Originally Posted by ColmT

My advice to pure lyrics is to learn three major and two minor chords of the same key on any instrument, guitar or keys or whatever.

So lyricists learn to play! God knows you'll never find a group of people more anxious to teach and help you - than here!


Colm, the comments above may have led to people expressing their feelings about whether or not they choose to learn to play an instrument. wink And the question "Why don't Lyricists learn an instrument?" is a pointed one. It might even be interpreted to imply that lyricists purposely choose not to learn an instrument just to p*ss off musicians. laugh

As regards your "pure lyrics"/"words of a song" question:

For me, theres no difference now. When I first began with lyrics, I viewed them more as structured poems suitable to be put to music. For maximum impact, they needed of course to have particular structures/formats, metering, flow, literary devices, and so on: the things I normally associated with poetry when I was working exclusively in that medium (and short stories). And of course depending on the genre the lyrics needed to tell a coherent story. I relied entirely on the composer(s) to provide music and hoped hed create a song that would please me as well. I suppose I viewed text then as pure lyrics.

Now, however, after a great deal of reading, research, practice, and in particular, collaborating, I find that I hear music/melodies when Im writing. Or Ill hear a particular bedtrack or instrumental and that will immediately inspire me to write something based on the emotions elicited by the music. These lyrics are perhaps the words of a song.

Mind you, I may have misunderstood the question. It's a strange one. wink

Donna

Honour the Earth. Without it, we'd be nowhere.

Life is too important to take seriously.