How To Give Your Song a Title

by Brian Casel | December 19, 2008 | 3 Comments

So you put the finishing touches on a new tune but it’s missing one key component- the title.

The most popular method of giving your song a name is to use the lyric of the chorus. This is the standard in pop music, which makes for good marketing. Radio listeners who know the hook of a song can find it in iTunes quite easily. But this is not just for the mainstream and there’s nothing wrong with this route. One of my all-time favorite songs comes to mind here:

Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin
“Since I’ve Been Loving You.
I’m about to lose my worried mind, oh, yeah.”

Sometimes the chorus of the song is an extended phrase of many words. In this case it’s common to use the one or two words that grab the listener the most, or the ones that complete a metaphor. Here’s an example:

The Warmth by Incubus
“So don’t let the world bring you down.
Not everyone here is that fucked up and cold.
Remember why you came and while you’re alive
experience the warmth before you grow old.”

Many times you might choose not to use any of the song’s lyrics in it’s title. Maybe the song is so mysterious that you want to the title to hint at what it’s about. Or the opposite- use the title to add a curious twist to the story of the song.

Something I like to do on many of my songs is cut out a piece of a line from a verse and use that as the title. I like the idea of a song title drawing the listener in, before they understand it’s meaning. Once the listen to the complete song, the title sneaks up on them during the second verse, this time in context. It’s a bit of an ah-ha moment for those that catch it.

23 to Waste by Brian Casel
“…And the pundits play their game to a nation in a daze
one hour of news, 23 to waste.”

The main thing to take away from these ideas is that just as anything else in songwriting, there is no right and wrong way to title your work. Just stay creative and have some fun with it.

Over to you…

Use the comments section to share one of your song titles and where it came from. If possible, provide a link to where we can hear the song online.

Thanks for being part of the conversation at Serve The Song. We have a simple comment policy (with thanks to Tim Ferriss) - critical is fine, but if you’re rude we'll delete your stuff. ’Nuff said.

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3 Comments:

12/19/2008
3:52 pm

remowill

I think this could be used in other venues also. Maybe some help here on what to name your website.
12/20/2008
11:21 am

Brian

True that.

Actually naming a website is probably harder than naming a song.
02/10/2009
11:46 pm

Jason

It struck me as odd that you wrote this “Many times you might choose not to use any of the song’s lyrics in it’s title. Maybe the song is so mysterious that you want to the title to hint at what it’s about. Or the opposite- use the title to add a curious twist to the story of the song.”

..and then transitioned into another example of using a phrase from the title, rather than examples of effective titles that weren’t taken from the lyrics.

Otherwise, great post with good info. I would have liked to see some more elaboration though – maybe that’s just because titles are the hardest thing for me, whether I’m writing a song, a story, a poem or a press release.