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Do lyricists come up with the melody or lyrics first?


Meltdown Tracker

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For me personally it's both.

Some songs start with the music first that leads to a vocal melody that leads to lyrics and other start out with a vocal melody line or two on my heads that I build music around. Today I wrote a first verse in my head to a new song while I was at work. 

Occasionally you have awesome moments like coming up with entire songs in your dreams and waking up in time with enough coherence to put them down. It's rare but it's happened a few times for me.

None of that's to say I'm a spectacular songwriter or even qualified to answer this question ... I may be an oddball on how I write. @Kay would probably be the better answer for you.

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What Speedo says.

If you search for some interviews of well known musicians, you'll get a very diverse palette of answers on this.

When I played in my band, I struggled a lot to write lyrics. I only was able to write music and lyrics at the same time one time, other than that, usually music came first.

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I don't contribute neither the lyrics nor melodies to myself. I consider those a gift from God, so if you wonder what came first you gotta ask him.

I consider it more of a spiritual experience rather than an artistic one. When you receive a masterpiece like "Circumstance and Circumcision" and "A Bird Dropped a Turd" you can also feel God's hand slide through your body. It's an out-of-body experience really. Every songwriter actually has a ghostwriter, so I don't judge Dr. Dre one bit. 

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I've always had a mixture, but 9/10 I have an idea musically first, will sort of sing random bullshit in a random bullshit melody until I find something thst fits that I like, and sometimes those random lyrics end up staying as the start of the song (I have some really fucking weird starts to songs from doing it this way!) then the song sort of works itself out organically. 

I have written lyrics and then used those for a song later on, but I'm much more likely to do that for bands I've been in then solo work. I find writing melodies and lyrics to be quite a personal affair and for me it doesnt work in a jam session with a bunch of people, it just comes out weird - so frequently, usually if I'm travelling, I will jot down ideas on my phone and work on them later on, usually with some musical idea in mind, and then I try to marry them later on. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 

I imagine / have read a lot of musicians are similar to my way, but a notable difference is bands like FOB - if I remember correctly, Pete Wentz used to write all the lyrics completely seperately and then they'd work on the melody of a song to fit it. to me that rarely works and I personally find it ass-backwards but it explains how FOB can have such pretentious wanky lyrics to relatively stupid music - and also their penchant for odd phrasing in their melodies.

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Serious answer: It's really different for each song. Sometimes I just write lyrics and later make the melody to it. Sometimes I write the music first. Sometimes I just start singing a song and try to find the music for it (these usually are the best songs). Sometimes I get lyrics in my head and think "I gotta use that some day" and then I use that a time I've written a melody and i usually have gotten more ideas for the lyrics before that. 

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  • 3 months later...

For me, lyrics come first because they are a poem on its own. I place a riff/chord progression in before the melody so I have more of a base to work off of. Then the melody is placed in a way that fits both the lyrics and instrumental.

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I think with me it's often melodies that come first but there have been songs where I've thought of a lyric or two and managed to create a melody over them. On the album I'm recording, there's a song that I came up with a melody for back in like March. Like I came up with the melody, then the lyrics. Very +44 sounding song, with a blend of Fenix TX but then I just ignored it for months. I then came up with a new idea like 1-2 months ago. Heavyish song. Like Refused meets Boxcar Racer or something. I took them lyrics from the +44/Fenix TX style song I had and changed the melody completely to suit this new idea I had. I actually did this with quite a few songs to be honest.

There's a lot of songs where the melody is my starting point, then I come up with the lyrics. Then I change the melody of it or something. I mainly start off with riffs, intros, build ups, instrumental stuff before I start lyrics/melodies though but there have been songs when the melody/lyrics are first.

I guess it's different with every song really. Never stick to one method or style of songwriting IMO.

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  • 1 month later...

As far as the band I played in, the vocalist would begin to hum over the music we'd created. As he hummed and developed a vocal melody, phrases and syllables would pop into his head. Once the actual melody is developed and patterns are established, the short phrases are fleshed out and made lyrical and poetic.

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