Reading through this thread got me thinking about what it means for a song to be lyrically well-written. I spent a lot of time wrestling with the problem that there are multiple dimensions across which lyric writing can express meaning, and listing them all out would feel tantamount to saying nothing useful at all, so I decided I should focus on just one quality I value in songwriting to get a thread started. I was pleased to see a few of my favourite popular writers already mentioned in the elder thread, so I listed them out to see what I thought they might all have in common.

Searching for a common, vital ingredient that ties together the work of my favourite songwriters across time and genre, the answer I've come up with is: humour.

I'm not talking about comedy lyrics here - I very rarely enjoy joke songs (since a joke is usually only truly funny the first time, while a great song should bear endless relistening) - but rather lyric writing with a sense of irony. A great songwriter explores the interplay between layers of meaning and depths of feeling, and is comfortable with juxtaposition of opposites existing in tension without clean resolution. Someone with a sense of humour can laugh through pain and spot the absurdities in mundane situations. That's what I mean by 'humour' here.

* * *

To illustrate my point I'll go through my own picks from the other thread:

dami lists John Darnielle and Tom Waits - the former is, for me, the king of underground folk for his work in the 90s through early 00s. Darnielle is constantly staring the worst impulses of humanity in the face and flicking them away with a flippant remark. His work often has a literary flair, casting historical and mythological figures in absurd/modern situations, or just exploring strange psychology on its own terms. I'd recommend checking out some live performances of Mountain Goats songs, since John often manages to bring the humour out of even their darkest material on stage with his wink-and-smile delivery. My pick: Going to Scotland

Waits shares a lot of DNA with John Darnielle, also being inspired by the experiences of people on the fringes of society - or the fringes of sanity. His humour is often more mean-spirited though; it can often seem like kicking someone when they're down. Nevertheless, if you squint, you can see the heart in it. My pick: Misery is the River of the World

Pidge mentions Everything Everything - a maximalist band if there ever was one, and their lyrics deliver by turning absurdism to the max without losing a pop-ish sense for flow and rhyming hooks. Much like their music, the moment you think it's getting too serious they'll hit you with a wild left-turn that's so over the top you've just got to smile as you dance your brains out. My pick: Hapsburg Lippp

Kevin brings up Radiohead, and I know I'm going to get some sideways glances from people who consider their output a fountain of undiluted self-serious angst, but I've got to disagree - Thom Yorke's writing is not (always) humourless. He is a neurotic guy with a mean, caustic sense of humour that comes through in a lot of Radiohead's best work. Kevin shouts out Airbag, a song that's positively whimsical by Radiohead's standards, but the standout moment for what I'm getting at comes on the following track Paranoid Android

when, at the end of the bridge section juxtaposing imagery of industrial slaughter with urban middle classes yukking it up at a high-end bar, he sneers the 'punchline' - "God loves his children, yeeeaaah". Some of us get to enjoy far more of the Almighty's favour than we would seem to be owed, while others might as well pack themselves into the ovens for all He's concerned. It's arch gallows humour, and Radiohead's work is full of similarly acerbic lines delivered with a sneer.

blower brings up Animal Collective - if there's one constant in their work it's a sense of playfulness. My favourite lyrics of theirs match childlike naivety with an undercurrent of old-soul yearning. The irony is in the discrepancy between the depth of the content and the style of the delivery. My pick: Mouth Wooed Her

Also from blower: It's no secret that Cameron Winter is a funny guy on stage & in interviews but I think his songwriting doesn't get enough credit for its subtler sense of irony than you'd expect based on his over-the-top wisecracking public persona. Geese's latest album is full of lines that express an overflow of conflicting feelings by playing with contradiction, like "I should burn in hell / But I don't deserve this", "You can stay with me / And just pretend I'm not there", and "I have no idea where I'm going / Here I come!" (I could go on). One of my favourite recent lyrical/musical moments though comes from $0

off his solo album, a lovelorn anthem at the climax of which he breaks into a fit of full-on religious ecstasy, wailing "God is real! God is real! I'm not kidding, God is real! I wouldn't joke about this, God is actually real!" over and over until the mania wears off. In interviews he's mentioned moments at concerts where new fans can't seem to tell if this is part of the song or he's just having a breakdown on stage. Some find it hilarious, others are brought to tears, and I think that's the greatest possible achievement of literary irony - leaving you unsure if you should laugh or cry.

