Writing Lyrics for an Elementary Piano Solo

A little unusual as I was creating the two new Adventures of Little Fuzzies pieces: Easter Egg Hunt and April Fools’ Mischief. I started journaling about the composing process. It was fascinating even for myself to reflect on how much effort even a small piece really is. I thought you might find it interesting too!

So many times, it’s easy to think that composing a piece of elementary music is simple. And even though I do it all the time, it’s daunting to start writing a new piece! But in spite of all of that, as soon as a piece is done, I seem to quickly forget all the details and effort that it took to compose, edit, and finalize it.

It’s a bit like having a baby. After you’ve gone through nine months of pregnancy and the delivery process, it’s easy to swear off ever having another child again! But give it a year or two and you do tend to forget how difficult it was.

So I thought it would be interesting to chronicle the evolution of Easter Egg Hunt, a new piece from the Little Fuzzies Collection. Maybe it will be fascinating or encouraging to teachers, students, or even composers. But if nothing else, it has been a good exercise for me to review my process and acknowledge the accomplishment!

How Do I Get Started Writing Lyrics for an Elementary Piano Solo?

Unlike pieces without words, writing lyrics for an elementary piano solo means that I have to have an idea of what a piece is about before I start writing the music. With the Little Fuzzies pieces, I find that I actually have to have the whole story planned out and even most of the lyrics written before beginning to work on the music.

So one of the most difficult parts of a Little Fuzzies piece is getting the story right. And that begins with brainstorming. I started by asking,

“How would the Little Fuzzies celebrate Easter?”

The obvious answer is an Easter Egg Hunt. But these are so common that it almost seemed boring to have the Little Fuzzies just hunt for eggs. I could see them hopping in and out of the grass. But there wasn’t much Little Fuzzy adventure in that. Of course, they could have tried to die eggs with food coloring in preparation for the Easter Egg Hunt. That certainly would have resulted in a mess typically of the Little Fuzzies. But alas, many kids have never done this, so I decided it wasn’t an activity to which kids most kids could relate.

So I tried to think of anything else besides an Easter Egg Hunt. Maybe they could sneak into someone else’s egg stash and eat all their candy. Maybe they could get lost in the new spring grass. Maybe they could have some kind of caper with new bunnies or spring chicks.

But alas. You can see none of these have any spark.

So I came back to the Easter Egg Hunt idea. How could I possibly make it more than just an Easter Egg Hunt? I started thinking about what Little Fuzzies are like and I even talked about it a bit with my family:

“The Little Fuzzies just have their own way of doing things. They’re in their own little world, sometimes oblivious to others!”

I remembered as a child that we sometimes had regular sized plastic easter eggs with candy inside them, but we really got excited about the oversized eggs since they held more candy. I started thinking about the size of the fuzzies and how gigantic a big Easter egg would seem to them.

I slowly turned the phrase over in my mind, “EASTER egg hunt. Easter EGG hunt. Easter egg HUNT.” And then it hit me! The Little Fuzzies have probably never heard of an Easter Egg Hunt before, so they might completely misunderstand what a “hunt” really was in this context. They might think it’s some kind of special hunting spree intended to track down and trap these awful eggs that must be so dangerous to humans!

I wrote this idea down in my journal: Maybe the “hunt” for Easter Eggs makes them think they are hunting for enemies and that they have to be really vigilant and that they are going to save the world by ridding it of these dangerous Easter Eggs. They face off in the grass. But soon they realize that they are stoic, statues, and all cracked in the middle! Just a little squeeze makes them pop open with chocolate, jelly beans, and sometimes even shiny coins.

Now We’re Rolling! Or Are We?

Very excited about the idea now, I started writing lyrics. That first lyric is really tough, but it’s the most important one because it sets the rhythm of the piece.

I obviously started with the phrase: Easter Egg Hunt!

