Most pages with this title exist to show up in a search, and most of the advice on them is padding around three ideas everyone already knows. This is a different kind of list. It's the small set of things that actually changed how my songs come out--collected over most of a lifetime of playing piano and guitar, and a folder of half-finished songs that taught me what wasn't working. None of it requires music theory, and most of it doesn't require an instrument in your hands.
One plain sentence. "This song is about the summer my brother left home." Not a title, not a lyric--the fact of the thing.
It sounds too simple to matter, and it's the tip I'd keep if I could only keep one. A lot of abandoned songs turn out to be about two things at once, or about nothing in particular, and no amount of rewriting fixes that after the fact. The sentence settles it before a line exists.
There's a longer version of this idea--one line per section, what each part of a song is for, and a fill-in template--in my post on mapping a song out before you write the words.
The fastest single improvement available to most lyrics.
If a song is about missing someone, the word "missing" shouldn't appear in it--nor "lonely," "nostalgic," or any of their relatives. Those are labels. A song's job is to show the thing the label points at: the coffee cup still in the sink, the porch light nobody turns on anymore, the phone almost dialed.
A line that names a feeling can almost always be replaced by what that feeling looks like in the room. The listener then feels it firsthand instead of being told what to feel, and that difference separates songs from greeting cards.
Things people actually say. A detail noticed at the gas station. A phrase from an overheard argument. Written down anywhere--a notebook, a phone, the back of a receipt.
Songs are built out of specifics, and specifics rarely arrive on command at the writing table. They arrive on an ordinary Tuesday. Writers who seem to pull perfect details out of the air are usually pulling them out of a pile they've been feeding for years.
Somewhere along the line, repetition picked up a reputation as lazy writing. In a song it's the opposite. The chorus states the one idea the song is about, the same way, every time, on purpose--that's its entire job, and it's the part people sing in the car.
So the chorus doesn't need rewriting on every pass, and it doesn't need apologizing for when it comes back. The verses are where the effort belongs, because the verses are the parts that have to move.
Verse one set the scene, the chorus made its point--and verse two is standing in the song with no assignment.
The fix is to give it one: show what happened next, widen the lens, let someone else in the story speak. The words were never the problem; the empty slot was. I wrote a full post on getting unstuck in verse two, because that particular wall is where most half-finished songs live.
Some of the best songs ever written use three chords, and much of the rest of the catalog uses four. More chords rarely make a song more interesting--usually the reverse. The fewer the chords, the more room the melody and the words have to do their work.
For starting points, these are the fifteen progressions I keep coming back to, with audio for each one.
A melody that looks fine on paper can sit in exactly the wrong part of a voice. Every line deserves to be sung full voice before the song is called finished--straining for the high note in the chorus means the song is in the wrong key, and that's a five-minute fix early.
A perfect rhyme closes a line like a door, and sometimes that's the right sound. But "home" against "alone" leaves a line slightly open, closer to speech--where "home" against "roam" announces itself as verse. A song that rhymes too perfectly all the way through begins to sound written-to-rhyme rather than written to say something.
A verse and a chorus is a finished song--not a fragment. The second verse and the bridge can come next week, or never.
Plenty of writers carry twenty songs at eighty percent and nothing they'd play for a friend. Finish the short version, play it for somebody, and let it earn its extra verses. For anyone coming back to music after years away, that goes double.
A blank page can't be fixed. A bad verse can be--easily, because the bad version shows exactly what it should have been. Writers who finish songs aren't skipping the bad version; they're writing it quickly and not taking it personally.
So the bar for a first pass belongs low. Get the whole shape of the song down--wrong words included--and then start correcting. The correcting is a fun part anyway.
I built SongFriend for myself, at first, because I wanted the bad version faster. It takes what the song is about, a genre, and a feel, and returns a draft--words in a real song shape, chords sitting above them.
The draft is the starting point, not the result. Every chord can be swapped or slid onto a different word, and the lines themselves take direct typing--keep what's good, rewrite what isn't. And then you'll end up with a song that is truly yours.
It also works the other way around. Bring lyrics you've already written, and it helps with just the stuck parts--a line ending, the next line, a rhyme, a chorus--then puts chords to your words, or you pick them yourself.
The first whole song is free, no card. After that it's $11 a month, which is what keeps this small operation online. Anyone who wants a real try and can't spare that can write to me through the contact page, and I'll set them up.
Quick honest note: SongFriend uses AI under the hood. I'm a piano and guitar player, not a tech company--I built this because I needed it, and figured other people might too. It writes a starting point, never the finished thing. The song at the end is yours, because you made all the calls. Have fun!