Lyric Adventures

As a lyric writer, I spend a lot of time trying to rhyme--and no, what I just said happened completely by accident. I promise.

I've never liked rhymed couplets or that sort of thing, but a few Steven Sondheim plays were pretty much all it took to get me hooked on lyric writing. His rhymes always seem to be organic to the stories he is telling, and while they are pretty much perfect rhymes, they always manage to smack you upside the head with their cleverness.

That's what I always hope to do with my lyrics, and now and again, I get lucky. When I started writing my first musical, I carried a rhyming dictionary around with me so I could write on the subway. 

Now I'm looking at rhymezone, but truthfully, I've never found a rhymer that works as well as I want it to. So if you know of one, will you write and tell me what you found?

Sometimes I hook onto a word that I absolutely love, and have to drop it because I can't find the right word to pair with it. When that happens, I have been known to make up a word or three:

I met him at a festival, all magical and mystical,With fortunetellers, fire and contortionists all twistical
He was staring, I was staring and all the others staring too
And then my chair was in the air and there was nothing I could do

Then there's the internal rhyme which always makes me happy when it happens: 

If I could say I’d have my way, a perfect mate, for night or dayI wouldn’t want a guy who would lounge and scrounge around all dayI want someone to make me hum and take me on the perfect dateAnd nothing else would be as close as getting me to levitate

My husband says he likes it when I make up words, but I'm not sure I should be? On the other hand, if it's impossible to rhyme something, what else CAN you do--especially on the choruses?  

For a real-time ritual, interstitial, unconditionally, fractiously divine

Intensely visual, serendipital, unself-critical, baroque bonanza shine
Horizontal, vertical, even birth-ical, you can be lying on the ground
And levitation, that nautical sensation, will turn your world around

Such is my world sometimes. At the moment, I am trying to find something OTHER than etiquette to rhyme with Connecticut.

Any ideas?


Happy notes photo: Carl Glover