But nothing came at first. I messed around with all kinds of rhythms, but in the end, when you say “Easter Egg Hunt,” there’s no special rhythm in the words. It’s kind of an unusual phrase because we don’t even really emphasize any of the syllables more than others, which makes it difficult to put into a musical context!

But when you put the word, “an” in front of it, suddenly we have an accent! An EASter Egg Hunt!

Now there’s a rhythm to that! You can clearly hear the pick up beat and where the emphasis is.

Sweating the Small Stuff with Lyrics

I can’t really tell you how long it takes to write the lyrics for an elementary piano solo, how many different permutations I had for each verse, or which words I wrestled with for far too long. But I’ll give you a little taste of how I “sweat the small stuff” when it comes to lyrics.

First though, let me show you the final lyrics:

An Easter Egg Hunt! It sounds tricky and tough;
Like the eggs are so sinister, mean, and so rough!
But if humans need help hunting down this bad lot,
We’ll invite and unite all the fuzzies we’ve got!

We line up (it’s strange), and then someone says go
Through a jungle of grasses that nobody mowed.
But we find them, those sinister, dangerous foes!
They are three times our size, with no eyes and no nose.

They stand there, those eggs without feud without fight.
They don’t move, they don’t threaten to hurt or to bite
But we notice a crack in their bulletproof vest,
Showing something inside. Might be risky we guess!

We look in and out pops a curious thing!
It is wrapped in a foil with great sparkle and bling!
It’s a bunny shaped choc’late and candy to eat.
We’ve been tricked! This is fun! All the eggs are a treat!

Here are just a few of the many notes I made about words that I mulled over and wrestled with in my mind to get these lyrics to be what they finally are.

• Stanza 1, Line 3 – Before I came up with this phrase, the word “thugs” was what I was going to originally use. But that sounded too beefy and it doesn’t roll off the tongue. Plus there’s not a lot of useful words rhyming with “thugs.” So I went to the thesaurus and found “bully.” That’s a great word that kids know right away, but it had too many syllables, so I had to pivot and use the word “lot” instead.
• Stanza 2, Line 3 – The thesaurus is always my friend (along with a rhyming dictionary) when composing. In this line, I needed some really descriptive adjectives about the dangerous eggs. The word dangerous was fitting, but I needed another 3 syllable one, so I used the thesaurus and a general google search for “3 syllable adjectives” and then found sinister. Perfect!

• Stanza 4, line 2 – I was looking for a word to describe the candy wrapper and saw an ad in rhymezone for Sparkle brand paper towels so I used the word “sparkle.” Serendipitous!

• Stanza 2, line 2 – The original lyric was “Through a jungle of green grass that nobody mowed.” But try to say that whole phrase rather fast and you’ll find it doesn’t roll off the tongue. It takes too many muscles for you to form the “gr” sound and you have to sing it twice, so it’s just not easy. I searched and searched for words to modify grass that were easier to say or things besides grass and weeds that are in lawns. Then, I finally realized that answer was in front of me…make the word “grass” plural and I now had a 2 syllable word the fit perfectly!

The Family Feedback Loop

An important step in writing lyrics for an elementary piano solo is to let others read your lyrics to make sure they are clear and just as funny to them as they are to you! So After I finally tweaked all of those lyrics, I knew I needed to put the piece through my family feedback look (i.e. play it for my kids) to see what they thought. I told them about the new piece on the way home from school and their priceless laughs and interest in the story told me I had a winner! Then, I played the piece with its lyrics once we were home.

Here’s what my family contributed:

• My older child pointed out that some of my lyrics were past tense and some were present, so I fixed that.
• Both of my kids reminded me that fuzzies don’t have arms, so I had to replace “We reach in and pull out a curious thing!” to “We look in and out pops a curious thing!” Much better. Thanks kids!

What About the Music?

Now, rarely does a piece come into existence in a nice, linear, step-by-step way. But there’s no other way to write about it, so I’ll tell you about the composing process next time. Then, I’ll talk about developing the cover (my favorite), my organized but still messy and tedious process of editing, and all kinds of things…all for just one piece!