On Learning Lyrics

Recent conversations about learning music have identified memorising lyrics as a specific challenge. I feel this one too – the notes and rhythms stick in my head far quicker than the words do, and I have a particular talent for weird random errors in the lyrics while singing (spoonerisms, paraphrasing, malapropisms).

So it seemed like a good idea to collate some of the specific activities and tricks people use to help learning lyrics. If nothing else, having more different things to try the process more varied and thus less boring than if you just plug away at the same thing for the same amount of time. But my hunch is that varying your approach also makes the learning more effective as it means your brain has accessed the material in multiple different ways. Thus, when you have a momentary memory blank from your primary mode of learning, there are other patterns of experience available to fill in the gap.

Anyway, here is a collection of ideas culled from my friends and colleagues. Some echo my recent post on general music learning, but they bear repeating as they have specific relevance here.

Leading with the ears:

• Call-and-response Listen to the words in chunks of a line or two and repeat back. Your listening can be from the learning tracks, or from recordings of other performances. A nice variation is to record yourself singing the words, and listening back to that.
• Audiating. Run the lyrics in your head with your eyes closed. When you get stuck you can open your eyes and remind yourself, then go back and do that bit again. After you’ve done this once or twice, start to think about the sound of the voice you are imagining singing the lyrics. Imagine them in the voice of the most famous singer to have performed the piece, then imagine it in your own voice. If you are feeling silly, imagine it sung by Elmer Fudd or the Smurfs.

Leading with the eyes

• Write the lyrics out This would also fit in the next section, as the act of writing engages your kinaesthetic memory too, but seeing the lyrics in your own handwriting makes a powerful visual memory. It helps to lay the lyrics out so you can see the structure, maybe using different coloured pens for verses and chorus for example. This helps give you a visual geography of the piece, so you are less likely to skip from the first verse to the last chorus (and find yourself in the dressing room with your socks off thinking, ‘What?’, as Victoria Wood described the experience).
• Develop imagery. Go through the lyrics, associating vivid visual images with each line. These can be directly related to the narrative, or they can be more surreal if that’s how your brain works. The classic method of ancient Greek orators was to associate each stage of an argument with a specific place in an imaginary room, so you could look around and ‘see’ where you had placed each idea and find it when you needed it. Having some kind of structure like this helps you access the images in the right order.
• Make flash cards for each line Summarise each line with a single word or picture, then sing through using the flash cards as prompts, as you might when giving a speech..
• Watch lyric videos on youtube. This is a somewhat more passive activity, but it can offer a richer visual input than just reading the words on paper, as it links the visual channel dynamically with the musical narrative.

Leading with action

• Mouth the words as you listen to and/or read the lyrics This connects the motor actions of lips and tongue that you will use while singing with other dimensions of memory
• Deliver the lyrics in different vocal styles Declaim them like a political speech, whisper them like an urgent secret, sing them in the style of high opera, death metal, rhythm & blues. Act out the persona of each different version to discover the distinctive gestural world of each.
• Interpretive dance. You could take this in either the artistic sense of representing the meaning of the lyrics in movement, or the sillier sense that tries to translate each word as it goes past. The former will help with processing bigger-picture structure, the latter with the detail of each line.
• Sing the words to a different tune Yes, this one does my head in too, but that’s a sign that it’s really making your brain work.
• Sing through the lyrics, missing out every syllable beginning with a particular letter. You’ll probably want to do this quite slowly, but it’s great for really making you process the detail of the words.

With all memory work, a useful thing to note is that the most effective time to revise something is when you’re just starting to forget it. So, frequent short bursts in the early stages are more helpful than a single long blitz without follow-up. (A long blitz followed by frequent short bursts is also good though – the important thing is to interrupt the process of forgetting regularly.)

The other thing is to start coming off-copy well before you feel ready to. The process of digging round in your head to find out what’s there and what isn’t is excellent for strengthening your memory of the bits already learned, and discovering which bits are not yet secure so you can prioritise them is much more efficient than practising everything with the copy.