The arrival of Storm Ciara scuppered any chance of taking my sons out today, so I needed to find an indoor activity to keep them occupied and entertained. I hit upon the idea of pretending we had formed a rock band, and getting them to name the band, and then create lyrics for a song. It worked really well, so I thought I’d share what we did. Maybe it might even be something that other parents will decide to try with their children?
6 Year old creates his rock band name and logo
I started the exercise with my youngest, who is 6 years old, nearly 7. I told him that band names could be one word, two words, or more in length. Some examples I gave him were Cinderella, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, They Might be Giants, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
My slight fear before starting this exercise was that my boys would want to write songs about farts, burps, or other equally rude topics that they find incredibly funny. However, my youngest went more in a dark and metal direction! We created a shortlist of three possible band names, which were Skull Banned, Strike Gun, and death Bomb! (He mentioned that Strike Gun was actually the idea that a friend of his had had in the school playground – I’m impressed they’re having discussions about band names!)
He ended up going with death Bomb, and we decided it was important that the ‘d’ of death should be lower case, while the ‘B’ of Bomb should be uppercase. I think he may be a natural at branding!
With the band name selected, we had to create a logo. The band name helped narrow things down a bit. I did a Google image search on cartoon bomb images and he drew a bomb with a fuse. Then, he wrote the band name at the top and bottom of his drawing. He coloured in the bomb black and made the words red, so they were dripping with blood! (He said that was what Skid Row did with their logo. They’re his favourite band at the moment.)
9 Year old’s rock band name and logo
My older boy riffed on his younger brother’s choice of band name, but brought in his love of Harry Potter, to create a band name of Death Eaters! His other shortlisted band names were The Dungeons and Fire Dragon. Those names were influenced by things he could see in his room as he thought about what names to choose – a toy castle and a dragon paper lantern that he’d made at school.
I (carefully) looked up ‘Death Eaters’ on the Internet but the pictures of them from the Harry Potter films looked a bit scary and also difficult to draw. So we decided that his logo should feature a drawing of a skull. He really enjoyed drawing and colouring in his skull, and we then found some small LED candles and placed them on the paper, turned the light off in his room, and created quite a cool and eerie looking photo!
death Bomb – definitely a rock band
I explained to my youngest that bands could be pop bands, rap bands, rock bands, etc, but he said that death Bomb would definitely be a rock band, and it’s hard to argue with a name like that! Our next task then was to create our first song for what would be death Bomb’s debut album.
My wife came up with an ingenuous idea for the lyric writing. She suggested we should get the boys to include words that were on their spelling list for the week, thus also handily covering off a homework task!
My youngest words were right, line, after, bring, who, hand, time, and five. And, as you’ll see, we ended up using five of them. We then launched into writing the lyrics. I let my son choose what he wanted the song to be about but I suggested we try to do rhyming couplets. In other words, each set of two lines has an end word that rhymes.
My son decided that death Bomb the band should have a song called death Bomb, which would feature on their debut album, which would be called, yes you guessed it, death Bomb! Here’s what we came up with thanks to his creativity and a little help from me.
death Bomb
death Bomb!
It’s time for the death Bomb
We’re going to leave you like a phantom
You can bring it on
But you won’t last long
After we hit you with our death Bomb!
You can line up to get me
But all you’re going to be
Is hit right off your feet
By a death Bomb!
The choice of the word ‘phantom’ came from him, which impressed me. It’s quite short a song as lyrics go. Perhaps feels more like Chorus and Post Chorus sections, but if we were to add in enough big guitar riffs and maybe some explosion sound effects then we might have a big hit on our hands?
Incidentally, I read a BBC article recently, entitled ‘Five ways music changed in the 2010s‘, that revealed that there is a trend of hit songs becoming shorter and shorter, as people’s attention spans dwindle. So my youngest looks like he’s get his finger right on the pulse of modern music here?!
The Death Eaters – a lyric with structure
Having left my youngest to work on his album cover, I went and assisted my older boy to create his lyrical masterpiece. Again, we had his spelling words to weave into the lyric and they were Sense, Scream, Scrabble, Sensible, Suggest, Satisfaction, Separate, and Fossil. He managed to get all eight into his lyric which was a great achievement.
Again, as with his younger brother, he decided that his band should have a song with the same name as the band. So his song is called The Death Eaters. The fact that he had the word ‘scream’ in his spelling words helped. That sounded like it would fit very well with the song name and we built it into the first line and then decided to see where his imagination would take us. Here’s the final lyric that emerged:
The Death Eaters
(Verse 1)
The Death Eaters will make you scream
They’re a nightmare, not a dream,
They shall sense your fear
When you’re near
I suggest you just run away
Scrabble away cos you’re their prey.
(Chorus)
The DEATH EATERS!
They’ll tear you apart
The DEATH EATERS!
They’ll eat your heart
(Verse 2)
The Death Eaters get their satisfaction
From seeing your scared reaction,
They want to separate your bones
And turn them into fossil stones,
If you’re not sensible you’ll be dead
So get away and keep your head!
(Chorus)
The DEATH EATERS!
They’ll tear you apart
The DEATH EATERS!
They’ll eat your heart
A suitably gory lyric, I think, for a song about Death Eaters. I reckon JK Rowling would approve?! One thing that I was really impressed and surprised by was that my eldest came up with the notion that there would be a verse and a chorus in the song. I hadn’t realised that he had understood about those components but I guess he has sometimes been paying attention when I explain things when we’re listening to songs in the car!
Next stage stardom?!
I guess we spent about two hours working on this mini project and, at the end of it, we had band names, band logos, two song lyrics, and ideas for the cover picture for the subsequent albums!
Both boys really enjoyed it and excitedly ran through to their mum to show her the progress they were making. And whilst she would have preferred them to have chosen less violent themes (!) she was pleased that they had used their creativity to fit their spelling homework words into their lyrics.
Actually, that approach of starting with some random words that you then try to fit into your lyrics is a really effective approach to take whether you’re a kid or an adult. You can check out what happened when I used a similar approach to create a lyric called ‘Something Awful Happens’.
As a final note, I had intended to get the boys to sing their lyrics and record it using a microphone that plugs into our computer. However, we ran out of time for that, so can keep that back as a future activity.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our fun adventure into kids’ lyric writing. If you do decide to try something similar then I’d love to hear how it goes!