On 16 May 1983 Iron Maiden released Piece of Mind, and its second track opens with a hymn. The singer who set the first verse of "O God of Earth and Altar", which G.K. Chesterton had published in 1906, at the head of "Revelations" was Bruce Dickinson. He wrote the rest himself. Nobody hearing the song can find the join.
A boatswain who has to join two ropes that must still run through a pulley never knots them. He unlays each end for an arm's length, lays the strands of one into the grooves the other has left empty and tucks them home until the joined rope is no thicker than either half, because a knot or a hurried short splice fattens the line until it jams in the sheave under load and rips the block clean off its hook. That long splice is the whole craft of how to write metal lyrics. The words have to run through the riff without catching.
Subjects are the easy part. What heavy metal sings about has barely moved since 1970, and the themes chapter maps every shelf of it, from the Crimean War to the Book of Revelation. The fit is the hard part, and it is learned from the practitioners who got it right rather than from any textbook of verse.
How to write metal lyrics: the riff comes first
Black Sabbath wrote in a fixed order, and the order is the lesson. Tony Iommi brought a riff, Ozzy Osbourne sang a melody over it with whatever sounds came into his mouth, and only after that did the words arrive. The bassist who carried those wordless melodies home and fitted a story to each of them was Geezer Butler, and because every line was cut to a tune that already existed, nothing in the early records fights the music it sits on.
On "Iron Man" even the title came before the story. Ozzy remarked that the riff sounded like a great iron man walking about, and Butler built a whole time traveller around the remark, a man turned to metal who returns to take revenge on the people who ignored him. The riff dictated the character. The character never argued back.
The working method follows directly. Sing over the riff before writing a word, on nonsense sounds, until the melody stops changing; then look for words whose weight lands where the sounds landed. A line composed on paper first and forced onto a riff afterwards goes on like a boot laced onto the wrong foot, and every singer who has tried to shout one at full volume knows it by the second chorus.
Stand in one pair of boots
The Californian singer who read Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo's novel of 1939 about a soldier left by a shell without arms, legs, sight or voice, and turned it into "One" was James Hetfield. On ...And Justice for All, released by Elektra on 25 August 1988, the song stays inside that soldier's head from its first line to its last, with no narrator standing by the bed to explain him. That refusal is what makes it unbearable.
The lesson is the narrowest rule in lyric writing and the one broken most often. Choose one voice, one tense and one pair of boots, and never step out of them to comment on what the listener is supposed to feel, because the moment the singer turns to the audience and explains, he kicks the walls out of the room he built, and the song stops being a place and becomes a lecture. Heavy songs in the first person carry further than any sermon in the third.
Names do the rest of the work. A date, a regiment, a valley, a hospital bed: one proper noun fixes a verse to the ground, while an abstraction such as freedom or pain dissolves in the first wall of distortion and is never heard again. Trumbo gave his soldier a name, a hometown and a mother. The song kept the bed and let the rest go, and the bed was enough.
Take from the library, and take it whole
The same band had already been to the shelf once. Ride the Lightning, in 1984, carried "For Whom the Bell Tolls", named after Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel of 1940, and "The Call of Ktulu", an instrumental named for H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu". A borrowed story arrives with its plot, its stakes and its ending already built, and the writer's job shrinks to choosing the one moment worth singing.
The bassist who ran Iron Maiden and opened Piece of Mind with "Where Eagles Dare", after Alistair MacLean's war novel of 1967 and the film of it that followed a year later, was Steve Harris, and the record goes on to "Revelations", where Dickinson's borrowed hymn sits beside verses of his own. Taken whole and credited, the old text stops being a quotation and becomes part of the frame. Taken in fragments, it reads like a scrawl on somebody else's wall.
Taken whole and credited, the old text stops being a quotation and becomes part of the frame.
Writing in a second language
A great deal of the style was written by people using a language they had learned at school, and the discipline shows. A writer who cannot trust the ornate phrase reaches for the plain noun and the hard verb instead, and plain nouns shouted over a riff are exactly what the form needs, which turned a handicap into the house creed of more than one band from the Continent.
The manager who wrote Accept's English lyrics under the pen name Deaffy turned out to be Gaby Hauke, and on Metal Heart, released in 1985, her title song imagines a human heart replaced by a machine. Every image in it is a concrete object. None of it needs a dictionary.
The Hanover singer who wrote Scorpions' words in English from the band's first album onwards, long before the band had an English-speaking audience to write for, was Klaus Meine, on the band's debut record in 1972. By common consent his plainest lines are the ones that travelled furthest. A stadium in Tokyo or São Paulo sings them back without a dictionary as well.
Cut until it runs
A violin maker graduating a spruce top works with a thumb plane no longer than a finger, shaving the plate a hair at a time, holding it up to the lamp and tapping it with a knuckle between passes, and stops only when the wood answers with one clear ringing note instead of a dull knock, by which time most of what he started with lies curled in pale ribbons around his feet. Editing a lyric is the same patient subtraction. The line is finished when it rings.
Metallica's best-known song went through exactly that. Hetfield's first draft of "Enter Sandman" dealt with the sudden death of an infant in a family, and the band and the producer Bob Rock asked him for something less literal, so the song became a child's nightmare instead. The rewrite cost him a subject. It gave the band its most famous record.
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846
Poe's rule holds for a four-minute song as firmly as for a poem. Before a line goes down, the writer should know where the narrator ends up, whether the trooper dies in the valley or the traveller reaches home, and every verse is then a step towards that end instead of a wander around it. Songs that do not know their ending fill the gap with a chorus about fire.
Reduced to a working list, the craft looks like this:
- Hum a melody over the riff before any words exist.
- Choose one narrator and stay in his head.
- Name things: a place, a date, a weapon, a person.
- Take a story whole from a book, and credit the book.
- Cut any line the singer cannot shout at full volume.
None of that is heresy to anyone who has written a song. The shelf the style reads from most often is fantasy, and the writer most often raided is the Oxford professor whose Middle-earth runs through half a century of records, from Led Zeppelin to Blind Guardian, a story of its own in Tolkien and heavy metal. He was borrowed whole, and it shows.
