Word Block

 If any of you out there are like me, then you probably have a lot of trouble when it comes to writing lyrics. And if you bear any resemblance to me, you probably have difficulty setting those words to music. Now, I go to an art school, and let me tell you, there is talent around every corner. There are kids in my guitar class who can conjure up catchy, witty songs magically, like there's some kind of formula for it or something. And I'm sitting there in the corner, practicing Bach's Bourree in E minor, wishing I had half the talent these kids have for song writing.  Don't get me wrong, I can come up with plenty good tunes and chord progressions. . . I have the music part down. . . It's just the words. . . sigh. When I was younger, we had to write poems for our English class. What I would do, is write a single line, like "The sun is setting over the ocean." and then slowly make it fancier sounding. Soon, "The sun is setting over the ocean" became "The searing sun is setting over the blissful ocean" and eventually I would end up with something like "The searing solar stone of stones laid itself to rest under the blissful ocean's silent roar". Pretty impressive for a then-seventh grader, right? But now, quite a few years later, words are not coming to me so easily. It seems almost as if I'm trying too hard. . . I am currently obsessed with a certain band's lyrics and I can spend hours analyzing them only to come out with nothing of my own to show for it. Like, take these lyrics for example:

If all our life was but a dream

Fantastic posing greed!,

Then we should feed our jewelry to the sea.

For diamonds do appear to be

Just like broken glass to me.

And then she said she can't believe

Genius only comes a long in storms of fabled foreign tongues.

Dripping eyes and flooded lungs,

Northern downpour sends its love.

Hey moon, please forget to fall down.

Hey moon, don't you go down.

I mean, those last two lines. . . what a simplistic yet beautiful way to say "I don't want the night to end.". And I'd much rather hear those first five lines instead of someone just saying "Our money is worthless, so let's throw it away." And later in the song, there is a line that goes:

I know the world's a broken bone. . .

Melt your headaches, call it home.

Which is just a better way of saying "there's nothing you can do about our current situation, so lets just not stress out anymore.". I would give anything to be able to write like that. I have been thinking about carrying around a notebook to just write random clever things that I think of down. But the last time I did that I ended up doodling all over it and basically just ranting all the time as if it were some diary instead of a sacred lyric journal. These are probably all signs that I'm not cut out be a writer. . .