Desmond Child, hit songwriter and music producer, put it this way: “The lyric is the script, and you can’t shoot a movie without a script. The score is actually the last part that comes into a movie, in the same way that the music on a record should help bring out the meaning of the lyrics.”
I love Desmond Child’s comparison of a lyric to a movie script. While music truly does have the power to move us emotionally, it’s the lyric that draws us into the song, paints a picture in the mind, makes us identify with the singer or with the people in a situation.
Not the same old story
Like a good movie script, a song has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a lyric, like a movie script, tells more than just the facts of a story—I met you on Monday, we fell in love on Tuesday; broke up on Wednesday, etc. This doesn’t really work well for today’s listeners – and it’s not enough for movie-goers either.