Lyrics an AI can actually sing.

Lines of six to ten syllables sit comfortably on a beat. Fourteen-syllable lines get rushed; three-syllable lines get stretched into vowels that sound drunk. Before: “I have been thinking about everything you said to me that night” (16). After: “I keep replaying what you said” (8). Say your line out loud and tap the table; if you run out of taps, cut.

Words that end in ay, oh, ee, oo can be held; words that end in consonant clusters (“strengths”, “climbed”) cannot. Put the open vowel at the end of the line where the melody holds. Before: “I won’t forget the way you climbed.” After: “I won’t forget the way you flew.”

The chorus is the part people remember; the title is what they search for. Say it at the start of the chorus and again at the end. Verses carry the story, the chorus carries the flag.

Write [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge], [Outro] on their own lines. The engine uses them to shape the arrangement: the drums open on [Chorus], the energy drops on [Bridge]. Without tags, it guesses, and it guesses worst on long unbroken text.

Repetition is not laziness in songs; it is the mechanism. Repeat the hook line word for word, repeat a two-word phrase at the end of alternating verse lines, and let the outro repeat the hook with fewer words each time. Before: four different chorus lines. After: two lines, each sung twice.

A chorus is a line the listener can sing back after one hearing. If they cannot, it is a verse.

“The kitchen light, the cold coffee, the note you left” is three images crammed into one breath. Give each its own line and the singer gives each its own weight. Concrete beats abstract every time: “cold coffee” sings; “emotional distance” does not.

Parentheses for background answers, all caps sparingly for a shouted word, a line in brackets like [spoken] for talking. Ad-libs go in parentheses at the end of a line: “I’m not coming back (no, no)”.

Consonant pile-ups (“sixth street’s strict”) and long numbers (“2,347”) trip any singer. Spell numbers as words and break clusters with a vowel word between them.

You do not need to sing well. Hum any melody and speak the words over it. Where you stumble, the vocal will stumble. Fix those lines first, paste the lyrics with tags into Octa, and listen for the two places that still bother you; regenerate only those with the section editor.