lawajava
The only thing all this powerful music software can't help with is cranking out meaningful, creative lyrics. Old fashioned elbow grease still applies.

Sometimes the lyrics just flow, and sometimes the well is just dry.

Tonight I'm frustrated because the music sounds good for a particular song, but my lyrics for it so far are really awful.

i'll get the words in shape soon somehow. It's a pain in the rear.

It's a matter of languages. The word verses music. Since the word is a concept, an identifier of a thing, an event, a feeling perhaps. And music is a representation of the energy associated with those things, events, feelings; trying to write the lyrics to the emanation of energy that you composed, rather than composing the representation in energy of the concepts you have written, requires that you first identify what inspired you to compose the energy-music in the first place. Pure music is a mantra, a prayer, an emanation. Relating it to an event in time requires that you pick it apart and put it back together.

I've done the nightstand thing as well.

I have also discovered that you can record off of your iPhone, comes in very handy when those lyrics just suddenly hit.

I once had lyrics come to me while I was at a funeral, man talk about awkward.

Making them come, putting them all together while you're meditating-emanating the music is what you want to do. Concept and vibration, making a concept vibrate..., the vibration of concept. The feeling of the music, what tense of the subject is the music in, and what tense is the subject? Sometimes music and concept transform each other in some mixolydian way. The song you were playing, that you mentally composed, is a flexible concept that will change as you add to it.

Am I the only one who could hear someone speaking Craig's posts in the background of a song ala the Moody Blues?  Hehe...

the best lyrics don't say anything definitive - they just temporarily liberate us from the limited ways in which we think and feel :)

ABV, in a lot of ways I agree with that. My favorite lyrics can often be interpreted in many different ways, depending on who is interpreting them.

I find that my best lyric writing comes from the old fashion way of sitting in a quiet space by myself and singing possible lyric combinations while strumming the chords. I have been struggling with a particular song for several weeks now, mainly because I just can't find any personal time or space lately. I call it creative time.

Hi,
 
About rhymes ...
 
I think they are over done, specially with the internet these days, and the ability to find a program or a word that gives you a SENTENCE that would make sense ... and too many times, as is the case in SO MANY rock music songs ... you can tell that the wording is silly, bad, and is not telling a story ... it's just plain words ... and it don't mean ****!
 
Rhymes were not designed to be cute, fun, or just plain ... I'm smarter than you! They were designed to help the inflection and the importance of each line ... and when you are just using a dictionary or a tool to find you similar words, you are not paying attention to the wording, or the statements you are trying to make ...
 
So yeah ... before you decide on a rhyme, decide if it means something to you or not ... because if it doesn't ... you are just like all the others out there ... and you are trying to make it out there, right?
 
The weird part? You have a singer that has to create emotion on a line that has none, because of your rhyme? ... you're sick! Or a part of those Existentialists!
 
Good luck!

Well I've been mum for a while on this topic and enjoyed everyone's comments.

I've had a good run on completing some lyrics in the past few weeks including that one road blocked song that I mentioned with the original post.

My recent breakthrough has come around as a result of my recent willingness to change the topic of songs I had been determined to write about but had been stuck on.

I had a gut feeling I had a good topic on the song I had been frustrated with. But after writing and rewriting the lyrics multiple times I finally raised the white flag. I decided to come up with another topic, also interesting to me, and the lyrics were done for the song in almost no time.

After that I had another song in a similar rut, and ended up changing the topic for that one as well. Turned out to be an even better topic to write about. Yeah! A feeling of accomplishment - that one is done as well.

So my comment for today is if lyrically you've written yourself into a corner, it can be freeing to think outside of the box.

I get lots of gut feelings but, unfortunately, it's usually just gas...

Lyric writing takes total concentration, yet sometimes they just boil out of your brain without trying. It's the concepts of their "manufacture" that is the machine. Meter, language, rhyme, matching a musical movement or building into the voicing's of a verse, vowel, consonant, punctuation and expression. Building a construct in your head and running the concept and words through it until it all fits, stops and starts, impacts and lets off, together. Two languages, imparting a higher feeling of a concept.