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How To Hone Your

Lyric Writing Skills

read an interview with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry 2. Do writing exercises
I recently in which he said something that interested and I’d love to know what Perry plays when he practices? Does
surprised me. He commented that when he’s home from he play music from his two bands (Aerosmith and The
touring he usually practices playing guitar for about two Hollywood Vampires), or old rock and blues classics? Or
hours every day. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised does he spend his time doing special guitar drills or com-
but I guess the thought that went through my head is that ing up with new riffs? It’s probably a combination of these
once you reach a certain level of mastery you wouldn’t and I think that variety is also something that lyricists
need to do much practice to retain your abilities. should strive for.
However, I think it serves to demonstrate that no matter
what our skills are we need to constantly sharpen them! There are writing exercises that you can set yourself that
will help with creativity and ultimately hopefully lead to
Always strive for better some great new lyrics. Here are a few examples that are
No matter how long you’ve been writing, or how worth trying.
proficient you believe you are, it always pays to aim for
self-improvement. Driving ourselves on to become better
will push us to greater heights of achievement. And
retaining that ethos will also guard against complacency
and ensure that we continue to deliver the new material
that is the lifeblood of songwriting and that helps lyricists
to remain relevant.

The organisation that I work for has a CEO who has
stated that her employees should devote 10% of their time
to self-development. That’s really refreshing, and what I
would say is that if you can’t allocate at least the same slice
of your free time to improvement then it’s your own loss.

So how can you go about improving your lyric writing
ability?

1. Write frequently Cut Up technique – cut out some random words or
You won’t become the next Leonard Cohen or Bernie phrases from newspapers or magazines and then play
Taupin by being a part-time lyric writer. Waiting for in- about with their arrangement, and create a lyric from
spiration to hit won’t cut the mustard either. To become as them. This is a technique that was utilised by a number of
good as you possibly can requires a commitment to write songwriters including David Bowie and Kurt Cobain, so
frequently. That doesn’t mean that you have to write a you will be following in illustrious footsteps.
new lyric or song every day but I think that you should be
thinking about lyrics and songs every day, and working on Pat Pattinson’s Object Writing technique – Pick an object
new material every week. and write about it for 10 minutes. Describe it using your
five senses and write without pause for the duration of
One way to achieve this is to allocate a time every day the exercise. The aim is to write free flowing prose, so no
when you will commit to sit down and work. That time need for rhythm or rhyme. The end result of this writing is
might be used to work on brand new lyrics, to edit ones probably not something that you’re going to publish but it
that are in progress, or to trawl back through your cata- has two main benefits. Firstly, it will help develop your
logues of half-finished lyrics to identify ones that should descriptive skills which is very useful for lyric writing.
now be resurrected. And, secondly, you may find that there are little gems
included within your writing that can form the basis of an
idea for a lyric.

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