Of course, those are just claims, not credentials. Credentials comes through the work.

To a certain extent it’s valid to keep a sheaf of your best poems, a book with scraps of lyrics, and a notebook of ideas. Some songwriters go through their whole lives being parsimonious and piecemeal. If you want the skill that can be used to write good songs, it’s better to cultivate the skill of being able to improvise. At least that’s how it works best with me.

I’ve gone through, and go through, different stages of either writing songs up to nine versions (or whatever) or writing a piece in one burst, but I have always found riffing to work better than sitting there, pencil in your mouth, puzzling over how to get across what you want to say.

Let the subject matter dictate the song.

If you try and rein in what may otherwise be a potent theme, you risk being too didactic and weakening the artistic or poetic effect.
Better to go with the flow.

For instance, let’s make this purposely hard, if I was writing a song of my own choice, I would find a strong title, one pregnant with meaning, and develop from that. But this isn’t about what individual songwriters do to prepare so much as it is providing skills that can be applied across a range of circumstances that might require some snappy rhymes or ditties. So let’s move on to a most unattractive region of writing praxis; the reducing of something that I, and many of my fellow minstrels, have habitually done throughout our youth without having any knowledge of this critical theory. I speak of postmodernism. And, yes, while I could proffer my song on the subject, “Postmodern Tension”, I want to do something illustrative and, gawd knows, it’s about time postmodern theory was made useful in this way.

So I’m going to ask you to cast your eyes down this blog and now, eyes downcast, imagine having to come up with songs entitled ‘The song’s about to start’ and ‘Ladies and gentlemen’. You don’t see any potential in that as it’s clear those post headings were chosen for purpose and are not promising as song titles. I agree with you, however, making the best of a bad lot:

If you’re a real novice, you could jot down the things that come into your head when ‘the first song’s about to start’. chatter, smoking, posing, nervous excitement

or you could start straight in at a faster pace, knowing you can do it as a a first draft if it doesn’t say what you want or is in some way naff

Depending where you are on the scale of lyricists, this can take a varying amount of time. You might first have to realise that ‘chatter’ and ‘natter’ are too close in meaning to dwell for that long, or you may have a bolt of inspiration and hit on a couplet that carries promise and you won’t apprehend it for it’s use of language and poetic device but by the fact that it drives you on and inspires more thoughts to come pouring out.

I think, when you get the rhythm, you instinctively know where the song is going to go. I’m not always down with the path of the narrative but as long as it stays faithful to the theme (which is nothing less than a meaning or set of meaning attached to the title in my songs) I don’t mind.

If you continue to hone your craft by insisting to your muse that you are writing a good song about this subject or scenario, then you’ll find it gets easier.

You probably wouldn’t stop to try on ‘shatter’ and ‘scatter’ and so forth as you know that you can get the idea of chatter over without rhyming it, or even including the word.
Sometimes it helps to then glimpse back at the reality of what you are writing about. Perhaps you don’t need to make it about a horror-themed event so you can use ‘splatter’, perhaps you just need to look at what is happening with the chatter when ‘the first song’s about to start’. It dies down; there’s an expectant hush. So, without stopping to survey the options, it becomes apparent that it’s an easier road to rhyme the ‘dying down’ and that’s the best way to phrase the line anyway. If you want to be stubborn ‘the content of their chatter/ceases to matter’ but that borders on prosaic whereas

‘How narrow the sorrows the crowd have half drowned
a sign of their awe is the chatter dies down’

Now, look, you can edit this as ‘a sign of their awe as the chatter dies down’ or whatever, but you now have a song that is starting to pull away from the literal meaning.
You may not even be aware of the implications of this wordsmithing but it’s a good thing it’s leading you on.

But, you wail, what can I do with ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, especially when you’ve twigged that the code for those entries was that they were the kind of phrases that get bandied around at live gigs. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ is archaic and doesn’t sing to the current generation. It’s too mannered to be of much use.
But that approach is setting up barriers before you get started.
There are surprisingly few topics or turns of phrase that can’t be moulded into works of art.

“Ladies fan out and gents in the corner”

It’s one line. But here’s the thing, Now you’re referencing several things at once: a ladies’ fan, the ladies being more demonstrative while the gentlemen are guarded and huddled in the back, the allusion to amenities and where they’re located

You can read as much or as little as you like into it. Contemplate how you’re going to be more expansive so it’s clear that the ‘ladies fan out while the gents hang back [like the amenities]’ without putting it that way, and without causing problems with the rhyming schema.

Trust me, this isn’t a problem, not like those back trying to list top hats and mink coats and then find things to say about them. Thinking outside the box isn’t mandatory but it is a handy aid.

Now, just because you can see promise in your idea is no reason to get bogged down. In the early stages of my writing vocation I might be stuck with just those lines or the title and that line and I’d be trying to do what I could in the way of equalling it for the qualities it possessed.

An easier way is to jot that line down in a journal kept for that purpose, and explore some of the other ideas that might have come up. What about the fact that its very usage here is only introducing something else, it’s not the honorifics that are significant but what they herald.

Ladies and gentlemen
it is my pleasure
to reach this stage
and take your measure’

Again, this might not be where your thoughts were heading when you first decided to write a song called ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ but that surely sounds intriguing, yes?

If you want to do a close reading of this (I know it’s scrap of verse with perhaps not even the intention of writing more, but humour me) then you realise that it has a couple of balls up in the air: the fact that it manages second person to make the song about the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ after all.

The only problem with the novice jagging this kind of dual purpose is that they then need to create further verses to match and this can be particularly daunting, especially if they stumbled on this part.

It’s another reason to write a lot quickly so you don’t get stuck on how marvelous a certain triplet is

‘Ladies and gentlemen
I’m sure you’ll agree
The sect to neglect
is the cult of Me’

That probably doesn’t add much to the picture, in fact it takes something. But it might serve to inspire something that will work. There continue to be different approaches you can take at each juncture. This second verse was a result of saying “well, if I can’t use this gaze at the audience, I’ll change tack and think of other instances where “Ladies and gentlemen” introduces something. In this ‘I’m sure you’ll agree’ but as it stands it doesn’t follow on as now it’s proselytising and the idea of staying with the ones not up on stage is too interesting to abandon.

‘Ladies and gentlemen
may I introduce
a means to betray
an attempt to seduce’

This not only follows on from the first (if it ends up being the first) it takes it in still more interesting directions.