SONGWRITER’s LEXICON

The river
The sun
The road

If your lyrics have a word that ends in the “-self” suffix then it’s perfectly acceptable to stop and explain why something is, literally or metaphorically, “on the shelf”.

^^^ this one drives me crazy because there's a 50/50 chance the 'shelf' part won't make a lick of sense

Echo & The Bunnymen v concerned with things being wrong way round/upside down/inside out.

'in my mind' is one that I always fall back on when writing lyrics. I really wish I wouldn't, but sometimes it just works and nothing else seems to fit the metre

I don't speak Spanish but I always notice it when Spanish language songs say 'mi corazón' (my heart) cos it happens so often. In French songs, especially from the 50s/60s/70s it's often 'la guerre' (war). My mum (who is French) used to say that English songwriters are always banging on about 'the rain'

"so all alone"

For the melancholic singer-songwriter, starting around 1990, "bones" has become an essential part of the toolkit. "Stones" rhymes and is also dry and forbidding, and you probably want a few rusted objects around, breeze or wind too, but bones are essential.

Tom Waits / Pixies 'Bone Machine' (hey, never noticed that!), 'Bones' by Radiohead', Alice in Chains 'Them Bones'.

“Tomorrow”

filler words to help with scansion: just, tonight, babe/baby, only, now, etc. i vastly prefer a singer to use a nonsense syllable like 'ooh' if they are too musically inept to stretch a word over 2 notes (some singers just don't get how to do that)
awful cliche phrases the singer never seriously means or would use in speech: on my knees, like a knife, i'm falling or on fire, etc. contrast this with cliches that we really do use in speech - got a feeling, forever, it hurts to say... stuff like this is much more acceptable to me, but it needs to be sparingly used as it can seem very lazy.

there are some rhymes that you hear the first of the pair, you know exactly the word that is coming on the next line, and it's pretty exasperating: above/love, eyes/lies, fly/sky/high, cry/die/sigh

here's a fun list
http://gawker.com/all-226-cliches-uttered-by-katy-perry-on-her-new-album-1451718946