A lyric is rarely finished at the moment the last line arrives. There is a stretch afterwards — an hour, a week — where the song is still soft enough to change, and where the right questions are cheap to ask and expensive to ignore. What follows is a working checklist: ten questions, grouped so you can run them in one sitting with the words in front of you. None of them needs a theory of songwriting. They only need you to be honest about what is actually on the page.
What is the song actually about?
Question one: can you say it in a single sentence? Not a genre, not a mood — a statement. A song about driving past a house you used to live in and not stopping. If you cannot get to one sentence, you probably have two songs sharing a title, or a strong feeling with no idea underneath it. Both are fixable, but only once you have noticed.
Question two: does the chorus add anything to what the verses already said? A chorus is allowed to restate, but it should restate with the stakes raised and the language tightened. If your chorus is a summary of the verses, you have written the same thing twice. Keep the turn, cut the recap.
Can you see it, or only understand it?
Question three: are you using images, or labels? Words like lonely, broken and free are labels. They name a feeling and hand the listener the job of imagining it. I've been sleeping in my coat does the opposite: it gives you a person, a room, a week. You do not have to explain it afterwards.
Question four: does the central image survive the whole song? Plenty of weak middle eights fail because the picture changed without anyone deciding it should. A song that opens in a kitchen and ends in a shipwreck can work, but only if you built the road between them.
A few checks worth running with a pen:
- Underline every abstract noun. Ask whether any could be replaced with something you could photograph.
- List your images in order. If a noun or verb belongs to a different picture, either bridge the two or choose one.
- Decide which sense leads — sight, sound, touch — and let the others stay quiet for a verse.
- Look for stacked adjectives. Two before a noun is usually one too many, and lyrics rarely survive three.
Who is speaking, and to whom?
Question five: are the pronouns and tenses doing what you think? Drifting between past and present is fine when it maps onto something — memory against now, for instance — and less fine when it is accidental. Read the lyric and mark every verb. If a shift surprises you, it will surprise a listener too.
Question six: who is the "you"? A lover, a listener, a parent, a town, yourself at nineteen. Ambiguity here can be a gift, but it should be a chosen one. Try the swap test: put the second person into the third for a verse and read it back. If nothing is lost, the "you" was doing no work.
Does it sing as well as it reads?
Question seven: where do the stresses fall? Spoken English has its own accents; melodies have strong beats. Where the two disagree, a line that reads perfectly will stumble in the mouth. Say the line in a flat, conversational voice and mark where the weight naturally lands. Then put it against the melody. If and or the is sitting on the downbeat of the bar, you will feel the trip every time.
Question eight: what happens on the long notes? Held notes want vowels that open — gone, home, rain, free. A held note on it or of leaves the singer with nowhere to put the sound. Check the highest note of the chorus in particular: if it lands on a hard consonant cluster, you are asking for a splutter rather than a climax.
Syllable counts are a rough guide at best. Two lines can hold the same number of syllables and sit completely differently in the bar. Trust the singing, not the arithmetic.
Does every line earn its place?
Question nine: cover a line with your hand and read the section without it. If the meaning and the momentum are unchanged, that line is decoration. Decoration is allowed — a good line can be there purely for pleasure — but you should know which lines are load-bearing and which are ornaments.
Question ten: is anything there only for the rhyme? Go through the rhyme words and ask, honestly, whether the line arrived because of the idea or because of the sound. A line that exists to hold a rhyme is usually the weakest in the verse, and also the easiest to fix: move the rhyme, rewrite the line, keep the idea if there was one.
While you are there, look at the last line of each section. Endings carry more weight than beginnings. A closing line should land a thought, tilt the song towards the next section, or turn the meaning of what came before.
A practical way to run the whole checklist
- Print the lyric double-spaced and read it aloud, slowly, in a flat voice. Mark every place you stumble. Stumbles are evidence; arguments about taste are not.
- Read the final line of each section on its own before you read the section. If the ending is soft, everything before it has to work harder.
- Put it away for two days. Sing it in the car, in the shower, on a walk. Whatever you have forgotten by then was not doing much.
- Make the changes in one pass, then stop. Five passes will sand the voice off the page and leave you with something tidy and anonymous.
- Give it to one trusted reader — someone who will tell you where they got bored rather than where they were impressed.
A lyric is finished when the questions left are about taste rather than craft. There is always a better line somewhere; that is not the same as an unfinished song. Run the ten, fix what is genuinely broken, and then sing it — because the final test is not on the page at all. It is whether the words still sound like something you meant when they are coming out of your mouth at volume.
Photo: 6689062 / Pixabay
