How do you write song lyrics? Writing song lyrics starts from one of three entry points: a title or phrase that demands to become a song, a melody that needs words shaped around it, or an emotion you need to process. From any starting point, the craft involves drafting without judgment, revising with skill, and the discipline to actually finish what you started.
Where Do Song Lyrics Actually Come From?
People ask me about the lyric writing process fairly regularly and I love the question genuinely because no two songs in my catalog came the same way. Every single track I have released in 2026 had a different origin story. Understanding the most common entry points can help any songwriter, beginner or experienced, move from blank page to completed draft more consistently and with less waiting.
The first entry point is the title or the phrase. A line catches in your mind and you know immediately and with certainty that there is a song in it. Do Not Disturb was exactly like that. The title arrived before a single lyric existed and it essentially told me what the entire album needed to be, what tone, what emotional territory, what purpose. When a title shows up fully formed, follow it without arguing. It almost always knows something you do not yet.
What Are the Different Ways a Song Can Start?
The second entry point is a melody. You find yourself humming something with no conscious intention, in the kitchen or on a drive, and you reach for your phone to record it before it disappears. The lyrics come later, shaped carefully around the melody’s natural rhythm and the emotional quality of where the line wants to land. Melody-first writing often produces the most singable results because the words have to earn their place in the music rather than simply occupy a lyrical slot.
The third entry point, rarest and most gratifying when it happens, is when a song arrives almost completely formed. You sit down and something comes out and an hour later you have a draft that barely needs revision. Those songs feel like gifts more than accomplishments. You cannot plan for them or summon them deliberately, but you can be available when they decide to arrive.
How Do You Actually Finish a Song?
Finishing a song requires making the decision to finish it, which sounds obvious until you are in the middle of a project that keeps revealing new possibilities. There is always another revision option, another bridge direction, another rhyme that might serve better. At some point you have to decide the song is what it is and let it be done. Done and released serves the listener. Endlessly revised and never released serves no one.
What has helped me most in 2026 is releasing on a regular schedule. The deadline creates the finish in a way that unlimited time simply does not. When something needs to be complete by a specific date, you stop tinkering indefinitely and make the final choices.
What Is Your Advice for Beginner Songwriters?
Write the bad ones. Every experienced songwriter I have ever respected has a large collection of things no one will hear, false starts and wrong turns and songs with one genuinely good line and nothing else around it. Every single one of those was worth writing because it cleared the path to the next thing. The craft of lyric writing is built through volume. The songs that connect, the ones people share and return to, come on the other side of many, many imperfect ones. Write those imperfect ones without apology. They are not failures. They are the road.