Lyrics

Often, it's the music that writes the lyrics.

rhyming couplets are always a safe choice. That said, beware of using 'forced rhymes', where the listener can tell you chose a word just to fit the rhyme scheme instead of for its meaning. Ideally, you're looking for words that say what you want to say, and just happen to rhyme.
Show, don't tell. Don't say he's depressed, say he's eating raw cookie dough in his room at 3am. Don't say she's beautiful, say her hair bounces around her frame with every step she takes. It's important not to tell the audience what they are supposed to feel about what they hear: instead, just give us the details and we'll reach that feeling ourselves. Specificity is incredibly powerful.
Think about structure. Generally, your chorus should sorta 'sum up' your song, while your verses should each explore different aspects of the topic. Perhaps your verses function a bit like chapters of a story. Perhaps as the song progresses, someone's perspective changes, something gets realised, something comes full circle by the end of the song. Maybe each verse has a callback to previous verses, some kind of lyrical echo that occurs in the same part of each verse
show first, and then tell
- showing makes the telling more powerful because your senses and your mind are both engaged.
- practically, think of the first line of a stanza (or set of stanzas) as a bag of dye with holes in it. It's a colorful phrase that continues to work after the line has already been sung, as the dripping paint colors subsequent lines

Metaphors

Metaphors are collisions between ideas that don’t belong together. It’s about creating friction in a way that results in something sensible

write down “An army is a rabid wolf”, and suddenly the soldiers begin to snarl, grow snouts, and foam at the teeth

Play with idioms. Take a common saying and twist it.

ex. Cloud with a silver bullet, wolves in wolves' clothing, that kinda thing.

Types of metaphor

expressed identity metaphor

Asserts an identity between 2 nouns

ex. fear is a shadow, a cloud is a sailing ship
these come in 3 forms:
1. “X is Y”
2. “The Y of X”
3. “X’s Y”

Qualifying metaphor

uses adjectives to qualify nouns, and adverbs to qualify verbs. Friction within these relationships creates the metaphor

ex. Hasty clouds, to sing blindly

Verbal metaphor

Formed by conflict between the verb and its subject and/or object

ex. Clouds sail, frost gobbles up summer

Diatonic Metaphors

Consider that concepts have other concepts tied to them. This is analogous to music and how things are in the same key (hence, diatonic)

ex. Power: avalanche, Muhammed Ali, army, socket, tide. These can be combined in interesting ways:
- Muhammed Ali avalanched over his opponents
- An avalanche is an army of snow
- A socket holds back tides of electricity

When looking at it this way, it reveals that a metaphor works by revealing some third thing that 2 ideas share in common

Objective Correlatives

An objective coorelative is an object that correlates with a specific emotion you are trying to portray. In other words, the object stands in for the emotion

ex. grafitti on an abandoned bridge conveys the feeling of urban decay.

Rhyming

There is something of a hierarchy when it comes to how hard a rhyme will land. This doesn't mean that some are better than others, but where the rhyme lands in the hierarchy does impact how resolved the rhyme will feel.

In this way, it's similar to how (in the key of C) G7-C feels more resolved than G7-C/G, or G7-C/E. Even though these are all V-I movements, changing the bass note allows us to achieve softer landings.

"Perfect" Rhyme

A perfect rhyme is not necessarily higher in stature than any other type of rhyme. If a word is a perfect rhyme, it means that

both words have the same vowel sound
the consonant after the vowels are the same
the sound before the vowels are different.

Remember, lyrics are sung, not read or spoken. When you sing, you exaggerate vowels, and since rhyme is a vowel connection, lyricists can make sonic connections in ways other than perfect rhyme.

Family Rhyme

Two words are in the same rhyme family if they:

have the same vowel sound
have a consonant sound after the vowel that's part of the same phonetic family (more below)
have different sounds before the vowel

Phonetic Family

There are 3 main phonetic families

	Plosives	Fricatives	Nasals
Voiced	b, d, g	v, TH, z, zh, j	m, n, ng
Unvoiced	p, t, k	f, th, s, sh, ch	—
Examples	rub, up, thud, putt, bug, stuck	love, buzz, judge, fluff, fuss, hush, touch	strum, run, sung

note: voiced vs unvoiced refers to whether your vocal cords vibrate when producing the sound.

If you need a family rhyme for the word rut, you simply look at what other consonants belong in the same family, and combine them with the vowel sound:

ub - club
ud - stud, blood
ug - bug, shrug
up - makeup
uk - struck

Additive Rhyme

One word is an additive rhyme of another if

the vowel sounds are the same
one of the syllables adds extra consonants after the vowel
the sounds before the vowels are different

If we want to rhyme a word that ends in a vowel (e.g., play, free, fly), the only way to do this is to add consonants after the vowel.

the less sound the consonant adds, the closer the rhymes will feel (ie. closer to perfect rhyme)
- referring to our Phonetic Family table above, the closest rhymes would be voiced plosives, then unvoiced plosives, then voiced fricatives, then unvoiced fricatives, then nasals.

Subtractive Rhyme

One word is a subtractive rhyme of another if

the vowel sounds are the same
one of the syllables adds an extra consonant after the vowel
the sounds before the vowels are different

Subtractive is basically the same as additive. The difference is perspective.

ex. if you start with fast, class is subtractive. If you start with class, fast is additive.
fast yields us glass, flat, mashed (family), laughed (family), crash (fam. subt.)