Rhyme is an important structural and sonic element of great lyrics. When used well, rhyme helps us to control the pace of the lyric, where the listener feels conclusion of our thoughts, and distinguishes song sections from each other through contrasting schemes. Great rhyme pairs let the listener stay focused on the content rather than the rhyme. Poor rhyme pairs steal the focus away from the content and result in cliche or contrived lyrics.

A great tool for broadening your scope on rhyme is Pat Pattison’s instruction on the 5 types. (For more in depth study, refer to Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies and Commercial Songwriting Techniques. Being able to recognize rhymes outside the small circle of perfect rhyme broadens the content available to us as we write. But I’d like to share with you a simple technique for finding rhymes that requires no pre-thought at all. You might find you’ve been doing this all along in one form or another, and the switch to being more intentional with your technique requires very little effort.

Using a style of free-writing called Object Writing or Destination Writing, the search for rhymes can be quite simple. The goal here is to find rhyme pairs within our original thought, not forcing ideas inconsistent with those original thoughts. To begin, do a few minutes of Object Writing or Destination Writing, using your senses to arrive at highly sense-bound language. If you’ve taken Berklee’s online lyric writing courses, or read Pat Pattison’s books or my own book, Popular Lyric Writing, you understand that this style of free writing focuses around taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and movement.

Now that you’ve got a page or two of sensory focused writing stemming from an object or location, you can look within the sentences for possible rhymes. Taking directly from your original language, you may find many assonance or consonance rhymes that wouldn’t ordinarily occur to you. The rhymes are also directly related to the subject matter of the song that will come from the free-writing itself. Below is an example:

I watched the condensation slip down the sides of the plastic cup, beading on the surface like a snake shedding skin. A green straw slid into the slits on the lid, diving into the icy water and plunging to the bottom where I’ll find sweet relief on a humid September day in LA. The faint sting of chlorine singed my tongue as the roof of my mouth retreated into a numb stare. The hollow tingle of ice cubes floating like life savers on the surface riding the waves as I set the cup down on the sticky metal table. Starbucks in the afternoon, skateboarders clicking over seams in the concrete sidewalk, students with laptops, purple blossoms half decomposed littering the ground…

From this bit of writing I can set the scene for the next song I write. For rhyme and line ideas, I can look within the paragraph and find a few of following:

lid – skin – click – slip – slits – singe
shed – bead
sweet relief – chlorine – green – retreat – seams – bead
plunge – numb – tongue
laptop – sidewalk
roof – ice cubes
faint – LA – day – savers – skates – waves
water – litter

These are some of the rhymes available to me as I start to construct my verse sections of my song. You can use the same technique for chorus writing. This technique and many others are studied in the online course Commercial Songwriting Techniques and companion book Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling.

Happy writing,

Andrea