Hey guys,

This is one of my favorite subjects. As in so many things, we can thank the Internet for a lot of this. The Internet exploded the amount of people writing, recording, and presenting music. It also shortened the attention span of the listener. So there has become very much a "Been there, done that" mentality among everyone, from artists, writers, industry people, all the way to the general listener. They tune out VERY quickly if you are not giving them something they haven't heard a million times. This manifests itself in the subject of rhymes more than just about anything,especially in country music.

When your format exists around conversational songs and stories, you have no choice but to make sure the song sings the way you would say it. The process we use most of the time are what I refer to as "Elbow moments' or those things you hear and poke your neighbor in the ribs with your elbow as if to say "Did you hear that?" That is most often done with "near rhymes" or "off rhymes.'

The perfect rhymes are going the way of the dinosaur as music gets more and more conversational. If you read your lyrics and they sound like Dr. Suess, "I do not like Green Eggs and Ham, I do not like them Sam I am," That is when you are getting too obvious and when most people start tuning you out. Publishers start to fill in "what comes next" and you can do it too.

Heart and Apart, Eyes and Realize, True and Blue, there are a bunch of them. If you are around music all the time, like myself, publishers, TAXI, artists, etc. you hear these over and over and it is like "been there, done that." There is a little trick you can do, listen to a LOT of songs. Amature songs, not hits. Just listen to a verse and chorus. See if you can figure out what they are going to rhyme something with at the end of a line before they get to it.

So near rhymes and different rhymes are the main way we avoid this. Finding different ways to say the same things we all have heard a million times.

And yes, there are those rhymes that make it into popular songs. It is quite a different story when you are coming off of three million selling records and are a strong selling act. My rule of thumb is "When you can see your reflection in your gold and platinum records, you can say anything you want, anyway you want.
Till then, you better find a different way to say it.

This is one of the most obvious things I have to tell people in any time I am doing reviews or critiques. It is simply because there are so many songs, so many artists, so many options to take our attention. 24 hour television, multiple radio stations, Internet, it is all blaring at us all the time. So if you don't find a different way to say something, they are already gone. And you have no time to waste. In Nashville, we listen to songs two lines at a time. If you don't have something ineteresting in the first two lines, we are not going on to the next two, and so forth.

So try for different rhymes. Please. It will pay off for you in the long run.

MAB