Pat Pattison shows you how to use lyric craft to inspire your creativity. Using Pat's series of exercises, you can open up a well of creativity and, using craft, you can channel it into lyrics that communicate with listeners in an immediate way that will make your song memorable when others are forgotten.

The lyric shortcuts in this book show you how to create the raw material for a lyric, develop a memorable lyric from your title, sketch out a song path, and write irresistible hooks! Hands-on exercises will get you working on a lyric immediately. Plus there are plenty of examples from today's music charts to show you how it all comes together in a hit song.

Pat Pattison takes you through a series of exercises that will help you gain command of lyric form, use a variety of lyric phrase lengths to create interest for your listeners, match lyric phrases with underlying musical phrases, and many more unique and valuable tools that will take your songs to a professional level.

Rhymes can by a songwriters best friend or worst nightmare! If you write a line for the rhyme but twist the emotional sense of your song, you can lose your listeners. The exercises in this book will help you gain control of rhyming and use it to strengthen your lyric - a crucial skill for songwriters at all levels.

The lyric writing section in this book is excellent. Song structure, lyric forms, rhyming, development and more are covered in a fun-to-read style. There are plenty of examples from hit songs of the last decade.

Jason Blume has written hit after hit, across all grenres. It's an amazing thing to pull off. Generous with his knowledge, always cutting to the chase, giving you the must-have info you need to get your own songs on the hit track.This is a mainstay of every songwriter's library.

I like this update though others who are used to the earlier versions may want to hold onto their battered but beloved rhyming dictionaries. I like the broader approach that includes sight, vowel, consonant, as well as one-, two-, and three-syllable rhymes. There are a lot of words here! Consider circling the ones you feel are "song-friendly."

This little book does something I usually have to do by hand in the larger rhyming dictionaries - I go through and circle the words I think I'll be likely to use in a song. Multi-syllable tongue-twisters aren't likely to be much help. Sooo... this book eliminates them for you!

A type of thesaurus that can give you lots of good ideas for lyric lines. Let's say you've got a good line but you're not sure how to follow it up. Try looking up antonyms - opposite words - to see if they suggest an interesting follow-up line.

Paul Zollo, the interviewer, is a songwriter himself and that means he knows what to ask to get songwriters talking about their craft. Again, check out the Table of Contents in the "Search Inside the Book." From Mose Allison to Lenny Kravitz to Sammy Cahn, the interviews cover songwriters in all genres and styles.