Lesson 3 · Arlo

Silence in the Lyric

What you leave out of a lyric is as important as what you put in. Maybe more important. The silence — the gap, the breath, the unsaid thing — is where the listener enters. A lyric with no silence is a wall. A lyric with silence is a door.

The rest of this lesson

Arlo takes this apart properly inside Songmatter — the rest of the lesson, the exercise that goes with it, and a critic who reads what you write back.