In our producer/songwriter world, we hear people throw around the word “singability” all the time. We talk about it ourselves and with clients pretty regularly. But what the heck does that mean to someone who is not in the high-level music business? “Sing ability… are you kidding? We just want you to sing our name and our poorly thought out slogan just as it is!”, is often the response. Clients send us lyrics all the time that have far too many syllables for a great hook, and it’s a pretty bad situation when they do. When we explain to them that their lyrics aren’t “singable”, sometimes they get it, and sometimes it’s like talking to a brick wall. Think about it this way - remember one of the most popular songs ever… “September” by Earth Wind and Fire. Think about how the lyrics ended up as:
“Do you remember, the 21st night of September. . .
Love was changin’ the minds of pretenders. . . ”
Obviously not brain surgery here. But imagine if they had a producer who insisted that the first line as:
“Do you remember,
we were walking the dog on the 21st night of September...”
If you sing it out loud it’s a musical train wreck. It would never work and it would never have been the global smash hit that it was. That said, clients do request those kinds of syllabically disjointed jingle lyrics. And when we go about rewriting them so we can have a killer hook for the jingle, corporate song, or any other kind of musical vehicle, they’ll often approve it at first and then later say no, they want to have the “walking the dog” part back in because the owner likes the “walking the dog” part. But it’s not singable, we tell them. . . and from there we’ll go through the myriad of hoops, hopefully convincing them that we were right. So yes. The lyrics must be singable. Please dear God, let them be singable.