Mark Steyn, in his numerous writings on popular music, regularly comments (or at least the songwriters he interviews do) on how much more difficult it is to write a good lyric than a good piece of music. To be sure, he's more often focused on the genres of Broadway musicals and the Tin Pan Alley classics, where the audience expected verbal sophistication and flair from the likes of Oscar Hammerstein and Sammy Cahn.
Rock is a bit more tolerant of inane lyrics -- not just the nonsense, of, say, "Louie, Louie" or "Tutti-Frutti," but stuff that was meant to be taken more seriously: like America's "Horse With No Name" or Steve Miller's "Take The Money and Run."
Sample:
Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas/You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice/He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes)
With me, it was all-too-often plain laziness. I thought it more important to get the basic melody down, while waiting (usually in vain) for the lyrics fairy to show up. Thus all the doubled-up and repeated verses, etc. The damn words I could fix tomorrow.
But to quote the Beatles (in a somewhat different context), "Tomorrow Never Knows."
This is my 2nd demo for the (rather pretty) "Who Do You Know?" (I don't think that we ever did a version together).
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