Why “are they good” is the wrong question
Ask a friend whether your lyrics are good and you will get a verdict you cannot use. Good is not a property a lyric has; it is a summary of several separate judgements collapsed into one word, and collapsing them is exactly what destroys the information.
Critics do not work that way, and neither do editors, publishers or anyone whose job involves telling a writer what to change. They ask narrower questions, and narrow questions produce specific answers: this verse has no images in it, this rhyme is doing the deciding, this chorus says the same thing as the last one.
What follows is six of those questions. None requires talent to apply, all of them require honesty, and each one ends with a rewrite you can actually perform.
1. What is it actually about?
Write the song’s subject in one sentence, without using any line from the lyric. Not the mood, not the vibe, the subject. If the sentence takes three attempts and still comes out as “it is about, like, feeling stuck but also hopeful”, that is the finding.
Songs that resist this test usually have one of two problems. Either they are about nothing in particular, assembled from lines that sounded good individually, or they are about three different things because the writer changed their mind between verses and kept both.
Concrete action: once you have the sentence, go through the lyric line by line and mark every line that does not serve it. In a first draft the count is usually somewhere between a third and half. Those lines are not bad writing, they are writing for a different song.
2. Is it specific or generic?
There is a persistent belief that a lyric reaches more people by staying general, because specific details exclude listeners who do not share them. The opposite is closer to true. Nobody has ever felt anything about “the pain inside my heart”. People feel a great deal about a particular kitchen at a particular hour.
The mechanism is that concrete detail is what makes an emotion transmissible. Abstraction names a feeling; specificity causes one. A listener who has never stood in that kitchen supplies their own, which is precisely how identification works.
- Count the nouns you can see. A verse with no physical objects in it is running on abstraction.
- Watch for the emotion words. Sad, lonely, broken, free. Each one is a place where an image could have been.
- Beware the borrowed phrase. If a line could appear unchanged in a hundred other songs, it is carrying no information.
Concrete action: take the most abstract line in your lyric and replace it with something a camera could photograph. Do this three times and the whole song changes character.
3. Does anything move?
A lyric needs to travel. Something has to be different at the end: what the narrator knows, what they want, what they are willing to admit. When nothing changes, a song describes a state rather than telling anything, and listeners feel the stall even when they cannot name it.
The diagnostic is blunt. Could you swap verse one and verse three without anyone noticing? If yes, they contain the same information in different words, and the song has been standing still for three minutes.
The arc does not have to be a story. It can be a change in perspective, a realisation, an escalation of stakes, or a single detail introduced late that reframes everything before it. What it cannot be is absent.
Concrete action: summarise each verse in five words. Read the summaries in order. If they do not form a progression, the fix is structural: usually verse two is doing nothing and should be carrying the turn.
4. Whose voice is this?
Two questions hide here. The first is grammatical: who is speaking, and to whom? First person to a specific you is the most intimate configuration in popular music and the reason so many songs use it. Third person creates distance, which is sometimes the point.
The second is tonal, and it is the one that goes wrong. Is the register consistent? A lyric that speaks plainly for two verses and then reaches for an elevated poetic image breaks the spell, because the listener has built a model of who is talking and the model has just been contradicted.
This is the most common flaw in otherwise strong amateur lyrics: individually good lines written in incompatible voices, kept because each one was hard to write.
Concrete action: read the lyric and mark any line that sounds like a different person wrote it. Keep the voice that fits the song and rewrite the rest, even when the rejected lines are the ones you like best. Especially then.
5. Do the rhymes earn their place?
Rhyme is a tool for memorability and closure, and it becomes a liability the moment it starts making decisions. The tell is a line that says something slightly beside the point, in slightly odd syntax, ending on a word that happens to rhyme. Listeners cannot always articulate why that line feels weak, but they register it.
Useful principles:
- Meaning first. Write the line you need, then find a rhyme. Never the reverse.
- Near rhyme is not a compromise. Slant and assonant rhymes are used constantly in contemporary writing and free you from the tyranny of perfect matches.
- Vary the scheme. Unbroken AABB across an entire song becomes predictable and starts to feel like verse rather than song.
- Perfect rhyme for closure. Save the exact match for the moment you want to feel resolved, usually the end of the chorus.
Concrete action: find every line where the rhyme word is the least interesting word in the line. That is your filler, and it is almost always fixable by rewriting the line before it instead.
6. Does it survive on the page?
The last test is the most exposing and takes two minutes. Print the lyric with no formatting and read it aloud as text. No melody, no chords, no production.
A great deal of what feels powerful in a song is being carried by the music. That is legitimate and it is how songs work: a lyric is not a poem and does not need to stand alone. But the test tells you how much is being carried, and the answer is diagnostic. A lyric that collapses entirely on the page is not necessarily broken, though it is a lyric with nowhere to go if the arrangement changes.
What you are listening for is whether the images land, whether the sentences are sentences, whether the progression is visible without the chorus arriving to signal it.
Concrete action: read it to someone. Not sing, read. Their face at the end of the second verse will tell you more than any amount of self-assessment, because by that point you are no longer able to hear the words as a stranger would.