This week, we continued to rehearse and work on our prosody song, as well as looking at lyric writing. As someone who doesn’t normally write lyrics, this session helped me explore methods of writing lyrics that I had not previously considered. One example of this was the use of haikus, a traditional style of poem which consists of 3 lines, with the first line containing 5 syllables in total, the second containing 7 syllables in total and the third line containing 5 syllables again, the same as the first line. Being someone who does not consider themselves a poet, let alone a lyricist, I thought I would have trouble with this task. I came up with the following haiku:
Whilst not exactly a work of art, this haiku was formed off a recent memory in which, as the poem suggests, I struggled to fall asleep on a sofa. I personally would not consider this to be an appropriate set of lyrics for a song that I would write, although I would most likely find it easier if I set myself a theme of some sort beforehand. I would also note that I mainly write instrumental music, although I should consider being more open to the idea of writing lyrics, especially as we had several lyric writing exercises shown to us in the previous year.
We also attempted to write lyrics in a “free” type of style. This meant that I would continue to write random thoughts in a my mind, except this time, as individual words:
Again, I would most likely not use most of these for lyrics, as only a couple stand out to me (mountain, broken, bottle?). This session may have shown me new, quick methods for lyric writing, but I personally feel that if I was to write lyrics, I would spend more time thinking about the meaning or the overall theme of a song first.
In regards to our prosody song, we continued to practice it as a group, and I began to consider a next section in order to have more content that could be interpreted, rather than just a 4 chord pattern. I added some new chords in order to form this next section (pre-chorus), as well as a brief 2 bar rest where the vocals stop for a moment to allow the piano and bass to play a line each at the same time. I thought this helped to convey the rain theme in our song, as the piano is playing notes in a quicker succession for a moment, rather than just block chords. After this, I came up with the chords for a chorus, a simple ascending pattern, which helped to change the tone of the song slightly, although the lyrics continued the theme of being lost in thought:
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