Three pastes in ten have no chorus
A lyric is not just writing with line breaks. What separates one from a poem is that something comes back — a line, a phrase, a title — and that return is what people remember and sing. Measured on what actually gets pasted here, most texts have one — and three in ten do not.
| What the pasted text contained | Share of pastes |
|---|---|
| A line that repeats anywhere in the text — a chorus | Seven in ten |
| No repeated line at all | Three in ten |
| [Verse] / [Chorus] style section tags | About six in ten |
| Section tags but still no repeating line | About one in eight — the tags are there, the chorus is not |
That last row is the interesting one. One paste in eight has the brackets but not the thing the brackets are for: [Chorus] gets typed because it looks like what a lyric should look like, while the line worth hearing four times never gets written. The engine honours the tags, so a [Chorus] over four lines that appear once is sung once, as a chorus, and never returns.
If you are pasting a poem on purpose — a reading, a tribute, a vow — that is a real thing to make and the rest of this page still applies. Just know that is what you are making.
Turning writing into a lyric, in four edits
You do not have to rewrite anything. These four edits take a couple of minutes on text you already have, and they are the whole difference.
- Find the line you would want someone to quote back to you. It is usually already in there, and usually not at the start.
- Put it on its own, mark it [Chorus], and paste it again after each verse. Repetition is not padding — it is the part that gets remembered.
- Break the long lines. A line that runs past about twelve words gets crowded into one breath; two shorter lines land better than one clever long one.
- Cut the lines that explain. Writing explains; lyrics point. “I was devastated when you left” is a sentence; “I kept your mug on the shelf” is a chorus.
Then leave the rest alone. The engine sings your words as written — it does not need to understand them, it will not improve them, and it will not fix a rhyme. That is the deal: exactness in exchange for editing.
What the brackets actually do
Square-bracket tags are read as structure and are not sung. [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge], [Intro], [Outro] all work, and so do directions inside them — [whispered], [spoken], [guitar solo] — which shape the arrangement without appearing in the words.
Two rules for them. First, tags are a plan, not a request: the engine follows the order you wrote, so if your [Chorus] only appears once, you get one chorus. Second, do not tag what you have not written — an [Outro] tag over nothing produces nothing.
If you would rather not think about any of this, paste plain text with blank lines between stanzas. The structure gets chosen for you, which is fine, and is exactly the case where you should listen to both takes: an unstructured paste is where the two versions differ most.
There is no example on this page. What gets pasted here is people's own writing — letters, vows, poems about a named person — and none of it belongs on a public page. The text-to-song page has two pasted examples that were safe to publish, and they are worth a listen for the length question.
Before you press Create
- One line chosen as the chorus — the one you would want quoted back
- That line repeated after each verse, not written once
- [Chorus] marked over it, and no tag over anything you did not write
- Long lines broken in two
- The explaining lines cut
- A style in four or five words — the words carry the song, the style carries the room
Written and fact-checked by the Tunely team · Updated