* * *

Now here's my shortlist of great modern songwriter ironists who didn't get a mention in the other thread: Leonard Cohen; Father John Misty; Andrew Bird; Fiona Apple; David Berman; Isaac Wood; Tim Smith; most honourablest mention to Stephin Merritt - I sang The Book of Love

at my wedding.

It's always worthwhile to think of a few objections to your own thesis in order to keep yourself humble, and I did come up with some counterexamples of popular lyricists whose work I admire but don't generally find humorous at all: Joanna Newsom and Sufjan Stevens. Both can be light-hearted, even whimsical, but I've never felt l like I share a sense of humour with either of them. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I love both their work all the same in all its earnestness.

* * *

Now I want to know what great songwriting means to other BotBrs. What qualities do your favourite lyricists have in common?

More of an addendum than a contribution here: One domain Large Language Models seem to consistently struggle with compared to human writers is comedy - they just don't seem to have a sense of humour at all. LLMs still can't generate original jokes, just remixes of established formats, and I'm yet to read AI-generated text that I'd consider amusing on its own terms. I'm not discounting that this may be another "AI can't render hands" situation, but at least for now, a through-line of humour is one of the last reliable signals that a piece of text was authored by a human.

What does this mean for a songwriter? If you want your work to stand out from the tsunami of AI-written slop that's already swamping the creative arts, say something funny!

Wow, roz. This is so eloquently written out.

The common thread of my own preferences often seems to be that I seem to remember and love music that I connect with either through recognition or through discomfort. "Recognition" to me means sort of a lining up of the neurons in which I say "hey, I know that feeling or experience or thought you're describing. I've had that one too." This doesn't need to be profound, but it results in a kind of a I'm-not-alone-in-the-universe sense.

"Discomfort" for me might be similar to how roz is describing music with humor. This is the stuff I connect with because it put me in touch with some challenging, difficult, painful, or even just more meaningfully emotional subject matter, with the end effect being it helps me sort of contrast and unpack the emotional things in my own life, regardless of whether these two things are closely related. I mentioned the Bright Eyes song Road to Joy specifically because it made me uncomfortable when I first heard it. It challenged my sort of ambivalent attitude towards war and societal problems when I was younger, and caused me to think. Another song on this album, Poison Oak,

is different in subject matter in dealing with trauma but has a line that brings it back to the same introspective sense, "I was young enough, I still believed in war."

This latter category doesn't necessarily mean I need to feel something intensely or be really brooding or anything, it's just that if there is some contrast of feelings between the music and myself, it's likely to make me think, and I love the feeling of being driven to reflect. Some of my favorite films are ones that are thought-provoking for me and make me think for days.

I sort of connect with non-lyrical music in similar senses, I think I just tend to do a bit more neural ad-libbing to fill in the blanks of the words being shared in those cases.

I also think there's a vein of music lyrics that I connect with for reasons completely unknown. This category is more, uh, mystical? It's something my mind and body responds well to, but which I couldn't describe as anything deeper than "I don't know, I love it."

