writing lyrics with lots of "i/me/you/we"

Wow to the above. Thats fucking heavy.

Who cares if the lyrics are in the first person, and all about you and your experiences?

If done well, and you're talking about something people can relate to, the listener will turn it all around to where it's all about them.

Say in a blues song; it starts out with "I Woke up with the blues this morning"

Self indulgence, right?

But no. Every listener has been through that and can identify with feeling the same way.

Don't worry about it. Just write real songs.
 
Who were you commiserating with?
Lyrics can be whatever I want them to be & serve the purpose I select: story telling, space holding, melody carrying, seduction, damnation. I pick. If I read back and they appear self indulgent then I edit them.
Unless a person can successfully/fully write in the abstract, (and to my knowledge even manual writers have trouble being completely objective), a sense of the writer will come through the lyrics: the biases, interested, vanities, occupation and problems of the writer will be evident at some level.
I didn't use "you" in the sentences because the use of "you" is often based on the assumption that others experience things similarly to the writer. That, to me, is more indulgent that the other pronouns.
I find that the way people write in general is reflected in their lyrics, though the lyrics will be stilted in comparison.
For example, if I'd have written the text below I'd have done it something like the edited job below it.
"Everyone on social media is so self involved and insufferable, that I just want to not do that. But hell if I'm going to write a song about a racoon. So it's tough times for a lyricist. I feel like the same rules of that FB article should apply to lyrics: make people laugh, inform them, etc, but not to get self involved."
"Many users of social media are often narcissistic and I, personally, find this insufferable. I do not wish to appear to be from the same mold. If I'm going to write a song about a racoon, I'll write it. It's a tough time for me as a lyricist; I feel that the rules of the FB article I referred to should apply to all lyrics i.e, I should try to make people laugh, where possible educate them and try not to expose my own egocentricity."
They are the same message but in different styles and reflect different things about the writers. For my part I come of as a pompous git who works on the words and text in terms of grammar and consistency. I'd normally come back and edit the text in an hour's time to ensure that emotion or lack of objectivity didn't muddy the waters.
However, if the reader can empathize or sympathize with the original better than the edit then the original is the better communicator of the two.
It's about the communication of a story, value, feeling or melody.
 
I'm playing a set tomorrow evening of 9 songs. (My first time on a stage in over 3 years) 8 of my own songs and 1 cover. Every song has the use of I, You, Me, We, etc. Am I in the slightest bit concerned?

Nope! :thumbs up:

It's all good, just write what you write. Bollocks to what other people think. If they don't like it, then that's their tough shit.
 
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I think few people pay attention to lyrics the first time they hear a song. And every time after they're just thinking about themselves when they hear "I". I took a pill in ibiza is like the most jaded sadsack song ever and people turned it into a dance hit so have faith that the listener is more interested in enjoying the song than empathizing with the artist. :)
 
rayc said:
However, if the reader can empathize or sympathize with the original better than the edit then the original is the better communicator of the two.
It's about the communication of a story, value, feeling or melody.
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Well, every act of communication is a 2-way street and requires not only a communicator, but an engaged reader/listener who is willing and ready to hear what is being communicated. Some may empathize with the original, some with the edit, some neither, etc. At the end of the day it says more about the reader/listener, which they prefer, than it does about who is the "better communicator."
 
There are listeners for whom lyrics really matter. We may not be in the majority, but we are here. To me, if the music is great but the lyrics suck, the song is a failure. There are many songs I once loved but can no longer listen to because inane lyrics spoil it for me.
 
One of the best songs I've written (and the people I play for seem to like) contains the words "when I burp the alphabet". It wasn't written as a funny song. It is a love song. It's real..... It's me.

Just be you.....
 
Well, it sounds to me like yer operating under the assumption that every time those pronouns are used in a song, the songwriter is talking about him/herself. This is not always the case. I frequently write songs using all of those pronouns but often I'm writing/singing from someone else's point of view, trying to put myself and the listener in that person's shoes. And even if you *ARE* writing about yourself, who's to say that there aren't many listeners who could benefit from seeing things from YOUR point of view for a while?

