I was working excitedly on a new Christmas song today. (Hey why not, it’s November already! Must plan ahead.)
Yup, this song definitely is on my playlist for the next Songcraft session. I’ll probably ask someone to sing it for me (again), if she doesn’t violently object.
Anyway, things went really well with the writing of the song. I completed almost 80% of the first draft…all while sitting at my workdesk. With no instruments whatsoever, just sitting there and humming out a tune and fitting lyrics in. Now it’s just about adding in some last bits of lyric and fine-tuning the whole song.
I got kinda stuck when I came to the chorus.
I had lyrics for the first line down pat. And the third and fourth lines. However, I just couldn’t get the second line to rhyme logically with the first. I really couldn’t. There weren’t any logical rhymes that I could use to rhyme with the first line of the chorus, and I just couldn’t think of a way to structure a second line to make it sound both good and logical. (I’m big on Rhyme, by the way.)
So after thinking about it for quite awhile, I suddenly experienced the classic “lightbulb” moment and did an Alan Jay Lerner*…which meant I simply repeated the first line. Which means that my first two lines of the chorus are identical.
It’s the best solution I could come up with. And I think it just might work.
Ah, the joys of crafting a song.
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*There are records which state that Alan Jay Lerner took two weeks to complete the last line of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” (from the musical My Fair Lady). And what exactly was the last line? “Loverly, loverly, loverly, loverly.”
