I did not post this thread in the genre specific forum because it pertains to two genres. My question is this: What is the difference between poetry and song lyrics? Do song lyrics have any form of meter? If someone is used to writing poems, what would they need to do differently to write song lyrics? I know that none of Shakespeare poems would qualify as Song Lyrics, although I have seen someone sing them as Hip-Hop songs. My question concerns the difference between poetry and song lyrics. So what do you think?
Shakespeare wrote in Iambic Pentameter. Poems that act as Song Lyrics are written in a 4 x 4 Rhythm. (meaning they don't care about syllable count, they just want 4 accented beats.) Derek Attridge goes into this concept in his book 'Poetic Rhythm, an introduction.' I won't lie, the book is a struggle to read and digest.
I would imagine Dream Theater or Tool would pull off iambic pentameter with all of their odd time signatures and irregular starting/stopping beats.
Do you know of any other place I can find this information, perhaps online? I don't have a way of purchasing this book right now. I looked up 4x4 rhythm on google but did not see any relevant results.
4/4 rhythm only applies if you're writing songs in 4/4 time. There are plenty of other time signatures that can be used to great effect depending on what style of music you're writing. A lot of ballads are in 3/4. If you're going really proggy, 5/4 and 7/8 can be pretty common as well. But 4/4 is the most common for standard rock, pop, country, hip-hop, etc. I don't really write poetry, so it's hard for me to comment on the difference, but I do write a lot of songs. Keep in mind, however, that with songs you tend to have an expected structure. You don't have to always adhere to it (especially if you're writing something proggy), but a general formula for a song is: Intro Verse (Pre-Chorus) Chorus Verse (Pre-Chorus) Chorus Bridge (Ripping Guitar Solo) Chorus Outro Obviously it can vary depending on the song--some songs have a pre-chorus and some don't, some have solos and longer bridges, some repeat a verse before the last chorus, etc. But they're all variations on the same theme. Also, songs don't have to rhyme. As long as the melody is strong, rhyming can take a backseat. Chances are you're not just writing lyrics in a vacuum, either--you're probably writing them to some kind of melody, whether you have chord progressions worked out or not. Melody is absolutely essential to a song--vocal melodies are what make people sing along. The best way to come up with vocal melodies is to listen to a lot of songs in the genre you're writing in. Steal from other musicians, we do it all the time! I would argue, as well, in the craft of lyric-writing, that show vs tell is still something to consider (though it may be personal preference). You can say you feel certain things, or you could describe imagery that evokes those feelings (though I suppose this is much the same in poetry). Take for instance the chorus from a song by Real Friends, "Empty Picture Frames": The home inside my head has a bed for me That no one will ever get the chance to see A kitchen table with one chair Walls with empty picture frames No one will ever see There's no mention of feelings like loneliness, angst, depression, or anything like that. You get it all from defined imagery. So, in conclusion after all my aimless rambling, I'd say the two biggest differences between poetry and lyrics are keeping to a repetitive song structure (whether the standard one or some offshoot) and writing with melody in mind. Hooks don't have to be lyrical, but consider when writing choruses that they should be catchy and not necessarily verbose--these are the refrains that need to stick in people's minds. In terms of content, poetry and song-writing likely have a lot in common when it comes to imagery and choosing words that evoke feelings and reactions in the audience, rather than just telling them what/how to feel. That's where I see the most overlap. Also remember that songs don't necessarily have to be love songs, though love songs are by far the most popular type. But I'd say the best thing to do, more than anything else, is listen to songs in the genre you want to write. Study the lyrics, study the structures, study the common themes, and study the melodies.
Don't think there is much difference. Song lyrics are intended to be sung - with all that this entails - and poetry read. Probably the professional bar of entry is higher for poets than it is for lyricists, in terms of command of language.
