How John Lennon Writes A Song Versus How Elton John Does It

Music is there to comfort us whether it’s top-charting sugarcoated pop ballads or experimental industrial screaming trapcore. It doesn’t matter how simple and bright or odd and complex the sounds are as long as they take our attention and soundtrack our lives.

While there are a number of genres growing exponentially, they all adhere at least somewhat to the same ruleset of music theory.

On paper, all of the music outside of the added distortion, delays, reverb, and wub wubs are just notes locked inside of barlines.

Writing a full song involves combining rhythm, melody, chord progressions, and harmony to create a colorful audible journey. Depending on whatever is emphasized the most you may feel obligated to tap your feet or cry about your ex. Or both.

Another important dimension of the music is lyrics. It goes without saying that there can be music without lyrics. However, lyrics act to grab us and immerse us further into the music. It allows us to sing along in the car, in the shower, and embarrassingly enough at karaoke night.

It fills Instagram captions whenever a person lacks originality.

Lyrics cater to the part of our mind that loves to process stories and act astonished at the poetic stringing of words and ideas.

A standard popular song utilizes music with lyrics in such a way that resonates with millions of people. But how does one write the next hit song? What comes first: the music or the lyrics?

To answer that question we are going to dive into the creative processes of two legendary music artists: John Lennon and Elton John.

The John Lennon Method: Music First

Considered to be the more emotional Beatle, Lennon creates chord progressions and then feels out what the melody should be that gets tarped over the chords.

The process of improvising melodies over the chords uses vocal phrasing. After the melody is figured out, Lennon tinkers with where the breaks should be in the melody in order to place phrases. Soon enough words will be formed after establishing consonant and vowel sounds and voila. You’ve got yourself some lyrics as a side order to your song.

There are a fair amount of accessible demo tapes in which you hear Lennon exercising vocal phrasing over the skeleton of soon to be smash hit songs.

A problem with this method is that it may cause you to create lyrics that are nonsensical. You could either continue to work on the lyrics or be at peace with how it is and just call it “cryptic.”

It’s fun to see what types of sentences could be created accidentally as a byproduct of this process.

What John Lennon did very well was create a balance between cryptic songs about girls with kaleidoscope eyes and genuine love songs with deep meanings in the lyrics.

He was a fan of poetry and enjoyed writing in his spare time. There was a short collection of poems and drawings that he released in the 60s called A Spaniard in the Works. Lyrics most likely would come naturally if you have experience writing in your spare time.

Create a feeling through your music and then assign lyrics to that feeling.

The Elton John Method: Lyrics First

Elton John splits his process between himself and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin. Elton has explained in interviews that when he arrives into the studio to record new music, Bernie has written 20–30 pages of lyrics that are there “waiting for him.”

He takes a gander at the lyrics and lays his fingers on the piano keys to create an accompaniment to the written lyrics. And that’s how it has been for basically his entire career. Bernie provides the lyrics and then Elton turns it into magic.

The good thing about this method is that if you value lyrics and storytelling, this is an effective way to make sure that what you are singing is airtight and purposeful.

However, it requires a totally different mindset from the previous method. Instead of assigning lyrics to feelings from the music you now have to assign music to feelings from the lyrics.

Doing this properly requires experience in understanding the moods attributed to different modes of music. Or it might require having a gifted mind.

Synesthesia is a cognitive case in which experiencing information meant to stimulate one sense of perception stimulates multiple senses. There is a list of artists, including Brian Wilson and Kanye West, that claim to be able to see music in the form of colors. It is a type of mind meant to create music.

Nobody should be discouraged from choosing this method over the other. In the end, creativity is something that is hard to define. Artists are constantly pestered about how they do it and most of the time they have no idea.

Creativity is a form of body possession. You have been taken over by this bizarre force and you translate this information from an undefined location by writing, drawing, singing, playing an instrument, etc.

I hope that any novice songwriter is able to find the method that works for them and to properly exorcise the demons that cursed them with such creativity.