How to Write Lyrics About Someone You Love

Writing lyrics about someone you love is harder than it looks. The feelings are big, the words are familiar (love, forever, always, you, me, us), and almost everything you write sounds like something someone has already said.

Here’s the truth: the words “I love you” have been written into songs ten million times. What hasn’t been written is your specific version of love — the small, weird, unique things that only exist between you and them. Those are the lyrics that move people.

The Hallmark trap

Most attempts to write love lyrics fall into the Hallmark trap. They sound like:

“You’re the light in my darkest night / You’re the reason I’m alive / Forever and always I’ll be by your side / My love for you will never die.”

This is competent. It rhymes. It scans. And it’s entirely interchangeable — it could be sung to anyone. It says nothing about this person.

To escape the Hallmark trap, you need to write about things only the two of you would recognise.

What to write about instead

Make a list, before you write any lyrics, of things like:

• The first time you noticed them in a way you couldn’t un-notice
• A phrase they say that nobody else does
• The way they look when they’re asleep, or laughing, or annoyed
• An argument that should have ended you and didn’t
• A holiday that meant more than you said at the time
• The thing they do that drives you mad and that you’d miss instantly if it stopped
• The thing you’ve never told them but should have
• A song that’s been “yours” for years and why
• What you noticed about them today that nobody else would notice

Eight or ten items from a list like this will give you more usable raw material than an hour of generic brainstorming.

The verse that lands

The strongest love-song verses tend to do one of two things:

1. They name a tiny, specific moment — something so small the person on the receiving end might have forgotten it. Naming it back to them says “I was paying attention to you when you didn’t notice”. That’s what love feels like.

“The morning in Lisbon when the coffee was bitter / And you laughed at me holding my face like a child / You said you’d remember the way the light caught my hair / You did. You told me five years later. You meant it.”

2. They write the thing you wouldn’t dare say out loud. Songs have permission to be tender in a way ordinary conversation doesn’t. Use it. Write the line that would make you blush over dinner.

“I’ve loved you on days I haven’t liked you / I’ve liked you on days I shouldn’t / If anything happened to you tomorrow / I’m not sure I’d still know how.”

Both work. Both feel like a real person wrote them about a real person. That’s the bar.

The chorus that earns it

The chorus is where the song earns the right to repeat itself. Keep it shorter than you think it needs to be. Use at least one specific from the verses so the chorus can’t live anywhere else.

A chorus that earns it:

“Bitter coffee, Lisbon light / Five years later, you still tell me / You’ve been paying attention to me all this time / I never told you, but I’ve been paying attention too.”

It’s the same image from the verse, brought back. It rhymes loosely — that’s fine, it doesn’t need to be perfect. What matters is that no other couple would recognise themselves in it.

Genre matters more than you think

If you’re writing a love song for someone, write it in the music they actually love. Don’t default to ballad because that’s what love songs “sound like”. If they listen to country, write country. If they listen to hip-hop, write hip-hop. If they listen to old soul, write soul.

The right genre, sung in the right voice, with the right specifics — that’s a love song that gets played for the rest of their life.

If you don’t want to write it yourself

If the blank page is too much — or if you have the feelings but not the words — this is exactly what CreateMySong was built for. You share the story (the list above is a brilliant starting point), choose the genre, and the song is written and produced from your details in around 10 minutes. From £9.99, with a free 60-second preview before you decide.

Either way, the result is the same: a love song that’s unmistakably about this one person, that they’ll keep on their phone for years, and that says the thing you might never quite have said out loud.

See also: How to Write a Personalised Song (the full guide) · Anniversary songs · Wedding songs · Valentine’s Day songs