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Water - Dissertations - Songwriting - Part 3Living
Water - Dissertations - Songwriting - Part 3|
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We continue our discussion of lyric-writing with the topics of rhyme and meter. Rhyme pattern is one of the aspects of lyrics which cause them to stick in our minds. Think of the next line for these examples:
You probably got at least three of the four without difficulty. Part of the reason that this works well is that the next line in each song rhymes with the line given. Our poetic experience causes us to have an easy time of recalling words which conform to a pattern which, in these cases, is that the last syllable or syllables rhyme. The rhyme scheme in these songs is "aabb," that is, the first and second lines rhyme and the third and fourth lines rhyme. This is probably the most common pattern in use in contemporary music. Among other things, it's relatively easy to generate and is therefore well-suited to the "tune factory" approach espoused by many people in the entertainment industry.
Bear in mind that this isn't the only possible rhyme scheme. Others which work very nicely, but which are correspondingly more difficult to produce, are: abab, aabccb, aaabcccb, and abcbdbeb. The primary reason these are more difficult to create is that they require much more foresight and planning than aabb does. A second reason is that if you try to use more than two rhyming words in a scheme, you will often find just the right wording for one line, only to discover that you can't find two or three other words which both rhyme and which can be used to make sense in the entire lyric (this probably means that you never, never should use "orange" as the last word in a rhyming line...).
There are other schemes, some of which don't even rhyme at all. For instance, many of the classical works take a Bible text and set them to music (e.g. Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah). This is also done occasionally in today's music (e.g. "Believer's Creed" by Mark Hayes). Sometimes a pattern such as aaabcccd is used, and other times the last line of each set of four is identical from one verse to the next.
Line length is a concern in lyrics. If the lines are too short, it's hard to communicate an intelligent message; if they're too long, the rhyme scheme may be lost in the syllabic shuffle (I've been found guilty on both counts at one time or another). There's a balance which must be established between quantity and quality.
In addition, most really good songs with multiple verses have identical syllable rhythm between verses. This attribute of good lyrics makes them easier to master because the rhythmic content must be learned only once, after which full attention can be paid to the words just look in a hymnal and you'll see what I mean). Of course, some minor variation is generally tolerated, such as using a pickup eighth note for "the," but drastic divergence make the song very difficult to sing well without loads of practice.
We're not quite done with lyrics yet. Next time we'll look at word density and borrowing words from other works.