Why I'm starting songs with lyrics from now on

On sincerity and having something to say

Feb 18, 2024

I’ve been dipping into Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act lately. One section that really struck me was ‘The Sincerity Dilemma’. In it Rubin points out that trying to express your truth as an artist can often have the opposite of the intended effect. ’In art” he says “sincerity is a by-product.”

What this has to do with ‘always starting with lyrics’ is still fuzzy to me—and let’s be real, I won’t always be starting with lyrics from now on—but it did point to a personal music-making experiment I really want to try.

As I finish my current album, I’m going to start each songwriting session with a 10 minute free-write and then use that as the basis for my first draft of lyrics.

Below I share some of my hypotheses about why this is a worthy experiment.

Keep going,
Lucy

Why start with lyrics?

HYPOTHESIS ONE: Starting with melody can be truly limiting

It makes you beholden to certain melodic shapes and the words that fit them. This isn’t always a bad thing, btw. Sometimes the first thing that comes out of our mouth is exactly what the song needs. When it IS a bad thing, it can lead to a mismatch between how you want to express yourself and how the song wants you to express yourself. Often this comes down to the first vowel sound you sang being hard to shake, but it can be deeper than that. IMHO, certainly melodies want poetic language, others repetition, others still a throwaway line of dialogue. It doesn’t always happen, but starting with the melody can hem you in.

HYPOTHESIS TWO: A knock-on effect of this can be inauthenticity

Trying to write to a rhyme scheme that’s too tight, or shoehorn a story into a melody often leads to an overall effect of inauthenticity. When I do this, I find my lyrics seem effortful and clunky—at least to my own ears. By contrast, the handful of times I’ve lead with lyrics, I’ve found myself singing true stuff that feels essential to the melody, almost like they were born at the same time.

HYPOTHESIS THREE: Starting from lyrics will expand your lyrical style

I’m really curious about this, to the extent that I might even start sessions with a free-write followed by some a cappella melody writing before harmonizing with an instrument and chords. How much do our lazy go-tos on our first instrument, or the styles we feel comfortable writing hem us in? Might we all create more truly original and resonant work by trying to find the melody our words want before pushing a song toward a particular style or genre?

Let’s experiment and find out!