Why the Lyrics Are Important

There’s an indescribable feeling that comes from being desperately in love with a song.

You’re sitting in your room with the lights off, browsing through YouTube’s suggested music videos. You pause on one. As the opening chords drift through your speakers, you think to yourself “hmm, that’s a pretty nice song”. So, you replay it. The lyrics turn over and over in your head when you realize “this is EXACTLY how I’ve been feeling. This is everything that I needed to hear”. And, with approximately three minutes, you don’t feel so alone anymore.

Music is more than something that’s just pleasing to the ears. It’s an art form. It’s a platform for creativity and for the birth of creative expression. It’s a community, somewhere to go when you need to feel safe. It describes your joy and your pain. Music is every heartbreaking moment, every back road in your hometown, and every windows-down kind of roadtrip. It’s how we say that we’re alive, it makes us human. Music brings us all together, but it’s lyrics that free our souls.

Lyrics can change you. Lyrics can make your innermost feelings and emotions know to everyone. The songs that you sing along to in the car are the words you sometimes can’t say. The words that you paint in colorful noises and rainbow chords that float over quiet cities as you drive over the river at midnight. Lyrics can bring both praise and hurt. You can sing to fall in love, or sing to free yourself. Lyrics are humanity’s constant version of “poetry in motion”.

One lyric can be a million shouting voices when you feel like you’re never being heard.

If you’re not someone who generally listens to the lyrics to the songs you hear, I encourage you to do what I did. Fall in love with a song. Let the words speak to you and, when you feel like you’re not being heard, let them speak for you. Embrace self-expression in its most common form, go out, and see the world in words.

My Top 5 Lyrics:

5. “You’re the reason I’m still up at dawn” –Fire Escape, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness

4. “I saw myself in summer nights, and stars lit up like candle lights” –Once Upon Another Time, Sara Bareilles

3. “Do you remember every block, every minute of every walk we used to take?” –Honey Come Home, The Head and The Heart

2. “Barefoot on the grass, listening to our favorite song” –Perfect, Ed Sheeran

1. “I will learn to love the skies I'm under” –Hopeless Wanderer, Mumford & Sons