How to Write Lyrics Like Radiohead
I am always in awe of writers who get away with far-reaching concepts or highly metaphorical and abstract lyrics. While the lyrics of more acoustic and grounded artists like Kris Kristofferson or Johnny Cash leans more into reality, artists like Radiohead venture far into the abstract. Their music allows for strange and interesting concepts like alien landings and fake plastic trees.
When I want to encourage a little more abstraction in my own lyric, I look towards styles and songs with that kind of language to be my guide. This is where lot of rock, metal, electronic, and some pop sits. The character is conveying truth, but does it with loads of metaphor and no sense of specific time or place.
I’d like to spotlight a few lyric ideas we can learn from “Fake Plastic Trees” to encourage more poetic and abstract lyrics that really work:
“Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself
It wears her out
It wears her out
It wears her out
It wears her out”
If this kind of language is where you love to live, one of the main challenges is avoiding sounding preachy, cheesy, and annoying. Listeners can spot attempts to be deep and poetic. So to counter those dangers, we can practice a few good principles to increase the believability of your lyric:
Keep your lines short and clean, and cut everything but what is essential.
Short lines become long lines when they’re sung one right after another. Use rest space to separate the lines and give the listener time to think about what you’ve said.
Connect your lines with prepositions and conjunctions.
Use ‘with, and, but, so, because, yet, still, maybe, then, just’ and other connectors to give the lyric an easy, conversational quality. This prevents us as the listener from having to put fragments back together to make sense of them.
Build Off a Single Image
Instead of suggesting several images that are unrelated, stay focused on a single object. In other words, stay in the world of fake plastic trees rather than going ‘fake plastic trees’, then ’BMWs’ and ‘carnival rides.’ There is plenty to write about with a single object, and it helps the lyric focus and take on a specific and unique identity.
Play with Metaphor
To practice making metaphor, you’ll need to be associative. That means you’ll write in the key of your image, making associations with it rather than jumping around. For 10 minutes a day, practice making lists of nouns, adjective, and verbs related to an object. I could choose ‘Abandoned car’ as my object, and make a list of words related to that object:
Rust, bumper, stalled, boot, missing hubcap, exhaust, chug, speed, tremble, worn tread, rubber, left by the side of the road, cold, ripped upholstery, flat
Now I can collide these words with a concept, just like Radiohead does with “It wears her out.” That language is all feeling, with no pictures involved. I could make my own statement devoid of pictures, such as “nobody wants to let go” or “It’s all here then gone” or “Only a Moment.” Holding these phrases up against the abandoned car, I start to see a larger ‘moral of the story’ emerge. I don’t yet know what the song is about, but it’s hinting at something. The abandoned car became a symbol of something meaningful, and if I let my mind run, I can discover what that meaning is.
When great lyrics feel inaccessible, remember that lyrics are just words - nouns, adjectives, verbs, and connectors. We talk all the time, and have the ability to convey our thoughts in meaningful ways to others. Lyrics are no different - just more concentrated, with less room to elaborate. To get to our best lyrics, the process almost always requires less rather than more. Trust your initial ideas and passionately write them down. What you have to say is enough. From there, trim and cut, leaving only what is essential.
