“I try to avoid certain images that I feel have been done to death, such as any reference to angels or hearts … and use of the word baby” —Aimee Mann
When music publishers, A&R executives and producers listen to a demo of a new song, one of the most common reasons why they end up hitting the ‘stop’ button is because they find the song’s lyrics are too full of clichés.
Remember, by the time these music industry pros get to hear your demo they’ve probably already listened to thousands of songs during their careers. So they liter- ally have heard it all before. They’ve had to endure all the old worn-out lines—all the overly familiar descriptions, tired phrases and metaphors, and predictable rhymes (such as “kiss you…miss you”) … and then some.
Many of these lines were originally created by great lyricists, of course, but they’ve been reused and misused so many times over the years that they have now become boring clichés. If someone is going to sign your song, or cut it with their artist, they want to hear lyrics that are fresh and inventive—with some original rhymes or a new twist on an old theme.
“Most lyricists rely too much on the standard rock clichés,” Aimee Mann once re- marked. “Good writers turn the clichés around.”
One of the finest examples of this is Diane Warren’s song ‘Un-Break My Heart’ which was a huge hit for Toni Braxton in 1996. The phrase “break my heart” must have been used thousands of times since the dawn of the music industry. But Diane Warren turned the cliché on its head and created something brand new that really made the song stand out.
“The title popped into my head,” she explained, “and I thought, ‘I don’t think I’ve heard that before, that’s kind of interesting’.”
The take away from this is: if there’s a line you plan to use and you’ve already heard it in another song, push yourself to find a new way of saying it so that it will have greater impact and create a much stronger image in the listener’s head. And don’t be ashamed to turn to a dictionary or a thesaurus for help.
When the great Steven Sondheim was once asked how he came up with his rhymes, he admitted: “I use a rhyming dictionary”. Other top writers also keep a dictionary of synonyms handy.
Jimmy Webb, in his book Tune smith: Inside the Art of Songwriting, observed: “There is one thing that these gentlemen and ladies [great lyricists] have in common, what- ever their style. Virtually all of them keep a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus close by. No shame here. In fact it is not a very lucid act to attempt the writing of verse in any form without these unless one happens to be a Mensa.”
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