Noob submission.

[notlimah]

Hi all,

 

I'm very new to songwriting. Ive messed around a little but don't have much of it recorded yet. Please give some feedback on these lyrics.

 

Thanks,

 

jeff

 

Verse 1:

Two people Too young

The last thing on their mind

Two decisions So tough

Answers so hard to find

 

Verse 2:

One gone One alone

One more on the way

Couldn

[Lee Knight]

This is really good

 

V3 might stand a little sprucing up but... I dig this. Nice idea, good execution.

[notlimah]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree, I did struggle with the wording in V3.

 

I'm trying to learn how to write songs, and I at least need to write something down to get started and then tweak from their. So I don't mind re-writing at all.

 

The big challenge is, my current band plays bluegrass/alt country but I had Foo Fighters style in my head when I came up with this. How do I blend that together?

 

Thanks,

 

jeff

[blue2blue]

It's a nice bit of story telling, the revelatory final verse... I'd been focused on the parents and didn't see the flash forward coming. Nice touch -- and, talking about style -- these purposeful, intelligent lyrics are probably more in keeping with the conventions of country and bluegrass than they are those of grunge/post-grunge. (Now, whether or not these would work in that musical framework, I dunno. I find myself all but incapable of listening to much of the rock of the last two decades. Been there. Done that. Time to move on. Oddly -- as a post-post-post punker, I have no such problems with bluegrass or trad country. )

 

Anyway, that's the storytelling. While it's hard to gauge flow (as our brothers of the street would have it) from the printed page, I could imagine a couple of possible rough spots in lyric cadence. Still, people often have a way of making things work in practice. Like you, I have concerns about the third verse.

 

The big challenge is, my current band plays bluegrass/alt country but I had Foo Fighters style in my head when I came up with this. How do I blend that together?

Banjo. And maybe some nice mandolin.

 

Seriously, though... when I write a song, I write the song. Typically with an acoustic guitar -- even in the past when I was doing a lot of heavily post-modern production and doing most of my musical composition out in front ofthe lyric writing... even when the song was musically pretty much finished, when writing lyrics, I'd sit down with an acoustic guitar when writing the lyrics. Of course, everyone is different. But I've found that helps me keep my focus... because I tend to think of the song as something bigger than any given performance or recording of it. Once I 'understand' the vocal line of the song, then, I find it's much easier for me to fit it into other contexts. Sometimes those contexts can be much more radically different than a post-grunge/bluegrass juxtaposition. There was one set of lyrics I wrote to originally go with an acid techno piece from a young UK based producer who wanted to collab with me. I liked the 140bpm thing he had but listening to the rapidly shifting beats and textures, I came up with almost nothing... So I decided to punt. Since the track had an urgent, appealing, but unsettling vibe, I somehow decided to go with a classic teen-tragedy type love story. I picked up my guitar and -- way down tempo -- picked out some classic 1-6m-4-5 chords. First, I made the song work that way, and then I found a way to fit my lyrics to the jacked up beats. Later, I found myself rerecording the song as some decidedly postmodern bluegrass influence something-or-other with a still different chord progression (but a melody with many parallels to the original). So... my long way of saying, for me, it's first the song.