On the topic of songwriting, which is what ryanwelton.com is supposed to be about in part: I don't talk enough about lyrics. And that's going to change.

There used to be a time I didn't pay attention to them much.

In the 1980s, I'd listen to Chicago and Toto and all these great studio bands and I would wonder who in the world needed words. Listen to this MUSIC!

However, as an artist, I came to realize the music part of a song is like sex. It's important to the overall marriage, but you eventually have to talk to your spouse, which means there needs to be some substance there.

Lyrics are substance. It's why Dylan is a god and why Springsteen is still influential, even though he hasn't had a chart hit in almost 20 years. Rightly or wrongly, words are why rap and hip-hop are not only popular but influential.

The process of writing words, for me, isn't one of communicating inner pain or resolving conflict. It's about creating aesthetically pleasing combinations of words in hopes of building a coherent lyric set to music.

I don't sleep with a notebook by my bed.

But if something comes to mind, as it did a year ago when the phrase "cigarettes and Certs" came to mind, I pop it in a Notepad file and store it away. Eventually, I wrote a song and gave it that very title. Click on my "originals and covers" tab to go listen to it.

The process can become a mix-and-match shopping trip, particularly if a writer is in need of a great first line of a verse or chorus. Take Peter Allen's song, "Arthur's Theme," which he wrote with Carol Bayer Sager, Burt Bacharach and Christopher Cross back in the early 1980s. They won an Oscar for it.

And, it had one of the great first lines ever for a chorus: "When you get caught between the Moon and New York City."

Independent of the song, what does that bring to mind? To me, I can't separate it FROM the song. It paints a picture of a boyish dreamer, a manchild perhaps, which is exactly who Dudley Moore portrayed in Arthur.

But that line was actually part of another song Allen co-wrote with Sager. Perhaps it wasn't finished. Perhaps it was never demoed. Maybe it was a throw-away. I don't know.

The line was so good though that he lifted it from that tune and plopped it into this one, which is something songwriters do all the time. Lyrical recycling.

The process of writing lyrics, for me, is one where I sit down and do it all at once. I open a rhyming dictionary. I surf the Web for ideas. I'll watch TV online. I'll veg. I'll take a phone call. I'll read the paper. But I'll do it all with my lyric sheet open.

And I don't get up until I have at least a lyrical construct in place.

However, when it comes to the details, the phrase turns, the tense, the search for that great opening line or great title, I get writer's block constantly.

And that's where this little creative trick can really bail you out.

The point is simple: Don't get so married to your phrases and lines that you aren't willing to recycle them. If you know you have a home-run melody, like Allen and Co. knew with "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)," then you have to take one for the team and sacrifice that already-used lyric.

Don't think for one second that if I'm faced with a once-in-a-lifetime writing opportunity on a song with a great melody and an opportunity for big success that I won't reuse a phrase or line I had put to bed long ago.