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Old 02-02-2008, 04:19 PM   #26
Lee in Limbo
It's Hard To Be Humble
 
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
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Quote:
Originally Posted by undeaf View Post
Of course, this situation appears rather unusual since writing lyrics and then writing a song around them just seems a little weird to me.
I've been known to do it both ways. Being a songwriter, I've got a fair bit of experience at using several different methods to reach the finish line. I started primarily as a lyricist, but eventually learned to track down my melodies and start building songs around them. At the same time, I also learned to compose songs in my head, and as well to improvise with other musicians, swapping parts or just creating something whole cloth on the studio floor. Sometimes I have lyrics laying around waiting for pieces of music to form like that, but quite often I write something with a melody already in mind, or compose lyrics to suit whatever comes out of the jam process. I actually had melodies in my head when I wrote the lyrics for Trum; however, I'm more interested in hearing what he does with them, if and when he does.

And I know the idea of copyrighting lyrics in the digital age can be confusing, given the state of digital rights management in the age of P2P and lyric sites. However, lyrical content actually is copyrightable material. If you look at lyric sheets in cassettes and CDs, you'll often see copyright information at the end of each song. It's only on (technically illegal) lyric sites that you never see such information, often forgetting even to credit the songwriter(s), choosing instead to just reference by band and song title. Over all, it's been allowed because it's seen as harmless promotion, but artists have been known to take such thing seriously, and in the past have dedicated sections of their sites to properly annotated lyrics. Although one site I was familiar with actually had the artist take down their lyric section for some reason. As well, OLGA bit the dust because of copyright issues, and although it might be thought to have been the MPAA that was responsibile, it was actually the publishers of the sheet music that were responsible for that move. The legal wranglings that go on behind the scenes over this stuff are sometimes comical when they're not depressing.

However, in principle, lyrics are copyrightable as a printed entity. Authorship doesn't become negated just because the intent is for music. Musicians have to credit their lyricists, even if they wrote the music themselves. Wordsmithing of any kind is the heart and soul of the original intent of copyright law. The rest is just lawyers and salesmen taking liberties.
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