Cryptic Lyrics: A Tightrope Walk

Some ramblings on lyric writing.

I have written more than my fair share of bad songs. Like many teens, my bad high school breakup flung me into a weird, self-righteous fit. Songs poured out of me with repeating lyrics like, “why don’t you love me anymore,” and other such nonsense. In retrospect, these songs make me cringe, but creating them was a necessary part of the journey toward more mature, digestible, and clever songs.

Here are some of my best tips and considerations for writing lyrics that aren’t too objective or cryptic, but somewhere in between!

Photo by Patrick McCormack

Subject Matter

A big transition point for me was when I began to look outside of heartbreak for song ideas. People write songs for a plethora of reasons, and to express many different things. I use songwriting to process whatever is irking me at the time: interpersonal drama, medical events, the stress of school, something mean someone said to me on the internet, etc. Using these subjects as fuel for my songwriting has been a powerful tool. It helps me to create a listenable song that isn’t cliche, and to process something I might not otherwise have the space to work through.

When examining my feelings and trying to write, I find that it’s easy to write about something frustrating, but not disturbing. I have trouble writing about things that are deeply disturbing in my own life. It’s easy to get caught in a loop trying to force myself to write about something specific. Instead, I find it easier to write about other people sometimes, like a person that annoys me or a petty grudge I have. Often, writing about petty things leads me to deeper things, and my lyrics come to have double meanings.

Take the second verse of a song I wrote recently. After becoming annoyed when scrolling on Instagram stories after some news of a couple weeks ago (I forget what it was specifically), I started writing about people that always need to be the first to say something.

Your perfect intuition
We heard the news from you
A little big-picture frightening
The woman in the blue

The first two lines are pretty clear-cut, sarcastically setting the scene for the rest of the verse. “A little big-picture frightening” serves double because not only am I worried about the news itself, but also about how this person is scrambling to be the first one talking about it.

The next line, “The woman in the blue”, is honestly an attempted callback to the first verse. In that verse, the hook is “The woman of the hour,” and I wanted to use the same format to make it all flow together nicely. I stumbled upon “the blue” because it rhymes with “from you”. So, that’s lazy and means nothing. However, it comes with an image: a woman wearing blue. A concrete picture in an otherwise abstract paragraph can round out a phrase quite nicely.

Metaphor and Image

Earlier, I referenced some cringe-worthy lyrics that I wrote in high school. Although it’s true that a song filled completely with statement-based lyrics does not hold my attention, these moments can be powerful when contrasted with metaphors and images.

Adrianne Lenker does this extremely well, in my opinion. Her songs are always ripe with images and often come to a hook like “I don’t want to talk about anything”. These colloquial phrases make the jigsaw of images click together, giving the song a satisfying thesis. Taking that song, “Anything” from Adrianne’s 2020 album “songs” as an example:

Christmas Eve with your mother and sis
Don’t want to fight but your mother insists
Dog’s white teeth slice right through my fist
Drive to the E.R. and they put me on risk

Grocery store list, now you get pissed
Unchecked calls and messages
I don’t want to be the owner of your fantasy
I just want to be a part of your family

And I don’t want to talk about anything

The lyrics move fast before the chorus. I’m sure everyone conjures different images when they listen to the words, but therein lies the point. The listener’s brain is given work to do, picturing these scenes. Then, Adrianne leaves them to make sense of it all when she turns, for a fleeting moment, to a familiar colloquial phrase. “I don’t want to talk about anything”. Yeah, I wouldn’t either.

Being Understood

Adrianne is obviously a lyric genius. Even if the song didn’t come around to its hook, I would still listen. Those images in succession, along with the guitar and melody, leave me with a strong feeling of melancholy and nostalgia. A listener doesn’t need to know exactly what she meant by every word, but they do need to be left with a strong feeling.

That’s why the most difficult part of writing cryptic lyrics is being understood- understood not necessarily at face value, but emotionally. I have written songs before where there was nothing to latch on to, just a couple floating images and no real powerful emotion to convey. Back then, I was concerned with making something that sounded smart and artistic, but it just came out confusing.

The key is twofold: describing images with a healthy mix of poeticism and concrete wording, and bringing the listener back around to a thesis with an abstract line or two.

As an inexperienced songwriter, I turned toward more abstract images. In songs like my old ones, you’ll find vague descriptions of color or water or darkness. These can be okay to use, but tend to confuse the listener. Taking “Anything” again for example: Adrianne says “Dog’s white teeth slice right through my fist”. She doesn’t say, for instance, “white and red, skin and blood,” or something similarly abstract. In writing my music, I’ve found that it helps to find concrete phrases that more easily conjure an image.

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Finding the right words is always a balancing act. I still struggle to hold on to my own advice. My lyrics can get very abstract in metaphor at times. In songwriting, following one’s brain, gut, and heart in equal measure is a full-time job.