The Best Books on Lyric Writing: A UK Songwriter's Reading List

Most books about lyric writing are one of two things: a craft manual that walks you through rhyme, metre and structure, or an anthology that shows you what good writers did with those tools. There is a third kind, and it is the one nobody buys: the exercise book, all prompts and timers and no theory at all. Most songwriters own none of it and wonder why they have eleven unfinished songs and a folder of fragments called ideas 2.

You need all three, but not at the same time. Buy one craft book, work through it, write four or five songs with it open on the desk, then go back for another. Reading three books about lyric writing while writing no lyrics is the most popular form of procrastination in this business, and the trouble is that it feels exactly like work. What follows is the shortlist genuinely worth your shelf space in the UK — and a note on what each book is actually good for.

Start With the Problem You Actually Have

Before you spend anything, work out which of these describes you. The right book depends on it.

• Nothing to say. Plenty of tunes, no subject matter, no images.
• Saying it badly. Clumsy lines, forced rhymes, syllables that won't sit on the melody.
• Structure. Verses that wander, choruses that don't land, no contrast between sections.
• Voice. Everything you write sounds like somebody else.
• Finishing. Wonderful fragments, no complete songs.

If your problem is ideas or finishing, you want an exercise book — something with daily prompts and a timer, that gives you permission to produce rubbish on purpose. If it's clumsy lines and tired rhymes, you want a craft manual you can keep open while you rewrite. If it's structure, you want the book that deals with form before it deals with beauty.

If it's voice, you want to read lyrics rather than theory. You cannot think your way into sounding like yourself, but you can read three hundred songs and slowly notice what only you keep noticing.

Most writers buy the wrong one first, work through three chapters, feel worse about their writing, and stop. That isn't a character flaw. It's buying a book for the writer you wish you were rather than the one currently sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea and a phone full of voice notes.

You are almost certainly not short of talent. You are short of finished songs. Ten finished, slightly embarrassing songs will teach you more than one perfect fragment you have been polishing since March.

The Two Cornerstones

If you only ever read two books on lyric writing, these are the two. One deals with the inside of a line; the other deals with the shape of the whole song.

Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison

Pattison teaches songwriting at Berklee College of Music, and this is the book his whole approach is built on. Its central argument is simple: words and music are not two separate jobs bolted together but one piece of prosody, and the way to write better words is to stop thinking and start sensing.

In practice that means object writing — ten minutes, one object, all seven senses, no rhyme, no judgement — which sounds like a creative writing workshop and turns out to be the single most useful habit in the book. Do it daily for a fortnight and you will stop reaching for the first abstract phrase that arrives ("I'm so lonely") and start reaching for the specific one that only you could have written.

The rest of the book covers metaphor, point of view, tense, the difference between a stable and an unstable line, and how to develop a verse instead of just restating it. The exercises matter more than the chapters, which is why the book rewards a pencil and a notebook rather than a comfortable chair.

Caveats: the examples lean American and some feel dated, and the prose is warmer than it is brisk. Don't skip the exercises and don't read it on the train and think you've done the work. If you finish it and want more, Pattison's Songwriting: Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure goes further into form, and Songwriting Without Boundaries is his pure exercise book.

The Craft of Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis

Where Pattison is about the senses, Davis is about the architecture. Published in the mid-1980s and still unsurpassed on the subject, it takes the song apart — title, opening line, point of view, tense, rhyme scheme, the function of the bridge — and shows you how each piece is doing a job. Her chapters on how a title works as the spine of a song, and how a chorus earns its repetition, are worth the price on their own.

Read it when your songs feel shapeless. It is the book that stops a second verse drifting off into a third subject, and it will teach you to hear a line that is technically fine but landing in the wrong place.

Caveats: Davis is writing for the commercial market of her era — Tin Pan Alley, country, middle-of-the-road pop — and her taste is more conservative than yours probably is. Read it for the engineering and ignore the aesthetic. If you like working from exercises, her companion workbook, Successful Lyric Writing, gives you the same material in drill form.

The Exercise Books: For When You Have Nothing to Say

These are the books for the writer whose problem is the blank page rather than the clumsy sentence. Buy one only, and use it daily.

1. Songwriting Without Boundaries — Pat Pattison. Fourteen-day challenges built on object writing. Sterile as a novel, invaluable as a gym membership.
2. How to Write One Song — Jeff Tweedy. Short, funny, deeply un-precious, and the best book on finishing that anyone has written. Its whole thesis is that a song is a thing you make, not a thing you wait for.
3. The Practice of Poetry — Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Not about songs at all, but the exercises are the sharpest collection in print, and lyricists steal from poets constantly (the poets have been stealing back for years, so it's fair).

Read Lyrics, Not Just Books About Lyrics

This is the section most reading lists leave out, and it's the one that actually changes your writing. Theory tells you what a good line is; reading tells you what your good line sounds like.

• The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present — Paul McCartney, edited with Paul Muldoon. Expensive, enormous, and the best value on this list. The commentary tells you where lines came from and how often the answer was "nowhere in particular".
• How to Be Invisible — Kate Bush. Selected lyrics, arranged by her, with the punctuation doing real work. Read it aloud.
• Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink — Elvis Costello. A memoir, but the best writing anywhere on what a line costs and how long it takes to pay for it.
• Faith, Hope and Carnage — Nick Cave with Seán O'Hagan. Conversations, not instructions, which is exactly why they help.
• Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo. Interviews. Dip in for twenty minutes before a writing session.

A method, if you want one: copy out a lyric by hand. Not type — write. Circle the line you would have written differently, then ask why the writer didn't. Nine times out of ten the answer is that their version was more specific, more honest, or simply stranger.

Why the UK List Looks Slightly Different

Nearly every craft book on lyric writing is American, written for Nashville, Broadway or the Los Angeles pop machine. Their assumptions — that a hook arrives inside thirty seconds, that a chorus repeats, that a bridge is compulsory — don't map cleanly onto a folk club in Sheffield, an open mic in Cardiff or the long British tradition of character songs, music hall and story-telling verse.

So read the American books for craft and ignore their idea of what a song is for. Test everything at a real gig. Ten minutes in a pub back room will tell you more about whether your second verse works than any chapter, because you will hear the room go quiet in the wrong place. That, and not a diagram, is your feedback.

A Reading Order That Works

1. Pick one craft book. Pattison if your lines are the problem, Davis if your songs are.
2. Do the exercises in order, badly, in a notebook that is only for that.
3. After every two chapters, write and finish one song.
4. Play the song to somebody. Then read the next two chapters.
5. Finish the book, put it away for a month, and read lyrics instead.
6. Then, and only then, buy the second craft book.

No book on this list will give you a voice, and any that claims to is selling you something else. What they will do is give you the vocabulary to diagnose what's wrong with a line at eleven at night, which is most of the battle. The shelf is not the point. The songs are. Buy one book, wear it out, and write the ones only you would write.

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