Help me memorise song lyrics

Today’s blog post I am going to turn the tables around a bit 🙂 Instead of offering my advice on something, I am actually looking for some help and tips from you guys. As many of you know I am dyslexic. I wrote about this in the past and if you did miss the post, check it out HERE.

Music has always come very naturally to me. I did struggle with reading music when I was younger. I did learn it, but still I was slow at it… With time my ear actually became faster than my music reading skills. So often I learned the piece of music by ear. Now, few decades working as a professional musician, my slow music reading skills have not held me back one bit. In fact these days I hardly ever have any use for the reading music skills. But that is also the nature of folk music. If I was a classical or jazz musician, things might be very different.

But what I am really struggling with is the lyrics… And I mean memorising them. It takes me forever to memorise song lyrics, even if I wrote them myself. The short term memory is one of the things Dyslexia can effect, as is the case with me, I’m also hopeless with names. This also is my biggest struggle with learning languages. I learn the pronunciation very fast, but the words just don’t stick in my head no matter what I try…

I remember my past band members talking about this years ago. Their process was something along the lines of writing down the lyrics, and singing through it a couple of times… Oh boy was I jealous of this! First of all, and this might sound funny for some of you who regularly read my blog, writing lyrics down has no effect whatsoever in aiding me memorising them. You see, creative writing I can do, but if I try to copy something, my mind goes on a different mode completely. I might as well be copying a simple drawing, It’s just lines… So what I do usually is sing a song over and over with the lyrics beside me over and over and over again.

The thing that baffles me is that sometimes the song sticks in a week, sometimes it takes months! So I am thinking there is some kind of underlying hack in my brain that lets me learn some of them faster. And I am big on analysing my own actions to learn and improve, but just don’t seem to be able to crack this one.

So I would like to hear your methods of memorising lyrics for songs. Do you struggle? Or does it come easy to you? How do you do it? Share it here below in the comments and if we get enough good stuff, I’ll compile the best bits into an another blog post. And please hit those shares 🙂

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get two of his free songs go HERE and click Download