Lyrics tips

The lyrics writer is free and unlimited, so the cost of trying again is nothing. Use that.

Structure tags

Lyrics come back tagged — [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge] — and those tags are instructions to the music model, not decoration. They tell it where the song changes. Leave them alone; edit the words underneath them.

Pick the structure to fit the idea:

• Hook only — one repeated idea, for something built on a loop.
• Verse – chorus — the default, and usually right.
• Verse – chorus ×2 — when there's a story with two beats to it.
• Full song — adds a bridge, which is where a song is allowed to change its mind.

Line length follows tempo

The writer already adjusts for this — fast tempos get short clipped lines, slow tempos get longer ones — and it's worth knowing because it means changing the BPM changes the lyrics. If the words feel cramped, the tempo may be fighting them.

Writing a good theme

The theme is the subject, not the style. The recipe already carries the style, and repeating it in the theme just crowds out the actual idea.

• Good: "getting rich on a coin nobody believed in"
• Good: "the last shift before a factory closes"
• Less good: "a dark aggressive song about money" — the mood and genre already said that.

Specific beats abstract. "A debt that never gets paid" gives the writer somewhere to go; "sadness" does not.

Using rewrite well

Rewrite on a single section re-rolls just that one and keeps everything else. It's told to take a genuinely different angle rather than reword what was there, so use it when a section is wrong rather than when it's nearly right — for nearly right, just edit the line yourself.

The length limit

There's a budget meter under the lyrics. Go over it and the music model truncates — usually mid-verse, which sounds like a mistake because it is one. If the meter turns amber, cut something rather than hoping.