Great Lyrics are Precise Lyrics

Ultimately, your song is made up of lyrics, melody, and harmony (chords). Of those 3, Lyrics are the only one you can put in a frame and hang up on your wall.  

Whether or not you see yourself as a poet, you are. A great songwriter has great music and great lyrics. Not just acceptable lyrics and great music. 

Are your lyrics framable? If not, time to make them better!

We’re going to go through one great way to instantly make your lyrics much better. 

Great Lyrics are Precise Lyrics

One of the biggest keys to great lyrics are precise lyrics. 

What do I mean by precise lyrics? By definition, precise means marked by exactness and accuracy of expression or detail. 

There are a lot of words that mean what you want them to mean. They’re accurate. 

If you’re “Holding on” to someone, we all know what that means. But it’s kinda boring. We’ve heard it before. It isn’t very emotionally evocative. It isn’t vivid.

How about “Clinging”? Isn’t that a more evocative word? If I tell you I’m “Holding” on to this world, you probably get a certain image. But if I tell you I’m clinging to this world, that word just carries a more vivid image. It’s more colorful. It’s more evocative. 

Let’s take the word “love”. 

You know what I love? My wife. I also love my pets. I love Star Wars, gyro, arguing for fun, music, pan pizza, and my Denver Broncos.

Hm. Seems the term love is a bit overloaded, right?

So, if I love my wife, great. Until you realize I also love The Office. Because, as amazing as The Office is, it’s a show and my wife is my partner until death. So, one is a bit more important.

But what if I tell you I adore my wife. When I tell you I love my wife, you probably think “Well, I would hope so!” And you’re not wrong. But when I tell you I adore my wife, you might have thought “Awwww!”. It somehow seems more meaningful.

Why? Because it’s more colorful and less general of a term. When I say “adore” you think of semi-obsessed, total love and devotion, not just my marital obligation.

What if I tell you I yearn for her? Oh boy, quickly starting to get a little steamy, am I right?

The point is that those words are more precise. They’re more evocative and less general. A great lyric will have words like that, with little to read in between the lines.

Because if I have a whole song talking about my “love” for something, I might just be talking about Star Wars. 

Looking at Examples

Let’s take an example from one of my songs. I initially had the following line: 

Living in a busy world

How meh, right? I mean, it’s true, but who cares?

But how about this?

Clinging to a restless world

That means the same thing really. And yet it means something so much more precise. 

Let’s break it down. First is “living”. Someone “living” in the world is general and just necessarily true. You’re either living in the world or dead. No one lives on Mars yet. 

It tells you nothing of the character’s attitude towards the world. But the word “Clinging” does.

It implies that the world is moving on without the character. But the character wants to stay in the world. But the world is taking off without them. You don’t have to cling to something that’s not leaving, right? 

With “living”, maybe the character wants to die to be at peace. How the world treats the character is not addressed at all. But choosing to use the word “clinging” reveals a ton about both the character’s attitude towards the world and the world’s attitude towards the character. 

How about a “Busy world” vs a “Restless world”? Busy is another boring word. Sure, it communicates more or less what I’m saying, that the world is too busy and moving too fast to care about the character who is living clinging to it. 

But “restless” is a much more vivid word than “busy”. Restless implies a certain high level of energy. It implies why the world is too busy; they are too anxious to get back to what they need to do. The world is constantly buzzing, either doing their next to-do item or thinking about their next to-do item.

Put those two small changes together and you get the massive difference from this boring line:

Living in a busy world

To this vivid, emotive, tragic line:

Clinging to a restless world

A great lyric is a precise lyric. It doesn’t just communicate the truth, but it communicates as much color and vivid emotion as each word can be packed with. Choose more precise words that have a larger depth of meaning and a more specific, precise meaning, and your lyrics will go from acceptable to great.