Writing Better Lyrics »

Pat Pattison is a professor at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches lyric writing and poetry. His books Writing Better Lyrics, The Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure, and The Essential Guide to Rhyming are considered definitive in their genre and have earned many ecstatic reviews. In addition, Pat has developed three online lyric writing courses for Berklee's online school, available through patpattison.com. Pat has written more than 30 articles for Home & Studio Recording Magazine, The Performing Songwriter and a variety of other industry publications, and he continues to present songwriting clinics across the globe. His internationally successful students include Grammy winners John Mayer, Gillian Welch and Rob Hotchkiss (Train). His website is: http://patpattison.com.

Learn to examine 17 extraordinary songs to discover what makes them so effective, work through more than 30 exercises to use language masterfully, use a rhyming dictionary and thesaurus to generate ideas, and more.

Foreword Gillian Welch Welch, Gillian

Introduction 1

Ch. 1 Object Writing: The Art of the Diver 3

Ch. 2 Rusty's Collar: A Lesson in Showing and Telling 19

Ch. 3 Making Metaphors 23

Ch. 4 Learning to Say No: Building Worksheets 33

Ch. 5 Cliches: The Sleeping Puppy (A Case Study) 47

Ch. 6 Productive Repetition 55

Ch. 7 Verse Development and Power Positions 82

Ch. 8 Travelogues: Verse Continuity 93

Ch. 9 Stripping Your Repetition for Repainting 101

Ch. 10 Perspectives 111

Ch. 11 Point of View: Second Person and the Hangman 128

Ch. 12 Point of View: Second Person as Narrative 132

Ch. 13 Dialogue and Point of View 139

Ch. 14 Meter: Something in Common 147

Ch. 15 Spotlighting With Common Meter 153

Ch. 16 Meter: Two by Two 161

Ch. 17 Managing Couplets 168

Ch. 18 Prosody: Structure as Film Score 177

Ch. 19 Understanding Motion 189

Ch. 20 Form Follows Function: Building the Perfect Beast 229

Ch. 21 The Great Balancing Act: Courting Danger on the High Wire 239

Ch. 22 Song Forms: (Im) Potent Packages 250

Ch. 23 Song Forms: (Im) Potent Packages II 257

Ch. 24 Process 262

Appendix Co-Writing: The "No"-Free Zone 289

Permissions 292

Index 295