There is no right or wrong way to write a song lyric. And there are no right or wrong lyrics. But, there is truth and falsehood. Is your song honest? Or are you just making rhymes?

I was honored to be asked to write this column exploring the craft of lyric writing. I have no particular expertise or unique understanding of that magic process, but I have a deep belief that songs should be ‘about something’ and, that something is best delivered not through the melody, but through the lyric.

I am drawn to songs that reveal truths I didn’t know. They make me see things anew. They open my mind while they entertain my ear. They are real.

My own way of writing a song is pretty consistent. I noodle around with a chord progression and immediately start singing a melody over the chords. Most often, I have no idea where I get the first line. I just sing whatever pops into my head. Then I rhyme it. At this stage they are meaningless words, picked from the ether. But are they? Or is my subconscious becoming manifest, telling me it has something to say?

Everyone probably knows the Paul McCartney story about writing “Yesterday.” He awoke with the melody fully formed in his head. He was sure he had heard it somewhere else and hummed it for his producer, George Martin, to see if he had unconsciously cribbed it. Having no lyrics, he first sang: “Scrambled eggs. Da, da, da, da, da, da. Scrambled eggs.”

Singing nonsense words works. It helps you form structure and cadence. In doing that you’re choosing the number of syllables, the pauses, the flow of the melody. No matter at this point what the song is about. Don’t try and force the song one way or the other in its early iteration. Let the muses take you.

For me, the melody does indeed come before the words. Once I have some melody in mind, but not fully realized, I begin writing the words. From that point on, they affect each other. The tone of the words begins changing the tenor of the music.

The melody, as expected, will move the listener to feel different emotions, melancholy or joy, foreboding or jubilation, with minor or major progressions. Do they make you want to jump and shout, or sit and moan? But, it’s the words that tell the truthful story. Are the words in your song worth taking to heart? Do they live in the truth?

I generally begin to know what my song is about around half-way through. I have an ‘ah-ha’ moment. “Oh, this song is about greed.” That’s when I take the creative steering wheel away from the muses and start driving the idea by myself. That’s when the words start to have meaning, purpose, power.

“No, that line doesn’t fit the theme. That line isn’t clear. That’s pedestrian. What am I trying to say here?”

I don’t want to criticize anyone’s art, but all songwriters, in my opinion, should be on constant alert against being trite, predictable, banal, obvious. Too many songs are way too obvious. As a listener, you know where they are going. You can predict the next rhyme, the next thought. They don’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

So, this is my fundamental songwriting advice: Say something new, something different, something true. Say something honest.

The most powerful songs, to me, have a moment of searing revelation, a single line that makes you stop in your tracks and say, “Wow!” A single honest declaration that can change your world view. Look for that moment in your song. Is it there? Try to make it there.

I wrote a song about an illicit romantic affair. I told the story through the guilt of the adulterous lover. But, the true nature of the story didn’t reveal itself to me until the final line of the final verse.

“Before this night is through
I’ll wash away the scent of you
To hide the stain of passion
We’ll kiss goodbye
While others wait at home alone and cry
From love unfastened.”

That line, out of nowhere, hit me like a lightning bolt. While all the previous words in the song set the literal atmosphere of the affair – the smell of cigarettes, intoxicating perfume, worn sheets, cold rooms, loosened morals – these last two words brought honest revelation about the reason for the affair. Love unfastened.

The audience may not get that those two words are the heart of the song. But I know. They declare the breaking of a trust. They uncover the true feelings of the narrator. They reveal that believing that love is bonded forever is a lie. I didn’t literally say those things in my song. Those two words did it for me. The honesty is there, even if just implied. It is left to the listener to hear it.

I didn’t start out to write that sentiment, that true love can be a lie. I started out writing a song about guilt. The real point of the song revealed itself to me because I am continually asking, what is this song about? And my mind answers. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation. Many others have had it. But it’s an honest lyric. And I may have said it in a slightly new way. Love unfastened. Those two words have layers of meaning to me.

