While I’m sitting here wondering what to type, and knowing it should be about music, I feel compelled to talk about lyrics. Now most of the music that I listen to is lyric-less, mainly because it is jazz. But I do listen to other songs that have lyrics. If a song has lyrics, it is usually because even though the artist is expressing him/herself through the music, they feel that lyrics will be a little bit more effective in conveying what they need to say.

When I write my music, I tend to find that I write the lyrics first, usually a result of the way I am feeling at the time. Quite recently, in a phenomenon that hasn’t happened to me in around 4-5 years, I have been able to write poetry. The last song that I was working on started as lyrics. Of course at the time I didn’t know it, but it took me about 2-3 weeks to get the final lyrics down. During that course of writing those lyrics though I managed to come up with a tune that would go with it. My music writing abilities however, only tends to encompass the saxophone, and every now and then the piano. However the song was a more slack key guitar (Hawaiian style music) indicative of having been created on the ukulele. It never materialized, and so I am stuck with its tune in my head, perhaps one day it will find its way to the world, or perhaps not.

I like reading the lyrics as well, because in them one can find the sadness of a persons life, or the happiness. On the other hand, there are songs in which the author really has had no relationship to the words, and they are just singing the song. Lyrics make up a big part of music, and although they are often not heard correctly, they do convey the sense of what the singer is trying to let the listener know about.