want money and fame out of this and while it’s not a bad thing, they should at least care about the lyrics. The other kind of corny lyrics is the ones that try to be serious but fail miserably. I see this in metalcore where bands who used to not take themselves too seriously decide to “mature” in their songwriting but end up making something that sounds like a high schooler who procrastinated on their poetry assignment and started writing the morning it was due. Everyone who likes these kinds of lyrics will go “But they have meaning!” Alright then, tell me what it means without having to write it out. Yep, it’s just a bunch of poetic nonsense like someone who is taking a liberal arts class and is making up stuff to impress their professor. Trust everyone around you, nobody likes when people do that.
Some genres like country and power metal can reuse the same ideas over and over again. In the case of country, the stereotype goes that all country music is about beer, trucks, and women. This is mostly applicable to modern pop country and while I can’t say that all of it is like that, I do know songs that talk about this. In the case of power metal, most of it is about fighting dragons, being victorious, finding treasures, and other fantasy or fantasy-adjacent things. You can listen to a Dragonforce song and count how many times they mention fire and being far away. Let’s just say it will take up more than two hands to count them all. You also have bands that create their own lore such as Rhapsody of Fire, Twilight Force, and Seven Spires. Their lyrics take you on a quest that can’t be easily translated into other media like books and movies.
On the opposite end of creating your own lore, you have bands that write songs based on books and movies. Ice Nine Kills and Blind Guardian are my favourite examples of bands that borrow from film and books. Ice Nine Kill’s 2015 album Every Trick In The Book is based completely on literature while the next two albums The Silver Scream and The Silver Scream II: Welcome to Horrorwood are based on horror movies. Blind Guardian, on the other hand, bases most of its music on fantasy media. While most of their albums have individual songs that borrow from different pieces of literature or movies, they have one album that’s based entirely on one. That album is Nightfall in Middle-Earth, based entirely on The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. The entire album is a retelling of the book and is considered a cult classic by power metal fans.
History is also something to base your songs on. Sabaton is the best example of this as every song they have written is based on a historical event, mostly wars. They even got a Christmas song out of this by making a song about The Christmas Truce. While people are concerned about their songs about Nazi battleships, they have stated that their songs are nothing more than just telling history lessons.
The language you use in the songs also matters. From personal experience, songs that use modern-day slang don’t age as well. You may have seen that video online where Alexandra Starr starts the song off with “No cap,” which translates to no lies. The tone of the song already didn’t call for it, but once that term falls out of favour, the age of the song will easily show when someone in the future discovers the video. It’s not a bad song by any means, but the language will be criticized.
Good songwriting comes a long way. You can write chords, obsess over the instrumentals, and implement as many vocal techniques as you want, but if the lyrics aren’t good, then people will either tune out the vocals or turn off the song together. We get it, writing lyrics isn’t easy, especially when you have to fit them into a melody. However, there’s a lot to pull from. There are world events, books, movies, and personal experiences you can pull words from. No matter what you choose, write lyrics that are inspired.