The last few months I've been writing lyrics for other bands and it's certainly been (and still is) a learning curve. I thought I'd share some of the pros and cons I've discovered, whilst also asking what your own experiences of collaborating are (doesn't have to be from a lyracist-musician perspective but collaboration in general).
The first band (I'm not naming either but both derived from forum membership, even if they didn't stick around here). We'll call them Band A and Band B.
I feel I was very niave when it came to band A (in certain respects at least) and also very inexperienced - something I also think applies to the band also. I wrote lyrics for 5 songs and it was basically a case of "here's the music, write something".
What I've discovered is, writing to a tune in your own head is totally different to writing to someone else's tune. Not least because, even though you have a tune to work with, you almost certainly don't hear it the same as those who wrote it.
It didn't help that, despite me loving the tunes, they weren't exactly verse-chorus-verse-chorus in their melodies. Though they did have repetative parts, they weren't structured in any way. From a lyrical standpoint, this made them awfully difficult to work out where lyrics should go. I had to do something I don't really do (at least not to the extent I had to here) and that was write the songs piecemeal - a part here, a part there, maybe stuffing something in between to fill in an unwanted gap. It was a virtual nightmare to do.
Somehow I pulled it off and ended up with 5 lots of lyrics I was quite proud of.
I'd sent the lyrics over whilst I was working on the others and got, shall we say, a lukewarm reception for them. They didn't fit how "they" saw the song. I'd timestamped the lyrics but this didn't help them in the slightest. They messed around with my lyrics (rearranged the hell out of them iirc) so I re-wrote them again (my originals) but only slightly. I also sent them recordings of me singing (okay, wailing Banshee-like) them so they could understand how the lyrics fit their songs.
Apart from a nod that they'd received them I haven't heard anything of them since. To be honest, I've been too busy to chase anything up. I feel it's a little disrespectful of them to be honest, and more than a little unprofessional.
Band B has been a totally different experience. For one thing, they're more professional (at the beginning we talked about how the collaboration would work and about things like royalties) and, best of all, I've had feedback. Mostly in the form of the vocalist recording my lyrics so I could see what was working and what wasn't. It helped a great deal that they would send two copies of their tracks - one instrumental and one ad-libbed/temporary lyrics - so I had a baseline to work with. It's meant I can get pretty close with the lyrics to start with and tinker with them where needed).
It's a slower process than I'd imagined but much better from my perspective.
So far, it's three songs in (well, I sent them the first draft of the third song last night) and, fingers crossed, it's going well so far. It's really exciting but I have to admit that I'm also extremely nervous - I really want to give them my best writing and I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up the standard I've set for myself so far. Every time I see there's a response to my last chat/mail I pretty much keck myself!
So; two bands, two very different experiences. well, you can't make an omellete without breaking a few eggs along the way I suppose.