Lol ah-HA so you did use to do single note acoustic shredding.
I bet that itch will resurface at some point, you can’t escape the pull of the shred.
Once upon a time, sure. Honestly, I get enough woopledy-bloop nonsense on electric guitar.
In the last few days that I’ve been playing my acoustics, I’ve written one full song with lyrics, another without lyrics, and I have chordal ideas for about 2 or 3 more.
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So I’ve become quite adept at singing and playing guitar at the same time over the years however I just suck at lyrics.
All the lyrics I try to write just sound so cringe it’s embarrassing.
Write funny lyrics (I am serious). Extol the virtues of SS frets and how shitty nickel is or whatever. haha
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I spent several years taking singing lessons, learning to sing and play at the same time, etc.
Lyrics are difficult for me, too. I just try to remember that most great songs go through several drafts of lyrics, and John Lennon said to just say anything until the right words come to you. The song I finished started as me trying to write my wedding vows (totally serious).
My father is an excellent drummer, but later in life he became a singer-songwriter. He’s won several national song contests. Even though his music is totally different from what I do, he has helped me in understanding the craft.
Probably not what most of the CTC audience would be into, but here’s some of his work for those who are interested:
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I relate singing and playing guitar at the same time as very similar to drumming.
I’m surprised more people don’t try to develop this skill because, imo, it grants the ability to actually create songs (well in my case songs with shitty lyrics).
I love being able to improvise singing over improvised guitar parts on the fly, it satisfies in a completely different way then shredding licks at 255bpm lol.
But the question is how are you able to work on lyrics without dying from shame and embarrassment? My lyrics are just so painful and lame sounding and I don’t know how to approach it lmao.
lmao my songs about nickel frets would be aggressive metal doom songs
It helps knowing that I’m already a giant lame-o, and that nothing I would write could make me any less cool.
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Lol I’m okay with me being a giant lame-o but I don’t want to channel that at other people through my songs.
But I bet your lyrics are interesting based on the content of your writings - whereas mine make me want to kill myself out of cringe lol.
Honestly, this all makes sense. I hesistated for a moment while writing “strength” because that doesn’t quite feel right - it’s more like familiarity with the motions or strength in the endurance athlete sense where repeating a motion thousands of times dones’t come with much of a metabolic toll any more, noting of course that metabolism is the exact wrong concept here. Could be as simple as getting my calluses used to the heavier strongs and maybe slightly different contact points, I guess.
Honesrtly, it’s kind of a yin and yang thing. The slow stuff makes the fast stuff sound faster, the fast stuff makes the slow stuff sound more soulful. Sure, i’m doing scale runs on mine, but I’m also just sitting there looking for cool ways to interlock chord voicings too, and it scratches a very different itch.
This is basically my entire approach to writing ANYTHING. :lol:
I’m not much of a lyricist, but if I can extrapolate from my experience as a music lover and someone who writes instumental music, most of this is just silencing your mental critic. A song writing exercise I’ve done a couple times now to get over writers block is to just sit down for a month and write a song a day, and don’t care if they’re any GOOD, just that at the end of the day you have a verse and chorus and mauybe a bridge section. I’ve never made it longer than a week and a half because without fail by tat point I’ll have three or four ideas that I’m legitimately so excited about I want to go back and flesh them out properly. Things that seem “obvious” or “cliche” or “uninteresting” at first pass often really, really aren’t when you come at them fully fleshed out, and there’s a lesson in there.
I think of Pink Floyd a lot in the context of lyricism. “Mother” has two of those lines that most songwriters, I think, would spend their whole careers trying to touch even just once, and they do it twice in five minutes. For a band that wrote very consciously about being a band, “She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing” is just a crushing lyric, and the final closing line, as the narrator sits back and looks at what he’s done and realizes the enormity of what it means to wall yourself off from the world, “Mother, did it need to be so high?” Part of me dies a little whenever I hear that.
