I’m doing Pat Pattinson’s Berklee Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics free course on Coursera. Very helpful concepts. I’m up to the rhyme scheme section, which I wish I’d done before attempting song 1 yesterday, Friends from the internet. That one drags, and I realise now that’s because the rhyming couplets are too stable, putting a full stop at the end of each pair of lines. You lose momentum and it sounds plodding. The song could do with a rewrite, but I’ll have to come back to it if I want to keep to this 30 day schedule!
The first lesson from the course was about the storytelling blueprint: the point of view, the journey of the song, momentum, and tools for padding out the story (who? where? when? why? etc), and the parts of a song (verse, chorus etc). The second lesson introduced the concept of prosody, which Pat describes as every element fitting together: line number, length, rhyme and rhythm. He breaks it down into two main patterns: unstable and stable patterns. Odd line numbers, irregular line lengths and non-matched rhymes are unstable; the opposite is stable.
It’s interesting to analyse lyrics according to this framework.
song-shaped objects 