"I don't write lyrics. I write music, and then I listen to it and try to figure out what it's saying"

Words arrive last; sound comes first. The method places feeling ahead of explanation, trusting that melody, harmony, and rhythm already carry a message long before language intervenes. Instead of treating lyrics as the engine of meaning, it treats them as a translation, an attempt to render into words what the chords, timbres, and spaces have already said in a tongue beyond speech.

Such an approach demands listening as a compositional skill. The composer becomes a patient observer of his own creation, receptive rather than directive. Music is allowed to reveal its emotional contour, tension, release, ache, uplift, and the lyricist waits for the right words to fit that contour, not only in sense but in sound: vowel color that matches a bend, consonants that can ride a rhythmic pocket, syllables that respect the arc of a phrase. Prosody becomes ethics. The song’s internal logic governs what can be said and how.

It also explains the landscape quality of certain songs: long instrumental passages, wide dynamics, motifs that feel like weather rather than plot. When the words finally enter, they don’t summarize the music; they crystallize it. That often yields images rather than arguments, metaphors rather than manifestos. Meaning stays open, because the originating language, the music, remains larger than the text that shadows it.

There is humility here. Instead of imposing a concept and forcing the track to comply, the writer takes up a role closer to translator or midwife, letting the piece be what it insists on becoming. The creative act shifts from control to conversation, from plan to discovery. It’s a reminder that songs are not essays with accompaniment; they are bodies of feeling in which words are one organ among many. When the music speaks first, the lyricist’s task is not to explain, but to listen well enough to say only what the song has already sung.