Why Great Lyrics Live Close to Cliché (Without Crossing It)
By Sam Marlow, City Vocal Coach
One of the first things I notice when I work with a new songwriting student is how hard they’re trying to avoid saying the obvious thing. They’ll twist a line into something unusual, reach for an unexpected word, do anything to avoid writing something that feels familiar. I understand the instinct. But it’s usually wrong.
The best lyrics don’t avoid cliché. They walk right up to it and stop just short. That line, the one between something that feels universal and something that feels lazy, is where most of the interesting writing happens. Learning to find it, and stay on the right side of it, is one of the most useful things a songwriter can develop.
Why clichés exist in the first place
A cliché becomes a cliché because it describes something true. “I can’t live without you.” “You broke my heart.” “I need you by my side.” These lines feel worn out not because the feelings behind them are wrong, but because they’ve been used so often that the feeling has been drained out of them. The emotion is real. The expression has gone stale.
The job of a lyric isn’t to avoid that emotional territory. It’s to find a way back into it that makes the listener feel it as if for the first time.
And here’s something I tell every student who beats themselves up for landing on a cliché: it’s not a failure. It’s a starting point. The cliché is often showing you exactly what the song is about underneath. Most songwriters just don’t take the time or care to go the long way round from there, to sit with it, push past the obvious expression, and find something new. They settle. The cliché isn’t the problem. Settling for it is.
Chris Isaak: flipping the negative
One of the cleverest ways to do this is to take the clichéd statement and put it in its negative form. Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game is built almost entirely from familiar romantic language, the kind of lines that have been sung a thousand times before. The chorus makes the technique clear:
“I don’t want to fall in love with you.”
Almost every word in that line is familiar. But because Isaak frames it as something he doesn’t want, something he’s trying to resist, the listener hears a familiar feeling through a completely different lens. The words are close to cliché. The perspective makes them feel new.
It’s a small shift with a large effect, and it’s exactly the kind of technique worth having in your toolkit.
Billie Eilish: reclaiming the cliché
Birds of a Feather contains a line that, on paper, has gone right over the cliché line:
“I want you to stay till I’m in the grave.”
Wanting someone to stay forever is a completely valid feeling. But expressing it through the image of “till I’m in the grave” is an obvious choice, made more predictable because it rhymes. But the following phrase goes somewhere the listener didn’t expect:
“Till I rot away, dead and buried, till I’m in the casket you carry.”
That’s raw, physical and specific in a way that pulls you up short. What Eilish does here is reclaim the cliché: she lets the obvious image stand, then immediately follows it with something so specific and visceral that it pulls the lyric back from the edge. The cliché becomes the setup. The specific image is the payoff. And because the payoff is strong enough, the listener doesn’t hold the obvious line against her.
This is a technique worth knowing by name, because once you see it you’ll start noticing it everywhere. You don’t always have to avoid the obvious image. Sometimes you can write it, and then reclaim it with what comes next.
Chris Stapleton: the coherent extended metaphor
Tennessee Whiskey is a song built almost entirely from comparisons that, listed individually, could easily read as lazy. Smooth as Tennessee whiskey, sweet as strawberry wine, warm as a glass of brandy. These are the kinds of lines a first-year songwriting student might cross out immediately.
But they don’t feel clichéd in the song, and there’s a specific reason for that. The song is about a man in a bar, drinking, missing someone. And when you think about it that way, how could he have written anything else? Every comparison belongs to the world he’s already in. They’re all drinks, all warm, all things he’s surrounded by in that moment. The metaphor isn’t just a collection of flattering images. It’s a coherent theme that emerges naturally from the setting of the song itself. And because every analogy is congruent with every other, and with the world the narrator is sitting in, the cumulative effect isn’t lazy, it’s inevitable. It lands with the satisfaction of the last piece of a jigsaw. The listener feels it click into place, even if they couldn’t tell you why.
This is one of the most underappreciated tools in songwriting: not just the individual image, but whether all your images belong together, and whether they belong to the world of your song. Random analogies, however individually striking, can make a lyric feel scattered. Analogies that share a world make a lyric feel like it couldn’t have been written any other way.
What this means in practice
When I work on lyrics with students, I’m often pushing them in two directions at once. Towards the universal feeling underneath the cliché, because that’s usually what the song is actually about, and towards the specific, personal, concrete detail that makes that feeling land as if for the first time.
A lyric about missing someone is a cliché. A lyric about sitting in their chair, wearing their jumper because it still smells like them, is not, even though it’s describing exactly the same feeling. The specificity is what saves it. The listener might never have done that exact thing, but they believe it immediately, and because they believe it they feel it.
A lyric about loving a city is a cliché. A lyric that names the exact bus route, the specific square, the particular corner where something happened, is something else entirely. You don’t have to have been there to feel it. You just have to believe the writer was.
That’s the target. Not avoiding the familiar feeling, but finding the specific detail that makes it real.
The question to ask yourself
When you write a line and something feels slightly off, it’s often because you’ve landed on the cliché rather than on the feeling behind it. Don’t cross it out and start again. Ask instead: what specifically happened? Not “I missed you” but where were you, what did you see, what did you reach for? The answer to that question is almost always closer to a real lyric than anything you’d find by avoiding the feeling altogether.
Cliché is a shortcut to a feeling. A good lyric takes the long way round and arrives somewhere more honest.
If you want to work on your lyrics one-to-one, I offer individual songwriting lessons at the Hoxton studio and online, built around your own material from the very first session. Find out more and book a free discovery call at cityvocalcoach.com/one-to-one-songwriting-lessons.