That moment of clarity is not always possible in your songwriting. But you know it when you write it. I know it when I can read my line and say, “That’s it. That’s the truth of this song. That’s what I was working to reveal. That’s what this is about. That’s what I want to say.”

So, I posit that we should all try to say something real in our songs. And say it honestly.

On the other hand, if your song gets people to move their feet, that’s pretty damned cool, too. As the teenagers in Philly used to say to Dick Clark on American Bandstand, “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. I give it a nine.”

SUMMARY: This debut article takes a reasonably deep look at a basic topic. It describes the dominant chords, which are often referred to as V and V7. I’ll also illustrate how the chords function, how they’re used, and I’ll end with some examples. You’ll learn that a dominant chord can be used alone, or you can assemble a hierarchical sequence of them for a powerful and compelling journey back to the tonic. There’ll also be a brief glance at the overtone series and at the circle of fifths.

The V-I move

Let’s say that your song’s chorus, in the key of C, comes to a triumphant end with a G chord followed by a C chord. That’s an example of the key’s dominant chord followed by its tonic chord. The dominant chord’s root is the fifth degree of the scale (the G note in the key of C), and so it is notated analytically as V (because we use Roman numerals for chords). The tonic chord’s root is of course the first degree of the scale, so we use the Roman numeral I. Analytically, then, your G-C dominant-to-tonic move is written V-I, and pronounced “five-one”. G7-C is an example of a V7-I move. A V7-I is a V7-I no matter what key you play it in. So, with this notation, you can reason about how music works in a way that carries across the specifics of particular keys and chords.

V-I and V7-I are arguably the most popular and most effective of all chord changes. But why is that? And what’s the magic contained in these moves that makes them so effective? Let’s begin to answer that with a look at what’s known as the dominant function.

The dominant function

In analysis, Arabic numerals (the numbers we all use) represent scale degrees. Let’s try something. Go ahead and play 1-2-3-4-5 of a major scale (in the key of C, that’d be C-D-E-F-G). Hold that 5 for a moment, then play 1 (the C note) again. You probably felt that the pause on 5 left you hanging somewhat, and then playing 1 felt like a return home to rest. You can get a comparable effect from 1-5-1, or even simply 5-1. Scale degree 5 is known technically as the dominant, and the triad formed with 5 as the root (5+7+2) is known as the dominant triad, or V. The dominant function is simply this: the 5 scale degree tends to sound unstable, and it creates a demand for the 1 scale degree. If you dress up 5 and 1 in triads, you can then similarly say that V is unstable and it creates a demand for I. You, as the songwriter, can choose to yield to that demand and to immediately resolve the tension you’ve generated. That’s the V-I move. Alternatively, you can choose to resist the demand, and to resist resolving the tension, by either remaining on V or by moving to some chord other than I.

So, the dominant function is not the same thing as the V-I move; but it’s part of the engine that drives the move. Before we look at the other parts of that engine, and also at the V7-I move, let’s spend a moment on the topic of tonality, since it’s a concept closely linked to the dominant function.

Tonality and overtones

Tonality is the sense of a hierarchy of stabilities existing between the scale degrees, with the tonic being the most stable. A belief that the origins of tonality can be found in a phenomenon known as the overtone series is associated with such names as Helmholtz, Riemann, Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, and George Martin. Certainly it’s demonstrable that the degrees of diatonic scales are generated by the overtone series. So what is it? Imagine a string, or a column of air, vibrating with a single fundamental pitch, which is the pitch you’re consciously aware of hearing. Subconsciously you’re also hearing a series of overtone pitches that Nature creates by the vibration of regular subdivisions of that same string or column of air. If the fundamental is the tonic scale degree, then the first overtone is a perfect octave above that, so it does not generate a new scale degree. But the second overtone is a compound perfect fifth above the fundamental, and that overtone creates the dominant scale degree (or 5). Additional overtones, even higher-pitched but much fainter, form additional scale degrees. So, you could say that the dominant scale degree is a pitch that is generated by an object vibrating at the tonic pitch. With the fundamental as the tonic, and the other scale degrees as pitches generated from this tonic by Nature itself, we get a glimpse into the origin of the hierarchy of scale degrees, and consequently their relative stabilities as we perceive them.

