I am collaborating with a vocalist with no writing experience and really, no musical background at all. He wants to make an album and the only process that he says works for him is for the musicians to come up with some riffs and chord progressions, and then for me (classical composer) to write melodies, and then he'll figure out lyrics to fit what we give him. Granted, my experience is classical composition and jazz arranging and not pop/rock/country song-writing, but my understanding is that the most common processes are to write lyrics, develop a melody that fits them, and then develop the chord structure or develop the melody and chords simultaneously. Either way, the lyrics don't come last. I'm at a bit of loss because I'm not sure how to go about developing a melody without some lyrics to guide me. Any suggestions?
In addition, this vocalist is absolutely enamored with AI in his day job, and I'm pretty sure that his lyric writing process will simply be feeding cues to ChatGPT. I'm not sure how I feel about being a co-writer on songs with lyrics by AI. Anybody have any experience and suggestions? Thanks.
