There are only 26 letters; there are only 12 notes; and there are only 9 kinds of lyrics.
They fit into the following categories:
1. We broke up.
4. We’re not going to break up.
5. I wish I could break up with you.
7. I wish I had someone to break up with.
Only nine archetypes for song lyrics! How amazing then that from such limited raw materials we keep coming up with new ways to say the same old things.
Ok, in all seriousness, I know there are many more kinds of songs than those mentioned above: social commentaries, protest songs, hymns, patriotic anthems, pseudo sci-fi spoofs about pooping into wormholes, and much more.
But just for argument’s sake, how would you categorize the different archetypes of song lyrics? Let me know in the comments section below.
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[Guitar picture from Shutterstock.]
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.