Songwriting Lyrics

This course teaches lyric writing using the terms and tools that working songwriters and Nashville and Los Angeles co-writers actually use: the AABA and verse-prechorus-chorus forms, the title-as-hook and where to place it, prosody as the marriage of stressed syllables to strong melodic beats, the rhyme family of perfect, family, and additive rhyme that frees you from forced clichés, point of view and concrete sensory detail, and the unwritten rules and percentage splits of a co-write. You will map the structure of songs you love, write a hook and a chorus built on a strong title, scan a lyric line against a melody to fix awkward stresses, build a rhyme scheme that does not bend the sense, and run a co-writing session that ends with a clear split sheet. Every lesson pairs a concept with a named technique and worked examples drawn from songs like the Beatles' Yesterday, Adele's Someone Like You, Dolly Parton's Jolene, and Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, with tools like RhymeZone, MasterWriter, and a simple split sheet.