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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44431
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I am a (part-time) composer, and I have written the music for songs using all kinds of lyrics, written any time from Chaucer to the present day.

I would say that if you don't have any practical musical experience, don't worry about it. The opera composer Rossini once had a pupil learning composition who complained that he could never find the right lyrics for the masterpiece he wanted to compose. Rossini gave something written on a piece of paper, and told him to come back with the song at the next lesson.

The piece of paper was … a thrown-away shopping list.

I would say the main things to understand about music is that (like a movie, a stage play, or oral story-telling, but unlike a written book) it exists only in real time. It "works" by setting up predictions about what is going to happen next in the listener's head, over different timescales (ranging from seconds right up to hours, for a long work) and by doing things that are either expected or unexpected in the context of those predictions. Because the process happens only in real time, repetition is a crucial element - set up a "pattern", and then destroy it, either subtly and gradually, or explosively.

The best sort of lyrics (IMO) are raw material for that process. A poem with beautifully crafted regular rhyme and rhythm doesn't work very well, because there is nothing for the music to add to it. A poem where the reader is expected to spend hours or days thinking about it and re-reading it doesn't work either, since music only works in real time.

If you look at classic lyrics, for example from the "golden era" of stage musicals, you will find exactly that process of setting up and knocking down expectations. Lots of half-rhymes. Lots of internal rhymes within a line. Complete lines that sometimes don't rhyme at all. Verse rhythms that might be consistent for a few syllables together, are all over the shop on a medium time scale, but suddenly fit together neatly (perhaps by verbatim repetition of whole sections of text - call them "verses" or "choruses" if you like, but the names don't matter) at a longer time scale. Grammar, syntax, and even meaning can be thrown out of the window if they get in the way. But it's all grist to the musical mill, and the music can glue the "broken pieces" back together in ways that don't make sense on the printed page.

Just one classic example, from "Singing in the Rain":

    ...
    A rose is a rose
    A toes is a toes 
    A Mose is a Mose
    ...

… WTF does that actually MEAN, as English text? Nothing at all - but it works perfectly, in a song and dance routine.

(Yes, I know it's a half a quote from a poem by Gertrude Stein. And IMO the main point of that reference, _in terms of the song,_ is that if you pick up that ball and expect the song to run with it, _it doesn't._ And if you never heard of Gertrude Stein, that doesn't matter either.)

If old movies don't rock your boat, analyse the lyrics of "Bohemian Rhapsody" instead. It works exactly the same way.

Original score: 6