“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” might be an apt title for these tricks of the trade. Prosody is good. Alliteration can be a nice piece of ear candy or an ugly distraction. Clichés are usually bad unless used before they become clichés. Maybe one of your lines will be a cliché someday. But let's hope it's not a cliché just yet.

Prosody

Simply put, prosody means that something sounds like what it is. If you have a slow, sad-sounding piece of music and write a lyric over it that describes how much fun you have skateboarding, it might confuse the listener. Likewise, a bouncy, uptempo number about losing your mom in a car crash doesn't seem appropriate. When writing lyrics to a melody, listen carefully to see that the melody evokes the right kind of mood.

Alliteration

When different words within a line or stanza of a song begin with the same sound, it's called “alliteration.” Think of it as rhyme in reverse. With alliteration, the words can be adjoining, like “Manic Monday,” or separate, as with “Wind in the Willows.” Although it can be used effectively in almost any kind of song, alliteration is especially good for songs with a light or silly tone. Who can forget the all-time classic, “Great Green Globs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts”?

Overused Words and Phrases

There's at least one big publisher in Nashville who doesn't want to hear the words “love” or “heart” in another song as long as he lives. Why? He listens to hundreds of songs every week, and guess which words he hears the most?

Emotions are the real underpinnings of any good song. You want to get the listener to feel what you feel, but using emotional words like love and heart is not the best way to get that feeling across. While there's no argument that love songs, anti-love songs, lost-love songs, or love-gone-bad songs are big moneymakers, people get tired of hearing the same words in every song. Look for alternatives. Describe your love instead of just stating its existence and location. When you do use words like love and heart, make sure that they mean something.

There are thousands of cliché phrases to be avoided, but a top-ten list might look something like this:

• We'll never part.

• It's really true.

• I can't live without you.

• That's the way it goes.

• We can make it if we try.

• How can I make you see.

• Got to make him (or her) mine.

• Soft as a dove.

• Please don't go.

• Then you'll understand.

Unnecessary Words

Anyone who's written more than a few songs knows that some words are perfect for those times when you need to fill a hole in a line. “Just,” “really,” “very,” “well,” “baby,” and many others can come in handy, but it's easy to become dependent on filler words and to overuse them. A common practice of professional songwriters is to look over a completed song and see if it needs a “just-ectomy,” which is to say “Are there any unnecessary words that can be replaced by better ones?” The following two lines show the results of a quadruple bypass just-ectomy:

Before: “I said well now baby that's just really very sad.”

After: “I said well now sweet pea that'd make a statue cry.”

Sometimes there's only one word that works in a given spot. As long as it works naturally, without sounding forced, and doesn't bring the song down or appear too often in the same lyric, it might be just the thing you need in a particular spot.