Musical friends, I'm a competent writer of all forms of prose, dialouge, screenplays, and so on. But I have a secret desire ... I've always wanted to be able to write songs, that is to say song lyrics - catchy pop songs! :)
Now for example, people sometimes ask, are there any good books or advice on writing screenplays. In fact yes, there are a couple of well-known books along the lines "how to write a screenplay!", or how to write a novel, and indeed some of these are quite good and offer excellent insights. Sure, you can't read one of those and suddenly make millions in Bollywood, but they exist, they have useful ideas.
I'm basically wondering if there are any famous or otherwise books, essays, writers on the topic of "how the hell to write song lyrics"? What do you think?
I appreciate that most people on this site are genuinely musical - for you songwriting means writing a whole song, the lyrics and the music, and you can sing. I can play a couple instruments somewhat competently (which as you know is nothing, I'm not musical - I work with real musicians all the time and its a whole other thing!), and I can't sing a note. So I'm asking more about essentially writing lyrics as such.
(It's quite depressing for someone like me that, let's say, Bernie Taupin, who is "not a singer", but is a famous amazing lyricist .. is indeed quite a competent singer! Maybe, it's basically impossible to "make up lyrics" unless you basically sing; I don't know - maybe there are simply no examples of lyricists, who, were really non-singers?)
I've really thought about pop song lyrics deeply for a long, long time. I've got to the point of realising it's all about time (not rhyme or other issues) and simplicity as an art, extreme simplicity. But, uh, that's all I worked out :) so musical friends, fill me in, are there any magic books on this topic that have come to us through the years? Cheers
NB, I later found on the site this fantastic reference to https://music.stackexchange.com/a/22213/20814 some comments by Sondheim. Good one.