Songwriting – How to use the length of your lyrics as a tool to write better songs
The length of your lyric lines can be a great way to create a sense of speeding up or slowing down by changing the line length you’ve previously established. Let’s look at an example. Check out this lyrics section:
Leave them all
Passing past
It can’t be the last
Fly fast
You’ll notice that a certain length is established in the first row and then shortened, which makes the next three rows feel faster. The length of a line can be determined by the number of stressed syllables or stresses in each line. So let’s look at voltages. I’ll put the number of strokes in parentheses after each line:
GO them EVERYTHING be-REAR (3)
WHIP-ing PAST (2)
IT CAN NOT be LAST (2)
I’M FLYING-ing FAST (2)
You can see by creating our section to have three stressed syllables in the first line, it makes the next three lines with only two stresses feel faster. There is also prosody going on as the last three lines are about speed.
On the other hand, we can also slow down a line by establishing a certain length and then increasing it. Let’s modify our previous texts to say this:
Passing past
It can’t be the last
Fly fast
But I ate their dust again
If we look at the highlights, we see that the texts do this:
WHIP-ing PAST (2)
IT CAN NOT be LAST (2)
I’M FLYING-ing FAST (2)
But I ATE theirs DUST a-PROFIT (3)
In this case, you can see by increasing the length of the last line, we’ve slowed it down to create prosody with what the text is saying. This is a great way to have your lyrics relate to what your song is doing.
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