Song-writing Thoughts: Lyrics or Music First?

An aspiring songwriter asked me today what's the best way to start writing a song. Well, since the question was asked, I gave my views on it, which I thought I'd include here too.

There's two ways to start in my opinion. Either music first or lyrics first. Music first is OK, and its possible to come up with something worthwhile in that way, but in my personal experience you can end up not knowing quite where to go with the song and get quite frustrated.

I've always been a fan of starting with a title for the song, which also is probably the main sung musical hook. A great title is something simple and catchy. It could be the kind of little popular expression people use everyday when speaking, that sums up some train of thought. There are also some other classic tricks people use that make titles catchy (alliteration, using colours, place-names, days of the week,  - but there's no obligation!)

Even more important though, the title must sum-up a genuine strong feeling, emotion or point of view that you or someone else has. If it doesn't, and is just a title that sounds interesting and you can't think what else to say, that's no good, 'cos it will make writing the rest of the song very hard! The rest of the song should just flow naturally from the title, and be quite easy to write because it just explains the title. When I say a genuine emotion or experience etc, it doesn't have to be your emotion, you could be putting yourself in someone else's shoes, but hopefully you would know what you're talking about.

There are so many examples of great songs that have been written like this. I remember seeing a video about Diane Warren, who's one of the most successful songwriters ever, and how she wrote "Unbreak My Heart", where she took a common expression: "break my heart",  and made it more interesting by twisting it round, and then wove a story around that. Also, if you look at the song-titles of someone like Adele, they all follow the principle of a strong title as outlined above:

Rumour Has It

Set Fire to the Rain

Someone Like You

Take It All

Turning Tables

Cold Shoulder

Crazy For You

Daydreamer

Don't You Remember

He Won't Go

Hometown Glory

I'll Be Waiting

Melt My Heart to Stone

One and Only

With a good title, you should almost know what the song is about before you hear it, or think you have a good idea. Or at least your interest is aroused because it strikes a chord and connects with you somewhere.

Well, there you have it, that's what I think, for what it's worth. You might well come up with a strong title and lyrics that grow from it while listening to a backing track, but not necessarily, and I don't think it's really necessary to have the backing track there beforehand.

However, what I would also say is that you don't have to have all the lyrics before you start working on the song. Just an interesting title and maybe another potential line or two is enough, and then you can start working on a beat to sing those lines along to, and get a strong melody with some chords, bassline etc, which may then help the lyrics and idea for the rest of the song. So, in a nutshell, a bit of lyrics, a bit of music, lyrics, music and so on (but at least some lyrics first).

In conclusion, I'd say that when you prepare to do maybe a song-writing collaboration with someone, (for example, as a singer working with a musician), it would be good if you, and maybe both, came up with some good ideas for song-titles along these lines beforehand, not just think the first thing to do is to get a backing-track done.