Advanced Songwriting Tips – Creating Powerful Opening Verse Lines – Part 1
The first line of a song has to captivate the listener and should generally be related to the song title or theme of your song. So how can we create killer lines that’ll make listeners salivate and keep them interested while moving the story forward? 
Experienced songwriters usually come up with attention-grabbing opening lines out of instinct, but even their well runs dry every now and then when they’re looking for an opening line to give their listeners that ”wow” factor.
There are a few ways or methods to create great opening lines and one of the best and the first one we’ll explore is to simply take your song’s title or theme, come up with words (verbs, nouns, adverbs, etc.) related to the theme, and construct phrases that relate to the song title or theme. To learn how to come up with a word list or refresh your memory, visit: SongwriterAdvisor.com
Let’s take a look at some powerful opening lines in some recently-charted songs as an example:
Bleeding Love, sung by Leona Lewis
Closed off from love I didn’t need the pain
Notice how the first words “closed off from love” relate to the title “Bleeding Love.” This is a common technique used by focused songwriters where they use wordplay to either directly or indirectly (subliminally) associate words and phrases with the song title and/or theme. In this case the words ”closed off ” indirectly relate to the song title because the singer essentially states she intentionally closed her emotional wounds and put those feelings behind her so she could continue living.
The following country song by Brad Paisley, “I’m Still A Guy” gives a great example of an opening line directly relating to the song title or theme, but it takes him just a little more than one line to accomplish this:
I’m Still A Guy, co-written and sung by Brad Paisley
When you see a deer you see Bambi
And I see antlers up on the wall
The opening lines here directly relate to the song title as Paisley drives the point quickly across that he sees the world differently than a female—she sees a cute animal as opposed to how he sees a prize associated with hunting a sought-after animal.
The next time you hear your favorite music try to listen for the first line of the song and see if it relates directly or indirectly to the song title or theme: You’ll be surprised–although this is an often-overlooked songwriting principle, you’ll find that the majority of successful songs do follow it! There are many songs out there with weak, forgettable opening lines. Why not make your songs that much stronger by developing memorable ones?
Using this technique gives you a far better chance that the listener will remember the first line and it’ll add more memorability to your song. Just as important, record industry people expect opening lines to be captivating, and when they are not, you’ve got to have something else special going on for the song such as a killer beat, or they’ll merely skip to the next song.
