Great lyrics don't just rhyme — they reveal truth. Here's the craft behind writing words that connect, from first draft to final verse.
TL;DR
Great lyric writing starts with specificity — concrete details over vague emotions. Show don't tell. Write from personal experience. Edit ruthlessly. Read poetry. The best lyrics make the listener feel understood, not impressed.
Why Most Lyrics Don't Connect
The difference between lyrics that connect and lyrics that don't is almost always specificity. Generic lyrics describe feelings in abstract terms: 'I'm so sad,' 'you broke my heart,' 'life is hard.' These statements are true but they're not revealing. They could apply to anyone, which means they resonate with no one.
Specific lyrics create images: 'I found your hair tie on my bathroom floor three months after you left.' That's a lyric that triggers emotional recognition because it's concrete, visual, and true to a specific human experience. The listener doesn't need to have lost a partner to feel the weight of that image — the specificity creates universal connection.
The paradox of songwriting is that the more personal and specific your writing, the more universal it becomes. When you write about your exact experience — the specific pub, the specific conversation, the specific feeling at 3am — listeners map their own experiences onto your specifics.
Techniques for Better Lyrics
Show, don't tell. Instead of saying 'I was angry,' describe what anger looks like: 'I put my fist through the plaster wall above your side of the bed.' The emotion is conveyed through action, not declaration.
Use sensory details. What did you see, hear, smell, taste, touch? Sensory information creates vivid mental images that abstract language can't match. 'The pub smelled like spilled lager and regret' is infinitely more evocative than 'the pub was depressing.'
Avoid clichés unless you're subverting them. 'My heart is broken' is a dead metaphor — nobody pictures an actual broken heart anymore. Find fresh ways to express familiar feelings. Or take the cliché and twist it: 'My heart's not broken — it's just filed under things I don't look at anymore.'
Read poetry. Seriously. Poets have spent centuries perfecting the art of compressing emotion into language. Reading Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Ocean Vuong, or Warsan Shire will teach you more about lyric writing than any songwriting course.
The Editing Process
First drafts are for getting ideas out. Don't censor yourself — write everything, including the terrible lines, the clichés, the ideas that don't quite work. You can't edit a blank page.
Second drafts are for identifying the truth. Read through your first draft and find the lines that surprise you — the ones that are more honest than you intended, or that capture something you didn't know you were trying to say. Build around those lines.
Third drafts are for craft. Tighten language. Replace vague words with specific ones. Check the rhythm of each line when sung. Remove anything that doesn't serve the song — even if it's a great line, if it doesn't belong in this song, save it for another one.
The editing process is where good lyrics become great. Very few writers produce brilliant work on the first pass. The willingness to revise — to kill your darlings, to replace a decent line with a better one, to restructure a verse that isn't working — is what separates professional songwriters from casual ones.
And remember: the goal of great lyrics isn't to impress listeners with your cleverness. It's to make them feel understood. The best reaction to a lyric isn't 'that's clever' — it's 'that's exactly how it feels.'