Cliches

Cliches abound in music. This applies for both the lyric, melody and the harmonies. Here we´ll have a main focus on the lyric, but it holds true for all the parts of your song.

Let’s come up with a quick lyric list: hold my hand, you’re a dream, by my side, love you forever, etc.

If you listen to hit songs on the radio, you’re going to hear a lot of these. They hang around because they have so much meaning behind them, and the reason they have so much meaning behind them is because they’ve been used so often.

After all, the world is full of amateur songwriters chasing dreams of fame who can write songs full of overused words, but there is a distinct lack by comparison of talented songwriters who can use words in a fresh and unique way to convey deep emotions.

If you’ve found yourself resorting to overused phrases in your songwriting, don’t worry; it happens to everybody. The mark of a great writer is in knowing how to take the emotion bundled up in these unoriginal words and transform it into fresh words.

Keeping It Fresh
A great technique for writing unique songs is to use well known words in ways that people haven’t used them before.

For example, let’s take the cliche of holding your lover’s hand. This is an image that has been used time and time again over the history of music.

So, how can we change it? First, let’s try to find an opposite. How about if instead of holding your lover’s hand, you’re trying to drag your hand from his/her grasp?

Writing a lyric like that will not only convey to the listener all of the emotion that has been loaded into the “hold your hand” phrase over the years, but also the fact that you(or a character in the song) wants to get away from all of that. A quick turn-around creates fresh meaning.

More Detail
Another technique to use when trying to avoid them is to use a lot of detail. This may be detail that is unique to the situation being described in your song or is detail about the action of the cliche that makes it unique.

For an example, let’s go back to the hand holding. Let’s go to a deeper level of what this unoriginal phrase signifies. Hand holding represents a relationship between two people, so how can we use this common image and add detail to deepen that relationship?

It’s Hard Work
One of the best ways to get noticed as a songwriter is to write things that nobody else can come up with. Nobody will be impressed with a sappy love song full of cliches because they could write the same thing themselves by stringing together different lines and phrases from love ballads that have been written in the past couple decades.

This is a difficult task and will take a lot of work. After you’ve written a song, go through the lyrics and look for anything that resembles a cliche, then think of ways that you can change that image so that it is unique and fresh.

Perform this process over and over on your songs. After a little while, the method of avoiding anything that sounds familiar will result in your work sounding new and fresh.

Finding the Groove The next article in the craft section is about Finding the groove. Click here to go directly to it.

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