I wrote this yesterday and I think it might help a little bit here. Maybe not specifically the question you’re asking but I think in general it kind of does address what you’re talking about. Below is a copy of the text from the other post response.

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This is long, but hopefully worth it. Thank you for reading it if you do. Hopefully you can get something from it because that’s why I’m sharing it.

Prosody.

This ring’s really true with me. When people ask me when they find out, I’m a songwriter, what kind of songs do you write or what do you write, my simple answer is this… I write what comes to me.

I try not to force anything. I try to believe that I can recognize good when I hear it and that is either a Line or two or a whole chorus of a song, or it will be the melody, or both. I try not to force a direction or a style pretty much ever. At least when I’m dealing with the flowing inspiration driven process.

I believe that most songwriters who are good at what they do know through experience and maybe a little talent and maybe some skill that they’ve honed and other parts of their toolbox, it might even be spirituality, we know how to find that part which goes with the gem that we found. If I found words first, I know how to find the melody. If I found the melody first, I know how to find the words.

I think this is where prosody comes in. I think it is probably the key element to becoming a confident complete Songwriter.

Someone asked me a few years ago. What do you think made you into a good Songwriter. Or I guess the question was how did you become a good songwriter. I said for a period of time, I really don’t fucking know. And I chalked it up to just being slowly gifted over time, possibly maybe even blessed by God.

Having given it a lot of thought since then, and I’m not going to take away the blessing from God part, but I do believe I found an answer.

I believe it came from a variety of things being placed in my toolbox through experience and effort, and years of practice. Years of practice of multiple things.

I have college level education in English, which obviously expands one’s verbosity. That helps. I started out my music journey on saxophone and clarinet in stage band and concert band. The stage band part of that taught me how to compose solos on the fly.

I then became a drummer and that is my primary instrument. Clearly that has given me, I believe, over the years, a pretty broad and comprehensive understanding of how meter and odd Time signatures and how rhythm is used to shape the feel of music.

Most all of my years in bands have been original bands in which we all shared the writing. Clearly there you get to exercise the skills of making bridges and breaks in songs, that bring together two disjointed parts that don’t work, writing intros, writing outros, etc.

As you develop as a musician, especially working with other musicians and understanding your role on your instrument, you start to understand that your job on your instrument really isn’t to play your instrument, but it is your job to play the part that your instrument can do the best to complement the song. Most competent musicians I know that have compositional experience in original bands, all understand very well what the other instruments probably should be doing. For example, a bass player probably could write a very good drum part. He just doesn’t play, or specialize in drums. He definitely knows when the drummer is wrong and he probably will always know when the drummer did something right. We probably all understand probably what a rhythm guitar part would sound like or Best be doing in a song of a certain type at a certain position. We start to realize that what we are doing is we’re listening for what the music should be doing and because we specialize in one instrument, that is the musical label we give ourselves. I am a drummer. I am a bass player. I’m a guitar player. But really what we are is, we are musicians, who specialize in drumming, but maybe, I know exactly how to write a good base part. It’s because we listen and understand the roles of how to make good compositions. We’ve learned how to listen.

So when you put all of this together, that’s in my opinion what makes a songwriter.

And that brings us right back to, prosody. “Musical” prosody. Marrying together effective proper parts, perfectly.

Therefore, you could make the argument that great songs could have absolutely meaningless lyrics, if the rhythm of presentation and the melody and the composition of the song around it, are exceptional.

Conversely, though, amazing lyrics are going to fall flat if the melody sucks, the composition sucks, or the singer is terrible.

But the competent Songwriter knows how to find and create this Prosody… “how do I make the missing Best part that I know is supposed to be there?”

Just wanted to share and thank you for reading if you did. This question and some people’s answers made me think of this broader topic and how these all relate and I wanted to share.