The lyric is the part of the song that gets you arrested. The melody can be subversive but the melody is abstract. The lyric is concrete. The lyric says the thing out loud. I like marijuana. Those are lyrics. Three words that got me an FBI file and a record deal on the same day. The lyric is the evidence. Everything else in the song is the getaway car.

Bob Dylan proved that the lyric could be literature. Before Dylan a lyric was moon and June and spoon. After Dylan a lyric was the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face. Dylan did not raise the bar. Dylan moved the bar to a different building. He proved that a song could hold the same weight as a poem and still make you tap your foot. The lyric went from a postcard to a novel in one album.

Woody Guthrie wrote lyrics on boxcars and napkins and the backs of union leaflets. This land is your land. Six words. A lyric so simple it sounds like a folk song that always existed. But it did not always exist. Woody wrote it in a flophouse and the lyric outlived the flophouse and the folk scene and Woody himself. A great lyric does not need the song. The song needs the lyric. This land is your land works without music. It works as a sentence on a wall.

On the corner I learned that the lyric is the contract. The melody gets their attention. The rhythm gets their feet moving. But the lyric gets their head nodding. Because the lyric says the thing they were already thinking. The street corner songwriter is a reporter. You listen to what the street is saying and you write it down and you sing it back to them and they hear their own thoughts in your voice and that is the connection. The lyric is the mirror.

Write something. Today. It does not need to rhyme. It does not need to scan. It needs to be true. One true sentence is a lyric. Hemingway said that and he never wrote a song but he understood. The lyric is the one true sentence set to music. The music makes it memorable. The truth makes it matter. I wrote I like marijuana and that was a true sentence and it mattered because nobody else would say it out loud. The lyric is saying out loud what everybody knows in silence.