How to Memorize Lyrics Quickly

If you're anything like me, memorizing lyrics is a nightmare. In fact, memorizing anything is awful for me. I'm happy if I can remember my own birthday or my own age. So I've had to come up with some tricks to memorize lyrics. I've also tried several things I can tell you right now DO NOT WORK. So lets do a quick once over of both.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK

The first thing most people do when trying to memorize lyrics is to listen to the song on repeat. This works to an extent, but only if you focus on memorizing while doing it. It DOES NOT WORK to listen to a song in the background while doing something else and expecting your brain to figure it out. This will work over a long period of time if you listen to the song and kinda sing along with it, but it will not work in the short term.

Just reading the lyrics over and over also isn't a great idea. Music is inherently, wait for it, MUSICAL. Simply reading it won't help you memorize since once you start singing it everything will seem different.

WHAT DOES WORK

Singing a song over and over is a good start, but not really a trick. What I like to do is take the written lyrics and sing along. Then go through and delete or erase one word from each line and try again. You can make it an easy word like "and" or "the" at first. This is usually pretty easy. Now sing it again and erase a second word. Keep doing this until every word is gone and you may find that you can do the whole song a lot faster than you'd expect.

Another strategy is to associate the lyrics with something else, such as a movement. Musical theater singers do this all the time. They use choreography to learn the lyrics and visa versa. The combination actually makes both easier to memorize quickly since you are using more parts of your brain to learn.

Conclusion

Memorizing lyrics is a massive pain for a great deal of singers, but can be managed with these strategies. If you need help learning a song, voice lessons are a great place to start. If you are interested in trying out lessons, you can sign up for a singing lesson by clicking here.