The most egregiously clumsy lyric, by my book, is in Trains, by Porcupine Tree.
Always the summers are slipping away
Find me a way for making them stay
First line - fine. Lush, in fact. Second line - fits neither the syllable pattern ("way" becomes "wayay") nor any known form of English grammar ("a way for making?"). In no way, shape or form does that line fit anything.
That said, it's very easy to find faults and much harder to find a remedy. There's a general trend in internet critics, in that they're perfectly fair and perceptive in their criticisms, but the second they suggest something that'd be better they tend to start talking nonsense - and there's no reason to believe I'd be an exception. You could replace "way" with "method," "method for" makes a lot more sense than "way for" and it fits the syllable pattern better, but emotionally it's a much more sterile word, so it tramples over the original in that sense.
So, I fear you'd have to replace the line entirely. Which I wouldn't be against - it's a catastrophically clumsy line in a song full of perfect ones - but I think that'd be a job for Steven Wilson. Any line I write would stick out like a sore thumb - "Falling through summers the sun never stays" is what I'd write, but it's incredibly un-Wilsonly. You could maybe combine it with the original line, and produce something like this --
Always the summers are slipping away
Find me the reason the sun never stays
-- but eh. Little corny. And it's very passive, while the original line was active. Not an easy fix! If anyone tells you writing lyrics is easy, they're not doing it right.
Topic: Fix a Lyric (Read 742 times)
