Page 38 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

Step 1 - Select a title
There are a million places to go to find title ideas. They are all around us in conversations, media, and advertising. For me, it's more about being in the right state of mind to hear them. I have picked up some of my best titles in some of the most unlikely places.
Once, I was listening to a stand-in radio presenter (whom I didn't like) for my favorite Saturday morning show who sparked off a title idea that I ended up writing in one of my bucket list co-writes. So I'd recommend keeping an ear open all the time for those little golden gems. You never know when they will appear, and you never know when you might need them.
But if you do need to dig around for titles there are systematic ways of going about it. In Berklee Music School's great course "Writing to a Title," Pat Pattison makes an interesting distinction between:
DNA titles – those that contain their own source of development such as "Black Velvet," "The Tracks Of My Tears," and "Cleaning Out My Closet," and
Parasitic titles – those that take their meaning from the rest of the lyric but by themselves are not that interesting such as "And They Do" or "All I See Is You."
In Sheila Davis' brilliant Songwriter's Idea Book, she lists a range of types of titles that we can draw on, such as:
Key word titles – numbers, colors, time (dates, days, months), places, names, top-ten words ("heart," "night," etc.), or book titles.
Wordplay titles – antonyms, idioms, axioms, paragrams (twisting a word of a common expression), coined words (inventing new words), or titles starting with "And..."
Opposites are also helpful in building title possibilities. This is where you combine a negative word/phrase with a positive word/phrase. In the past, I've even used a spreadsheet to generate random combinations until I found one that really resonates (e.g. "Born Crucified"). My friend and fantastic lyricist Gina Boe has a knack for finding these–for example, Mandisa's "Broken Hallelujah" and "Love Like A Thorn."