Favorite Things, Soul Homework

(Song)Writer

Writer McWriterson

When you discover a new song, do you read the lyrics? Do you go back and read the lyrics of an old song you thought you knew?

I was listening to music in the car the other day, and it got me thinking about the words within songs, and I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to have a book of just lyrics from songs I love?

I’ve been writing down quotes I like in my soul homework journals for a few years now, so I decided to create a notebook just dedicated to quotes. I thought it’d be nice to look through when I’m having a bad day or need a quote to put in a card or blog post.

It made me think of song lyrics and how there are so many wonderful words that are written into songs and we don’t pay enough appreciation to the song writers.

The majority of the credit goes to the vocalists, who aren’t always the writers of those songs. I am considerably more impressed when they are both vocalists and songwriters.

I’d write a book dedicated to lovely lyrics that go unnoticed in songs we know and love. But I’m afraid that would be a copyright nightmare I wouldn’t dare tackle.

Do you pay attention to the lyrics of songs?

Do you have any favorite song lyrics?

40 thoughts on “(Song)Writer”

  1. It’s often the lyrics that draw me into a song; if I don’t like the message then I usually don’t like the song (though I sometimes have those lyrics wrong as I am awful about looking them up!).

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  2. You are so correct in the fact that the vocalists get all the credit when generally, they aren’t the ones who wrote the song. We have a lot of songwriter friends and I’ve heard some of the most beautiful lyrics and they don’t enough credit.
    One of my very favorite songs (lyrics) is Van Morrison’s ‘Into The Mystic’; such a lovely collection of words.

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  3. It wasn’t until the last few years that I realized the people who write the lyrics are often not the same as the people who sing them. duh. True to form, I am clueless about music. I enjoy listening to music but I often have the lyrics wrong, as my children like to remind me. I like lots of the U2 lyrics, maybe Unforgettable Fire the most.

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  4. I always pay attention to the lyrics. I pay more attention to them than the sound of the music. If there’s a mismatch between the sound and the meaning of words, it drives me crazy. (The light, upbeat tempo of the music with the anguish of the lyrics in Annie Lenox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” is particularly egregious to me.) When the sound and the words each deepen the meaning of each? Poetry. Singer-songwriters is one of my favorite Pandora stations.

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  5. Yes I pay attention to song lyrics. I also go back to read the ones I thought I knew– often discovering I didn’t know them.

    A couple of months ago there was some man on Twitter who got bent out of shape because he said “no one can recite poetry now,” BUT everyone said “of course we can, we know the lyrics of songs.” This guy took offense at that idea, and a Twitter kerfuffle ensued. It was stupid

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    1. Me too!

      This reminds me of a TikTok posted by a woman who owned a vintage book business. She said that she is constantly approached by so many people who say to children who are reading books, “I bet you don’t know what that is!” as if children don’t know how to read a book because of technology! People continue to read books, to recite poetry, to read song lyrics. It just looks different. Change is a good thing!

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  9. From get up stand up by Bob Marley & Peter Tosh
    “We’re sick and tired of your ism-schism game
    Dy’n’ and go to Heaven in-a Jesus’ name, Lord
    We know when we understand
    Almighty God is a living man
    You can fool some people sometimes
    But you can’t fool all the people all the time
    So now we see the light (watch you gon’ do?)
    We gonna stand up for our rights (yeah, yeah)
    So you’d better
    Get up, stand up (in the morning) give it up
    Stand up for your right (stand up right now)”
    that is my favorite part of the song

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  10. Oh gosh, I love so many songs I don’t even think I could list even 1% of them here! I always listen to lyrics. Landslide is a biggie for me. Also, the line from Elton John “Butterflies are free to fly, fly away, bye-bye” is beautiful to me. If I had a book for all the lyrics I love I think it would be phone book-size. (Are there still phone books? You know what I mean).

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  12. In our family, I am the song lyric noticer/analyzer and my husband is the person who notices that the bass is being doubled by the piano and that the key signature is 3/4 time. One of my favorite songs is “Hold Me” by Weezer. I find the lyrics, and of course their pairing with the soaring music, to be so moving. But as a lyric-noticer, I find it so fascinating how many songs have completely incomprehensible lyrics! I guess I prefer typical sentence structure in my songs as in my poetry.

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  13. Oh my gosh! It’s always about the words for me. I mean a beat has to absolutely smack me over the head for me to notice that first. I remember asking my husband the words to some song that he was playing years ago and he responded that he didn’t know. I was flabbergasted-like how can you enjoy the song so much without knowing what it’s saying to you? (I do fully respect people being moved by the music itself, but I am just not those people.) Then of course there are times when the words aren’t enough and I want to know EXACTLY WHAT THEY MEAN!!!!! Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. The Middle by Jimmy Eat World is one of my favorites (thought I’d go all out and answer the question) and Few and Far Between speaks/shouts to me!

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      1. I think with the last move I finally convinced him to lose the reel to reel tapes and player. He’s still keeping his illegally copied DVDs, though.
        How old are we?

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