News

2008.0603

Hits Guaranteed Lyric Writer Shares His Secrets

By Joanna Tung Campus Reporter National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) students were overwhelmed by renowned lyric writer Vincent Fang (方文山) as he shared his experiences of his job as a lyric writer at Cheng 301 on the main campus this morning. "For me, creating lyrics is just like creating a script for a movie,” Fang said.  “But you have to guide the listeners into the picture or the story that you are telling with the minimum word count.” Fang, music director for JVR Music (杰威爾音樂), was invited by Department of Chinese for the speech to tell NTNU students what his job is all about.  Department of Chinese Assistant Professor Huang Li-chian (黃麗娟) said that the department would invite Fang to share his job with students because lyric writing is a new form of literary work, which is not covered in the department’s courses. To write the lyrics for a song, Fang said, the author would create the settings of the lyrics by starting with key words.  He said that he would write something that listeners would immediately have the picture in their minds after they hear the lyrics. "For example, I would begin with ‘cliff,’ ‘rock,’ and ‘coastline’ to create the image of the seashore if I am writing for a song about it,” Fang said.  “A song like this would definitely make a deep impression and people would begin to notice who the author is.” Fang said that the usage of pronouns in the lyrics would be essential for the job because it would make the lyrics sound like a story that would happen to everybody.  Also, the rhyme of the lyrics would be another thing that is crucial for lyric writing because a good-rhymed song will make it even easier to be remembered. Unlike creating music, which would be based on inspiration, Fang said that lyric writer would spend more time making the words in the lyrics as perfect as possible.  As a constant partner for entertainer Jay Chou (周杰倫), who is fond of Chinese style music and would always create a new song to stick with the style for every new album, Fang said that writing lyrics for this kind of songs requires more senses of the touch of Chinese words.  Fang said he would transform many Chinese ancient poems into lines of the lyrics that he was writing for a Chinese style song, which was created by Chou. Lo Feng-yu (羅風羽), a senior from the Department of Chinese, said that Fang’s lyrics would be equivalent to a drama and full of tensions. "Writing lyrics for this kind of songs is like painting in different colors or cooking for different smells,” Fang said. When asked whether singers would have difficulties understanding lyrics that he wrote, Fang said that singers would only have problems pronouncing certain words which are rarely used or seen. Fang encouraged students whoever are interested in creating lyrics to keep on writing, read as many different kinds of books as possible and join as many different kinds of lyric contests as possible. "Creating lyrics is about releasing or recording one’s emotions,” he said.