Face the Music

Like a broken record, you've been told time and again never to use song lyrics in your writing. Scratch that. Here's how to actually pull it off.

- BY ZACHARY PETIT

The craft of writing has its own set of commandments.

Like, say: Thou shalt show, not tell.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's prose.

Thou shalt put thy butt in thy chair and write.

And, well, this one, which always struck me as particularly odd among the more obvious proscriptions: Thou shalt never include song lyrics in thy fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in any fashion, lest thou find thouself destined immediately and permanently for the void of literary oblivion and general financial ruin.

Years ago, I was an editor at Writer's Digest. When you're an editor at WD, you tend to learn in real time from publishing's foremost pros, shortly before copy editing that knowledge and passing it on to readers. And right from the outset of the gig, one thing curiously kept coming up again and again: the fact that you should never publish song lyrics in your work. Ever. It'll get you sued. It can kill your career.

So, in my own writing, I never did.

But then I signed a contract to write a book for Bloomsbury's storied 33½ music series about the chaotic/fascinating tale behind Modest Mouse's record The Moon & Antarctica. I assumed the most difficult part of the whole endeavor would be scoring interviews with the band, tracking down the people who worked on the record 25 years ago, or, well, you know ... writing the book.

But I was wrong. As a devout, practicing writer, I wanted to show, versus tell: I wanted to reprint the lyrics to each song in the book to let the band's signature enigmatic, literary-infused wordplay speak for itself.

After all, these days you can find the lyrics to any given song on myriad websites across the internet. We've all read novels prefaced by a song lyric. How tough could it really be to print some in a small nonfiction book?

Soon enough, I found myself caught up in the cosmic forces of big music publishing—and I found out.