Overall, I agree with what many of the other responses here have said: just write. Don't over think it, but don't under-think it either. Write what you know and what comes naturally. Some of the best songwriting advice I ever got was, "yeah, rhyming is nice, but it's the stuff that comes before the rhymes that counts." ;)
 
George Harrison wrote a song about this. It was the last new song the Beatles ever recorded. It's called "I Me Mine". There are many Beatles fans who hate this song, I am not one of them.

Chuck
 
chuckduffy said:
George Harrison wrote a song about this. It was the last new song the Beatles ever recorded. It's called "I Me Mine". There are many Beatles fans who hate this song, I am not one of them.

Chuck
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On roadtrips, that's one of my 5 year old's favorite songs. :D
It might get played 5 or 6 times in an 8 hr time span.
 
Can't be arsed to read a whole thread about this - but I do write a fair few lyrics and occasionally the I, My, You thing annoys me. Its often easy to get rid of this by just dropping them from the start of sentences. Things often end up sounding in a really cold passive voice when you do this - which I actually quite like. But then I'll have a verse of 4 lines, all of which start with I
 
JDOD said:
Can't be arsed to read a whole thread about this - but I do write a fair few lyrics and occasionally the I, My, You thing annoys me. Its often easy to get rid of this by just dropping them from the start of sentences. Things often end up sounding in a really cold passive voice when you do this - which I actually quite like. But then I'll have a verse of 4 lines, all of which start with I
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I tend to write a lot of songs with "I" in them, but I sometimes put myself into an unflattering role to highlight bad behaviors of others. Instead of just pointing out others that bug me, I'll write about it as if I'm that person. I'm the bad guy, I'm the idiot, I'm the problem, I'll make fun of others by putting myself into their shoes and then speaking about all of the stupid things I do as them. It's fun for me. Lots of I/Me/My and I couldn't care less what anyone thinks of it because it's my song and I'll write about whatever I want however I want.
 
I've used a similar technique by writing from an alternative POV but I've still removed the I/Me stuff from it. This then ends up being really ambiguous between the verses that are actually personal and the verses that are from an alternative POV.

I'm not sure I give that much of a fuck what people think of them either. Your lyrics are good though, Greg. They're generally pretty funny too.
 
JDOD said:
Your lyrics are good though, Greg. They're generally pretty funny too.
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Thanks dude. That's pretty much all I go for. I'm not interested in being deep or dark or emotional. I'm not interested in breaking some new lyrical ground. All that is great for people that do it naturally, but a lot of that type of lyrical content from people is very forced because they really think they have to write thoughtful and meaningful lyrics, and to me there's nothing worse than that. It's so contrived. It's pretty transparent when someone is trying too hard. It comes off as very corny and cliche to me. I think lyrics are mostly stupid pretty much all of the time. Lyrics are the least important part of how and why I listen to and/or write music. I know that goes against standard boring musical groupthink, but I don't care. I just want them to be entertaining to me, then maybe they'll be entertaining to someone else. And if not, that's okay too.
 
Greg_L said:
All that is great for people that do it naturally, but a lot of that type of lyrical content from people is very forced because they really think they have to write thoughtful and meaningful lyrics, and to me there's nothing worse than that. It's so contrived. It's pretty transparent when someone is trying too hard.
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I know you don't like Nirvana and/or Soundgarden but there were a lot of good, interesting and artistic lyrics in there. Fuck me, it didn't half inspire a generation of contrived bollocks though.
 
JDOD said:
I know you don't like Nirvana and/or Soundgarden but there were a lot of good, interesting and artistic lyrics in there. Fuck me, it didn't half inspire a generation of contrived bollocks though.
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There ya go. I can believe that Cobain was a broken guy. He clearly had a myriad of mental disorders. That's part of what made him appealing to so many people. I'm not a fan of Nirvana specifically, but I am a fan of rock and roll from weirdos. You have to be sort of fucked up to make the best rock and roll. But it did spawn a bunch of crap. No one wants to listen to a bunch of well-adjusted baptist accountants from the suburbs try to be Nirvana.
 
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