But, then there’s “Wish You Were Here,” their song for Syd Barrett. “Oh how I wish, wish you were here” is such an obvious lyric… But never in a million years could I actually write that, because it’s TOO honest, too direct, too heartfelt, and too naked, without being wrapped in anything approaching a metaphor. They just come out and say it. And it’s such an amazingly heavy line for it.
There’s a lesson in there.
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Lol I’ve tried that write a song every day thing and have failed miserably every time.
I’m definitely someone who gets option-paralysis when it comes to committing to musical ideas - it’s like I keep on thinking if I keep mining I’ll find something better around the corner. This effectively makes me work on certain songs for years. YEARS lol.
Honestly, the secret is to not CARE if they suck. Maybe set out to write bad songs for a while. I can definitely spend weeks on, for lack of a better word, “editing” or “refining” a song, once I have the core of it, and while some of my best writing basically happend fully formed, one of my favorite songs on this project I’m wrapping up now was a couple weeks of listening back and maybe punching one different note in somewhere in the verse because it didn’t QUITE sit right for me… but I had the core of the song done pretty quickly, it was just taking a cool idea and figuring out how to let it breathe. Hell, the chorus is basically as-demo’d, just on a different guitar. 
(Strat, position 2, vs my Suhr, bridge humbucker, so we’r talking very different tones)
But I CARE!
I can’t stop CARING! lmao. I’m sensitive when it comes to my songs! Sensitive I tell you!
Here’s me:
“Hmmm can’t come up with good lyrics for the part in this soft acoustic ballad - I know! I’ll put in a shreddy 80s metal solo with thick distortion, chorus, harmonizer, and slap-back delay!”
Anyways, sorry if I derailed the thread, your Collings is sweet.
I don’t really care, to be honest.
Alright then. There’s a few lines I’m not totally happy with and I intend to workshop it with my father and my musician friends when I visit home before the wedding, but there’s literally zero chance that my fiancée will read this thread, so it’s not like this would ruin it for her. Judge for yourself:
Here I am now lost in your eyes
I’ll stay for the rest of my life
I think that I’ve lost my mind
I think about you all of the time
You tell me you’re not perfect
As if I hadn’t made up my mind
Darling, you are worth it
All my love and all of my life
Here I am now lost in your arms
Safe from every worry and harm
I think that you’ve lost your mind
To want to give me all of your time
I’d tell you I’m not perfect
Darling, I know you’re not blind
If you tell me I’m worth it
I vow to show you that you’re right
Here we are now lost in our love
Life’s the dream that we’re dreaming of
Maybe we’re just losing our minds
Maybe all we have is our time
They’ll tell you life’s not perfect
Everyday we see that they’re right
But we know it’s worth it
We find our way with love as our light
It’s truly liberating.
I’m a huge fan of Waters’ lyrics, and I totally agree with the examples you’ve listed.
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Maybe we should split this off into a seperate thread, but if it helps, go try to write the WORST song you can tonight. Intentionally make it as bad as possible. It if doesn’t elicit physical pain, you’ve failed.
Then, tomorrow, go write anything. The trick is to disconnect the process from the outcome and make the process all that matters, and then after a fw weeks of this, then and only then assess the outcome.
I love that!
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I feel like your soon to be wife will love that song
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Suddenly, the Connor Lynn Instagram lyricist account is created.
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Thank you, that’s very encouraging.
I’d find it hard to believe that any song I’d write would be worth plagiarising.
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Shiiiit I could write you the worst song ever in like 2 minutes, just hold my beer.
Lmao but seriously I do need to figure out how to get over myself when it comes to lyrics.
My GOAT Viktor Frankl would be proud.
I’ve lost count of how many things I have improved in my life thanks to paradoxical intention (including my picking haha). Absolutely love it.
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Putting aside the insanity of Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize in literature for his lyrics, there is no right answer here. The reason is that no matter what lyrics you write, a huge amount of people will simply hate them. HOWEVER, some people will love them, and that’s success for the song.
Consider these lyrics: Brilliant? Stupid? It’s up to you.