Thoughts on Lyrics Being "Too Abtract", "Cliche's"

[Casey H]

Orchestral Music?Now THAT's a grenre whereby the lyrics are VERY abstract!!! LOL cAsEy

[nomiyah]

Quote:[quote author=hurowitz board=songwriters thread=1146586374 post=1146712078] I was rejected in an "orchestral" listing awhile ago, and my pieces have been performed in Washington, D.C., and L.A., and have been recorded by the Bulgarian Symphony and the Kiev Philharmonic.Ern, Congrats on all your success. Makes me feel a bit better because I recently got a return on an instrumental with heavy orchestration. The screener said it was returned because strings sound too 80's and I should use synth sounds instead. Orchestra's are too 80's: does that mean 1780's?

[og]

Casey wrote,"One of the things that makes a great song is when the lyric can say the most and evoke the most feeling with the fewest words. Less is often more."I think that is the gist of the whole matter for me. The problem arises when I say what I mean in a way that the A&R guys don't think will sell.When I was writing for magazines years ago, the mantra was "the fewer words, the better", which blew when we were getting paid by the word. And art had no place. I was told, "If you have a phrase that is so beautiful it tears your heart, cut it out." It was all about information. Think about any story song (or prose short story, for that matter), you have to get the point across in X number of minutes or words, but we have the power to make it art with the right words. I am always uncomfortable when told that I need "to write it this way". Am I writing for stupid people? Or can I use high-school English?I actually had a train of thought when I started, but it obviously ran into a tunnel and never came out. I do feel better, but that might be the brandy.

[nomiyah]

Og,I was thinking along the same lines. I have been around a lot of hip hop and dancehall. They put an awful lot of words together in 3 minutes!!!! I've been writing like that since before I first heard rap in 1982 and called it Rhythm Poetry. When I perform that style in clubs, people go crazy, they love it. But when I pitch such a song, industry people tell me there's too many words. Wasn't it Mozart who was told that he used too many notes? My conclusion is to always write songs for myself even if I write other songs to be commercial Nomi

[edteja]

Ah, but Nomi, the issue is are they "abstract" words? How many is too many anyway? Do they spill off at the end of a line?Tell the A&R people that the critique is too abstract. You need to know which of the too many words are the excessive ones. Or tell them to buy the song and they can leave out the ones they don't like. Lets write Dylan and let him know that his songs are okay but he has too many syllables in some lines.

[Casey H]

Quote:Ah, but Nomi, the issue is are they "abstract" words? How many is too many anyway? Do they spill off at the end of a line?Tell the A&R people that the critique is too abstract. You need to know which of the too many words are the excessive ones. Or tell them to buy the song and they can leave out the ones they don't like. Lets write Dylan and let him know that his songs are okay but he has too many syllables in some lines. LOL... I joked about this before. Do you remember in High School how your English teacher would mark up your reports, circling items with phrases like "awkward", "vague", "too long", "expand", etc. ? I always wanted to get their comments on my report card, circle items, and mark them as "awkward", "expand", etc!!! Yours Truly,(Or is it "Sincerely" ?) Casey

[edteja]

When my son was in second grade he brought home a letter from the principal and it was nearly literate. I marked the mistakes with a red pen and sent it back with an F. I attached a note letting him know that I expected a rewrite by the end of the next school day. Didn't get one for some reason.

[ernstinen]

Quote:LOL... I joked about this before. Do you remember in High School how your English teacher would mark up your reports, circling items with phrases like "awkward", "vague", "too long", "expand", etc. ? I always wanted to get their comments on my report card, circle items, and mark them as "awkward", "expand", etc!!! HeHeHeh! That reminds me of my high school senior English project. We were supposed to do a report and analysis of our favorite poet (yea, right). I just COULDN'T take this seriously, so I did the only thing a smartass could do: Make up an "unknown" poet and write all the poems myself!The poet was named Richard Johnson Zucker. I thought that his name was too obvious (Dick Zucker), but I guess not. I made up a story about how he was born in an isolated swamp in S. Carolina, and was just recently discovered. The poems I wrote were all cliched jokes, but I found deep meaning in all of them.So did I get kicked out of school? Nope. I got an A+. Go figure. Ern

[og]

I got "You can't put that in the school newspaper! I'll lose my job!" Did you have a point to make...? Nomi, I've come to the same conclusion. I write some songs because I need to, and if I don't make money on them, I still had to write them.