As I mentioned in the first entry on lyrics, I am a big fan of looking at the simile and metaphor potential in lyric writing, so this week was a great opportunity to develop those techniques. I particularly enjoyed the freedom provided by the exercise Robyn set for us involving creating metaphors from seemingly unrelated words10. Sometimes I find myself focusing on purely adjectives that directly connect to the subject, but this often leads to cliches or predictable writing, so I enjoyed the contrast of random selection and the ensuing bizarre constructions such as “euphoric door” or “homeless mountain”. In my mind, this idea of nonsense metaphor making reminds me of the idea mentioned in Robyn’s first lecture on creative process1 of how if you’ve set aside time to work, sometimes your mind finds solutions to problems in the time you’re ostensibly not working – I found myself coming up with legitimate lyrical ideas while we were just listing random adjectives and nouns. This led me to construct the stanza that I brought in the following week:
everybody’s got a story
they don’t want to tell
everybody’s drinking water
from their hidden well
but if you decide that you’re drowning
every now and then
time will tell you to rebuild and
like the setting sun you’ll rise again
Using a sunset over the sea as a starting visual point, I constructed this verse to emphasise the effect metaphor and simile can have.
10 Habel, Robyn. “Lyrics (Imagery and Metaphor)”. Lecture presented at the course Song Writing and Performance 1A, University of Adelaide, May 20, 2019.
1 Habel, Robyn. “Creative Process”. Lecture presented at the course Song Writing and Performance 1A, University of Adelaide, March 4, 2019.
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