The blend of ambiguous lines and thick 90s alt guitar in Hum's Ms. Lazarus

were an example of this. I think I get more what I like about this song now, but when a friend first introduced it to me in junior high I kept thinking about the words even though I didn't really get what the hell it could be talking about. Maybe this is just a sneakier version of my more thoughtful category I described earlier, where my subconscious self is beating my conscious self to the punch.

words

love this thread! much to absorb that's already been said... roz I think your observation about humor-but-not-comedy is a keen one. I agree this is an endearing quality in a lyricist and there's a lot of power in getting somebody to crack a smile right as you also prod at their heart. I absolutely love that $0 song btw, it was one of my most favorites that I heard last year (similarly stymied by that final ecstatic refrain). Andrew Bird's an interesting pick - his approach is often so wordplay-focused over meaning-focused, but he's still a keen writer when he wants to be. songs like "Effigy" and "Saints Preservus" knock the ball outta the park.

I appreciate that this question is appended with "...for you?" because, like I wrote in the other thread, there's so many different approaches to writing, and what hits hard for one person might bounce off the other; what's deep to one will be trite to another, and neither of them are wrong, they just have different perspectives, ideas, personalities, experiences by which to process what they're hearing/reading. so by that same token, even if some common threads emerge amongst what we find "works" for us in terms of songwriting, different songs are gonna trigger those same common threads for different people. cool huh?

for me... I think "relatable" is one of the most important qualities in songwriting that sticks with me. lyrics that I can recognize a little bit of myself in, or shoes I can put myself into, something to form a little personal connection to... or even, in a broader sense, when I feel like my own temperament is being met or appealed to. I increasingly find emotional appeal [on the part of the music] to be a critical aspect to much of the music I like, and of course it resonates most clearly when I feel like the singer is articulating something that makes some kind of personal sense to me. perhaps it's at its best when that something is something I hadn't thought about on those terms before. perhaps it's about crafting a little world or story that I feel like I want to live in, to experience through the song, and somehow feel and learn something about myself in the process of listening. I guess this is about introspection, much like what kilowatt has said.

another thing I find really appealing is fine, specific detail. some of my favorite lyricists make their keenest statements on their subject at hand through really particular details rather than focusing on the whole. a picture painted by describing things that get the point across obliquely, and somehow more poignantly because the written space feels more lived-in. I find those details tell you a lot about the person who wrote them - why did this, of all things, stick out to them? - and so perhaps in a larger sense I like getting to know their headspace just a little. (and perhaps this ties into "relatability" too!) Yoni Wolf is one of my favorites for this reason, and I would also include Isaac Wood and John Darnielle amongst writers who use this technique. directness can be plenty cool too, but detail-painting is like artful acupuncture. OK, I don't like the acupuncture simile but at least it gets the point across.

subversion / dodging expectations has a way of getting me interested too - much like with wry humor, one lyric sets up another to either make a different point or to deliberately launch in a different direction. perhaps you could call it delivering punchlines. it's dangerous 'cause if it misses it really misses, but in the right writer's hands it's a great way of pulling me in and building that needed bit of relatability to keep me invested.

thinking of a song I heard recently with the following "chorus"/repeated bit:
I don't want you in my bedroom
I just want to know you'd want to
I don't care how cold that makes me
my landlord John pays for the heat
but you didn't offer, did you baby?

p.s. zor, what are you doin' there subverting the thread bumping boon cost? ;[

Honestly this is a better thread idea than the one I came up with. Well said, roz! I agree that humor is endearing for an artist, but it seems even that is up to interpretation a lot of the time.

Like I said in the other thread I really do like songs with lyrics that you kinda have to chew on for a little while to understand, but it's for sure not the only thing. I notice that I also tend to like artists with a certain... voice? Hard to describe. The best way I can put it is the lyrics sound like their voice; Their voice isn't stunted or stifled by how they sing the lyrics. That's kind of also why I'm not a huge fan of video game music with lyrics, since a lot of times they're translated from their native language or the lyrics are written before the song and kind of shoehorned in.

It seems I also gravitate towards songs that describe a bad situation or moral dilemma. Not necessarily dramatizing or downplaying the problem, but making light of it as if to say "it'll pass with time. Don't worry too hard over it".

