An Easy, Little-Known Rhyming Technique That Adds Excitement to Your Lyric

Why, as songwriters, do we place rhyming words at the end of each line?

How and when did that become normal? We songwriters don’t usually think about this method as “end rhyme” at all; we just think of it as the way rhyming is done. Yet end rhyme is just one approach of many. 

There’s another way that I want to share with you. This technique is called linked rhyme.

Linked rhyme

Linked rhyme is dead simple: just rhyme the end of each line with the beginning of the next one.

Like this:

Apples hang heavy on the trees in the orchard:
Morbid with worm-holes, swollen with sunlight,
Tight and full and green for a while.
By the end of October we find
bindings unravel from every tree;
Leaves scatter like pages
Shaken from the book of Autumn,
Some sad story of cooled-off Summer love…

No masterpiece, I know—this is just a quick example. But do you hear the way each line’s ending rhymes with the next line’s beginning?

Apples hang heavy on the trees in the orchard:
Morbid with worm-holes, swollen with sunlight,

…

Leaves scatter like pages
Shaken from the book of Autumn

This is much different from end rhyme, where the rhymes tend to come at a more predictable pace. Linked rhymes feel faster-paced than your listener would usually expect. It’s a refreshing twist, and odds are good that your listeners have never heard this technique in action before. Use it to add a sense of excitement to any lyric you write.

Most of these pairs aren’t “perfect” rhymes, but that can be a good thing. As I’ve written before: true rhyme is not the only type of rhyme. And like any rhyme scheme, linked rhyme can be a very helpful writing aid. After you’ve written one line, you’ve already got a seed for the next one.

Examples of chain rhyme appear in:

• Verse three of the lyrics to “Heavy Metal Drummer” by Wilco
• Verse one of “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, as slant rhymes between “better/Remember”
• Verse one of “First Song” by Andrew Bird and Galway Kinnell

See if you can find where chain rhyme occurs in each of the above examples.

Try It

That’s all there is to it. Linked rhyme creates a totally different flow of thought, a kind of stop-start rocking horse rhythm. If you set a lyric written in linked rhyme to a melody, I think you’ll find it even affects the melodies you compose.

Linked rhyme offers a refreshing change of pace for both you and your listener, and it’s no harder to do than end rhyme. Try it!

 

Symbolic image of rusty chains courtesy of pratanti