About writing song lyrics

Like a few people on this forum, I'm no spring chicken. I like listening to and playing rockabilly tunes, and I'm motivated to write and record songs, but at this point in life I would feel silly writing about the standard rockabilly topics--girls, cars, getting drunk, being a bad-ass, etc..

I'm wondering how to get around this, while staying in the genre. You don't hear too many thoughtful, mature rockabilly tunes, do you? :confused:

I guess I'm mostly trying to start a discussion of how to write an interesting and "true" song, when your life has settled into a fairly boring groove... work, marriage, mortgage, blah.

Get the Jimmy Webb book "Tunesmith, inside the art of songwriting".
I don't know about *boring*? ... Is your marriage perfect? Is work "great" all the time. Is it super easy every month to pay your mortgage? You probably have something to say to 50% of all humans. I don't think I've ever heard a rock-a-billy song about Airedales(?).

You can write about work, war, whatever, and still call it a woman.

Write about road rage and pretend the other cars are lost loves.

Everyone has emotions, just shadow and disguise what it's about. This will give your perception a unique quality. Works for poetry, should work for lyrics?

I guess I'm mostly trying to start a discussion of how to write an interesting and "true" song, when your life has settled into a fairly boring groove... work, marriage, mortgage, blah.

If your job and marriage have become boring, that's material for a number of songs right there.

listen to some early Dylan and check out how he states things that can be interpreted many ways. i'm of the geezerly persuasion too, and i've run across the same problem as you, so i've been trying to state my lyrics as imagery that can apply to life in general rather than the specifics of what's going on in my own (often boring) life.

I guess I understand what you guys are saying, but I'm not sure how to relate the things I think about writing about to the genre of music I'm most proficient in... if that makes sense. I mean, it's not that I don't have enough crap in my life to write about...

Get the Jimmy Webb book "Tunesmith, inside the art of songwriting".


This book was the content of one of my first posts (http://www.tdpri.com/forum/telecaster-discussion-forum/11089-melody-dead.html?highlight=Jimmy+Webb) here. Take a look at Hippie Tim's response, i still remember that one.

As for the OP, it's a great question. I guess sometimes you have to reinvent the form. Good example is Neil Sedaka "Breakin up is hard to do." The early teenie bopper and the later slowed down one. Same song, same lyrics, totally different level of maturity.

Also how Elvis did some of his early hits later in '68 or so, or Sinatra returning to some of his early hits. An adult can do it, maybe it's just a question of tone and interpretation of lyrics. I mean it is all sort of about the same stuff as in H.S., just a little more withered and (hopefully) wise is all.

I like your sentiment....I'm still in my mid-twenties, so take my advice for whatever you think it's worth....I write many songs in various roots flavors, including rockabilly. My main thrust as a songwriter is to tell stories, and I wind up making up 90% of the details.

The trick is in the other 10%, which is the truth of my experience. When I studied fiction in college, some of the best advice I got was to temper your creativity with an essential truth from your own life. That is, write what you know.

What you can do is take something from your own life, a story, a memory, a feeling: anger, indignation, good ol' randiness, and project it onto a fictional character, your rockabilly self. Bruce Sprinngsteen didn't kill anybody, but he still wrote Nebraska.

Ya know?

If you want an example of what I'm talking about from my own musical catalogue, go to my myspace and listen to "Bismarck." About 95% of that one is purely made up. But the 5% that isn't made the image real, at least for me.

Good luck.

Jon