There's basically nothing to stop a poem being a perfectly good song... a lot of composers took a poem and "set" it to music...there are several settings of psalm XXIII...Leonard Cohen straddled the two disciplines - Suzanne being very much a free verse poem set to music. @xanadu has already covered that "songs are all 4/4"...The Beatles wrote With a Little Help from my Friends in 4/4, Joe Cocker took one listen and recorded it in 3/4...the Beatles wrote I Call your Name in 3/4, the Mamas and the Papas took one listen and recorded it in 4/4...(Sorry these are really old examples, they're all I could think of...plus, I get the feeling that current musicians don't have the chops to do that) 4/4 doesn't mean "4 accented beats"...It means you get one accented beat and three unaccented beats...Words of love, so soft and tender, Won't win a girl's heart any more... Then again, you don't have to have one syllable = one beat... There's also a lot more scope in songs for elision and epenthesis, where syllables are drawn out or shortened (in performance) where the words as written wouldn't scan. Xanadu also mention the ripping guitar solo...the other big thing is the guitar fill...where you sing a line, and then play some sort of "response", which fills in an acre of rhythm before the next line of metered prose is sung...not quite so easy to include a line in your poem that says "now shut up for 3.6 seconds"!
Here in 2017, I think the distinction is wider. Most poetry I've seen written in the last few generations is not metered. There's mostly freeform these days. Freeform doesn't lend itself to musical accompaniment, as it has no pattern. Here: try applying a tune to Cummings' "Buffalo Bill's"... Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death
Apropos... while writing is a 'future occupation' for me, I do have a hobby: music. I play fiddle. Lately, a lot of my 'amateur gigs' have been slam poetry nights, and I have wondered about something... The musical accompaniment that seems to work for a lot of slam poets who are doing freeform (often improvised) work is arguably a musical version of same. eg: free jazz, from the Chicago school, a la Mingus or Miles Davis. So the question I guess is: if I'm playing something chaotic, conveying an emotion with the sound, and the poet is aligned with his unstructured verse, could that constitute lyrics? I don't have an answer, but I like the concept.
I think it may boil down to definitions. In addition to your Shakespeare's Sonnets, another accessible example of prose or verse found itself amenable to song lyrics is Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, which woke up one morning as a Pete Seeger song. (and subsequently made famous by a Byrds cover). Looking at this, I propose that any verse can be lyrics, if you figure out how to wrap a song around it. Does anybody here know Westlake's Dortmunder series' character J.C. Taylor? One of her scams was that she advertised lyrics writing services in music magazines ("Just send us your music, we'll put lyrics to it,") and music writing services in poetry magazines ("Just send us your poems, we'll put music to it,"). (The mechanics of how this works should be self evident, but: is it really a scam?)
I would have mentioned Cohen, if you hadn't already brought him up. Some of John Prine's songs work well as straight poetry, as do the works of Paul Simon or Jackson Browne. And one of our recent Nobel laureates has written almost exclusively in the song-writing mode ... Poetry into song is another kettle of fish, although, as has been pointed out, a lot of Shakespeare's stuff works as songs (and, indeed, may have been intended to be sung, such as "O Mistress Mine" or "Sigh No More"). One poem I often sing is "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, because Don Dilworth wrote the perfect musical accompaniment for it. I need only make a few rather insignificant changes in the words to make it fit to Dilworth's troubador-styled music and reflect the concept of super-idealized "courtly love" that the poem epitomizes. Another favorite of mine is Yeats's "Song of Wandering Aengus" which many people have put to various tunes and tempos (my favorite is Dave Van Ronk's, although my own is a bit different). As a rule, I would say that the main difference is that traditional songs rely more on a metrical structure that can either undermine or enhance the tempo of the words as a spoken medium; the meter can force a pause where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. IMO, that's why some pieces work as a song that would fall absolutely flat if they were just spoken. And consider the Lennon/McCartney song "I've just seen a face I can't forget the time or place where we just met she's just the girl for me and I want all the world to see we've met ..." Its the rush of word, the breathlessness, that conveys the exhilaration the singer feels, and I think that would be lost if the song's meter didn't propel the singer along. It works as a song because it's the music that separates the words into distinct sentences so you don't have to rely on punctuation to know how the words parse out. I think that's brilliant. And there are other conventions of forms ... a chorus, a bridge ... that are seen far more often in song-writing than in poetry. In some of the songs I write, I don't have a chorus that repeats verbatim; there's usually some variation to emphasize a point in the preceding verse. (For an example, see "Say Goodbye" which I posted in draft form some months back: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/say-goodbye.148551/ ) Songwriters have different approaches. Some, like Paul Simon, don't even start thinking about the lyrics until they've pretty much got the melody locked down. Others write the words, and let the words tell them what the music should be. I'm sort of in the middle, because the key lines of the song comes out as both music and lyric, and I see what goes with them. That might be true in a literary sense, but as I mentioned above, the poet doesn't have to worry about how the lyrics are going to mesh with the melody, so there's more freedom there. I'd say that the two forms aren't strictly comparable and let it go at that.
