Written for Kurrent Music
Published May 27th 2017
blog about song lyrics
How The Times have Changed
When I started writing lyrics for other artists, I think around 2004, I was told once that my lyrics were complex and difficult to sing. I wrote too many words and used too many big words, without flow. It’s one of those comments that has always stuck with me, ‘cos I actually never understood it. I had no problem singing my lyrics at all. Maybe its’s because I knew exactly where to put the emphasis in the words to fit it on the beat and others really had to learn this. Maybe it just wasn’t a natural match, but wasn’t that exactly what you would want? Something to catch the listener’s attention with?
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of the lyrics change in pop music and I’ve often ran into the same ‘problem’ with songs by others. They would pronounce a word just slightly different than I would expect or play around with pronunciations altogether. One Republic’s “No Vacancy” is a good example of this. I would’ve never come up with that song, because I would never pronounce the word “vacancy” the way they do in the song’s chorus. It doesn’t work any other way.