How to Write a Love Song Without Clichés
The love song is the most over-written genre in music. The only way yours earns its place is if it sounds like a specific person loving a specific person.
Love the specific, not the general
"I love you" is a sentence the listener has heard a million times. "You still sleep with one leg out of the covers" is a sentence only this narrator can say about this person. The more particular the detail, the more the listener believes the love.
Name the annoyances
Love songs that only list virtues feel fake because love in practice isn't made of virtues; it's made of endured quirks. A line about the thing your partner does that drives you crazy (and how you love them anyway) is worth ten lines about their beauty.
Avoid these exhausted images
- Stars in their eyes
- Heart on fire
- Lost in their smile
- "You complete me"
- Any body of water standing in for depth of feeling
These images worked once. They do not work now. Write past them.
Verbs over adjectives
Adjectives tell the listener what to feel. Verbs show them what happened. "She was beautiful" is an adjective line. "She tucked her hair behind her ear before every hard sentence" is a verb line. Love songs that stack verbs stack evidence; love songs that stack adjectives stack claims.
Let the song have stakes
Pure happiness is boring on the page. The love songs that last have something at risk — distance, time, the narrator's own history of failing, the threat that the thing could end. A love song with no shadow reads as greeting-card. A love song that acknowledges the shadow reads as true.