A consequence of tonality’s hierarchy of stability (that hierarchy being generated by the overtone series) is that playing a less stable scale degree tends to lead the ear to a more stable one. In the case of the dominant function, 5 leads us to 1. But there are other tone-changes at play in V-I that lead the ear in comparable ways. You’ll remember that the V chord is formed from the scale degrees 5+7+2; and I is 1+3+5. 7 and 2 are the other parts of the engine that drives the V-I move. Both 7 and 2 have an instability that creates a demand for 1.

V7 is 5+7+2+4, and the instability of 4 creates a demand for 3. But V7 also contains the very unstable interval of the tritone (or diminished fifth), which appears in the V7 in the interval from scale degree 7 up to 4. The tritone interval is so discordant that it was referred to centuries ago as “the Devil in music”! During the V7-I move, this discordant tritone between 7 and 4 collapses inward a semitone at both ends, and the result is the stable and restful concord of a major third from 1 up to 3. All of these effects account for the voice-leading that can be seen as the notes of V or V7 are replaced by the notes of I during a V7-I or V-I resolution.

Once you understand that V and V7 serve to generate instability and tension and a demand for I, you can use those effects to whatever artistic ends you see fit. Painters paint with light. Musicians and storytellers paint with drama and suspense. So, let’s look at some examples in well-known songs of how this painting can be done.

Spotting V-I in the wild

Here are two Beatles examples. First, their cover of “Twist and Shout” (Berns/Medley), in the key of D, contains a thrilling example of a V7-I move. Beginning at 1:24, note-by-note the vocal harmonies construct an A7 chord, which ends up being sustained for a period of six full bars before finally resolving ecstatically to D.

“When I Get Home” (Lennon/McCartney), in the key of G, ends with a satisfying D7-G move in the last two bars. But the bar before the D7 contains an A7. If D is “the V”, then A is “the V of V”, or “V/V” for short. V/V is an example of a secondary dominant. Analytically, it makes more sense to regard that A7 as a V7/V instead of as a II7. We can see that the A7 does exactly what we’ve seen V7s doing all along: it contains the dominant function, it sounds unstable, and it creates a demand for the tone or chord a fifth below it, which is D7 in this case. Incidentally, you can say “the tone or chord a fifth above” and “the tone or chord a fifth below”, or you can do what the 19th century music educator John Curwen did and opt for the shorthand terms “over-fifth” and “under-fifth”, respectively. For what it’s worth, I favor the shorthand, but I omit the hyphen.

The circle of fifths

Look at the circle of fifths, and you’ll see the A-D-G from “When I Get Home” forming three consecutive counter-clockwise stops. Analytically, that’s II-V-I (although as we’ve said, V/V-V-I sheds more light on the dominant functions that are at work). The Beatles could have extended this itinerary indefinitely by adding more and more stations to their journey. They might have prefixed that A-D-G with E (which in the key of G is VI, or V/V/V). They might then have further prefixed that with B (which is III, or V/V/V/V). And so on. Each additional leg contributes a new level of dominant-function hierarchy and cranks up the tension, and the eventual resolution, another notch.

At its heart, the dominant function is a root movement (the root moves down a fifth). That makes the circle of fifths a useful reference tool, but it also means that minor-quality chords perform the function as well as major-quality ones. ii-V-I (or v/V-V-I), for example, is just as much a string of dominant-tonic resolutions as is II-V-I. The songs “Moon River” (Mancini) and “I Will Survive” (Fekaris/Perren) contain extremely lengthy excursions around the circle of fifths to great effect, and the chords involved are not necessarily all major.

Give delayed gratification a try!

How do you use the dominant function in your songs? Are there ways in which you can use it differently? Do you use secondary dominants, perhaps whole hierarchies of them to create a conclusive and dramatic, if delayed, sense of returning home? If you always give in to the urge to resolve immediately to the tonic, try holding on to that dominant for a while, or going somewhere other than the tonic. You might find that it adds some extra drama and spice that you like! Why not share your discoveries, if you feel so inclined, in a discussion on Meetup!