For example, I submit Billy Preston's Nothing From Nothing

(1974). I think the lyrics are pretty self-explanatory, it's about someone feeling like their relationship with their partner isn't mutual. The funny thing to me is how terse and dismissive some of his lines can sound on their own while he still sounds lighthearted with a cheery melody over the song (even in the studio recording he has a big goofy grin on his face the whole time xD). Sort of gives the impression to me that he's trying to be kind but frank, and is more or less at peace with the situation. The wordplay is pretty funny too, especially this line:

Don't you remember I told ya
I'm a soldier in the war on poverty

It's definitely referencing and poking fun at Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty

initiative, but what I think is funnier is him using it sarcastically as a way to basically say "I'm doing bad enough as it is fending for myself". That line also gives a hint of humility to me, which I tend to appreciate in songs too.

Humour is indeed a great component in memorable lyrics, as well is in any writing, drama etc.

I have a soft spot for "cleverness" as well, but that said, it can be liberating with silliness once in a while.

Cleverness from Cake – Sad Songs and Waltzes

"I'm writing a song all about you
A true song as real as my tears
But you've no need to fear it
'Cause no one will hear it
Sad songs and waltzes aren't selling this year"

similar to what i said in the other thread, interesting images, possibly some playfulness, and not too on-the-nose

@zor: My guess is that LLMs suck at humor because it's one of the literary skills that require or greatly benefit from having a biological body.

Humor that is mechanically created by extrapolating the stuff that's already out there tends to be stale. Good humor requires stepping outside the familiar patterns with the help of your intuition about the things that tickle your brain.

Oh man I almost tapped in to the lyrics thread so I'm not missing this one!

As someone who writes words just about as much as I write notes, and in both musical and non-musical contexts, I'd say my mark of "good songwriting" (or even just "good writing" in general!) is thematic cohesion. It's definitely not the only factor, the aforementioned human touch of humor can do a lot in that regard, but it's probably the most immediate thing I gravitate towards for a question like this.

I have a very head-first approach to writing, where first I'll identify what emotion/ theme/ moral/ etc. I want to capture. After that, everything is in service of that one goal, and what exactly that goal (and what achieving that goal) looks like is different every time. Note: XHB's being very conducive to this process is why I got hooked so thoroughly on them.

Additionally, on top of a strong thematic core, I'd say the perceived quality of execution is the other half of any artistic work's merit (at least, to me), though for me it isn't symmetrical. A good idea with poor execution is, to me, preferable to a bad idea with great execution. Ideally, you have/do both. If you really wanted, you can label these as "taste" and "skill", though I'd advise against being a disparaging dickhead to people-- especially amateurs just trying to learn (You could also call these two the "why" and the "what", respectively).

At least in my experience, most writing/ songwriting that falls flat for me does so because I find myself asking "why?", or similarly "what was the point?", failing on the idea side of things. I do acknowledge that to some extent, this line of thinking revolves around the semi-mythical "original idea", but something-something all-ideas-are-remixes, that can be a different discussion. Point is, if I personally feel like your writing/ song/ whatever has just been done before full-stop (or otherwise lacks an identity/theme, or it clashes against your stated intended theme), I'm much more likely to be critical of it. Taking an old idea in a new direction is a good way (and maybe the only true way) to combat this. Overly formulaic musical trends are the opposite, I'd say.

Then there's execution; clumsy prose, poor structure, uninspired riffs, all of these point (for me) to a technical deficiency more than one of taste or theme. This is a lot more straightforward in my opinion, as it feels at least a tad more objective (or at least, a lot easier to point at something concrete and go "this, this needs changing"). As such, I honestly don't have as much to say. Honest-to-god, I was a completely talentless hack starting out as a kid-- I don't feel like I wrote even a half decent piece of music until last 2020, and even then, I'd extend that line as far as 2023 now. Practice makes perfect, and I'd say I'm living proof of that

TLDR; Your English teacher bitched about theme endlessly for a reason. Stay in school kids, most Americans are illiterate and I promise you it's not a high bar to clear.