There was a study of musical notes written to Iambic Pentameter. The results of it were posted in Timothy Steel's All's the fun in how you say a thing. Since I don't read musical notes, I can't comment on the methodology of approaching that; I do know there is some difficulty in the process, but I don't understand the musical reasons why. Nah, and I've not a ton of study in Beat/Song Poetry. Most of my studies are in Blank Verse and using Iambic Pentameter in Dramatic Verse or Narratives. I've only touched on 4 x 4 verse in the sense that I am aware that exists and what it is called and where it is used, but not to the point I am comfortable with dealing out resources or advice on the subject. Like I said, The book I suggested goes into great detail about it. - Funny you bring this up, in Blank verse, these two principles are what confuses a lot of people when writing in Rhythm/ in meter. I can show people examples, and explain the ideas behind it, but I found this concept hard to teach people about.
In my humble opinion seasoned lyricists don't worry about this, rather they internalise the demands of melody as poets internalise the demands of meter; in both cases restriction frees inspiration. I'm reminded of T.S Eliot, no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job; the forms may offer different obstacles, but the fact that most poems lend themselves more or less to song* suggests there is much common ground between them. *Of course a song lyric these days can mean anything from a single repeated word to rambling monologue. One man's rubbish is another man's treasure etc. Interesting discussion anyway, cheers.
That makes me more of a lyricist than a poet, I guess. I like Robert Burns because half of his “poems” were actually songs which I like to sing. Finding the original tune can be a challenge, even when the name is noted. As a musician, it’s the rhythm that gets me.
Yeah, I know this is an old thread, but I came across this piece by Leo Kottke called "Jack Gets Up." I'm at a loss as to where to pigeon-hole it ... is it a song, or blank verse set to music? I'd say the latter, but in that case it pretty much stands alone not only in his repertoire but anybody else's. The thing is that without the musical accompaniment, I don't think it would work as straight recitation. So there's something inextricable between the words and the music. Your thoughts, please.
I submitted some song lyrics as a poem for a writing class I was taking. The teacher’s response was that this poem sounded like song lyrics. So, at least she, could tell the difference.
Your teacher might have been tipped off by a fairly rigid rhyme scheme and a consistent meter. Much of Leonard Cohen's songs started out as straight poetry. He found, however, that they could be easily set to music. And there's the poem "Annabel Lee" which has been set to music many times, in different arrangements. I remember Sara Teasdale's "I Shall Not Care" set to music as part of a longer piece by an obscure and under-rated group called Pearls Before Swine, one of the original out-there rock bands. The poem got sort of buried in the arrangement, but I found it interesting enough to put into my own repertoire (discarding the rest of the arrangement). It's one of the classic "Screw you" poems. Heinrich Heine's "Die Lorelei" has been set to music a zillion times, most notably by Franz Liszt.
There are actually endless numbers of poems which have been set to music. Schubert and Schumann practically made careers out of it... and that brings us to the reality that it is, in fact, a fleeting difference. In pop culture you can often tell that something is a song lyric by merit of it following a clear song structure and a poem following a poetic form and the likes, and free verse is nowadays more common so if it rhymes and has meter it's a bit more likely to be a song lyric etc., but other than that it's difficult to tell. Also the difference quantitative metre - using speech rhythm in a way which makes it depend on the length of the syllables) vs accentual-syllabic verse - using it to rely on the syllable and stress numbers (arguably the main difference between a lyric and a poem) are in fact closely related, have the same historical roots and if you can gain the latter through an inherent understanding of the former (i.e. some form of rhythmic understanding), you are more likely to have a natural gift for poetry as well, at least as far as sound is concerned. I just think song lyrics, through the hyper-standardisation of the contemporary music scene, are rather easily identified through form.
That's one of the things that I find most fascinating about John Prine's lyrics: they sound as if they were spoken, with the same cadences of the characters common speech. They almost beg to be sung. If you just read his lyrics as poetry, you find yourself falling into the cadence of his music. And I've found that if you try to rephrase the song so that the words follow a different cadence, you almost always fail.
