Hey Reader,

A lot of songwriters run into the same frustrating problem.

You have a melody that feels good—but when it comes to writing lyrics, they all feel stilted, silly, and cliched.

The inverse is true too: we hear from songwriters all the time who are more ‘wordsmith’ than ‘melody-magician’—they have lyrics on the page, but can’t quite find the melody to make them sing with the same musical poetry that the words themselves have.

In either case, the emotion you know is there just doesn’t come through as clearly as you hoped.

One of the things we see again and again is that songwriters tend to think about lyrics almost entirely at the level of meaning — what the words are saying — without realising that lyrics also live at the level of rhythm.

This is something The Beatles understood deeply.

In songs like Eleanor Rigby, the verse melody repeats with absolute precision. Not a single note changes. That kind of melodic repetition is incredibly exposed — and incredibly difficult to write for.

What makes it work is that the lyrics don’t just fit the notes — they match the rhythmic shape of the melody itself. The strong and weak stresses in the words line up naturally with the strong and weak beats in the music.

Lyrics aren’t just meaning — they’re meaning plus rhythm.

Understanding this can unlock the connection between lyrics and melody—that lyrics themselves have a musical component to them, inside their natural rhythm.

And if this feels like something you’d really like to get better at — not just understand, but practice — that’s exactly what we’ll be doing in our upcoming live workshop:

​Writing Lyrics and Melody: How to Make Them Work Together​

It’s a space to slow this process down, try it hands-on, and develop the skill of shaping lyrics so they truly belong inside your melodies.

If that sounds supportive rather than intimidating, I’d love to see you there.

Write for life,
Keppie