Obsidian is a note-taking app that I fell in love with a couple years ago for its ability to connect notes with wiki-style links. In my songwriting practice, I like to use the Dataview plugin for Obsidian to help me link lyrics to tunes and combine lyric fragments. I do this by way of tagging notes by their poetic meter. The three kinds of notes I use for this are lyric notes and tune notes, connected by database notes.

Several years ago, I directed music at a small church where we’d often sing from the hymnal. In that time, I gleaned a lot about the intersection of poetic meter and musical meter. Hymn writers have their own system for this kind of thing, counting syllables. For instance, “Amazing Grace” features a line of 8 syllables, followed by a line of 6, then another 8 and 6. Its meter would be classified as 8.6.8.6 in a hymnal.

When you have one individual writing lyrics and another writing music, this is an effective way to pair the two together. You could write a new lyric to an existing tune, or vice-versa. Because of that, you could sing “Amazing Grace” to just about any other tune that fits the meter of 8.6.8.6. You may recall the now ancient meme that you can even sing it to the Pokémon TV show theme.

But the trouble with naming a poetic meter like the hymnists do is that it doesn’t account for syllabic stress or rhythm, just syllable count. And when you don’t line up the rhythm of the words well with the rhythm of the music, you get what we call bad prosody.

This is where the notion of “feet” makes the difference. In poetic meter, a foot refers to a unit of rhythm in poetry. There will be more about feet later because it’s more urgent to discuss the count of feet per line. If you count each strong syllable in the first line of “Amazing Grace,” you’ll count four, which means we have four feet to a line, with three feet every other line. So we would say it’s in alternating tetrameter and trimeter—iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter to be specific, since each foot is an iamb. (Poets happen to have a nickname for this alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter: they call it common meter.)

The iamb is perhaps the most common foot in English poetry, and it’s characterized by a weak syllable followed by a strong one. If you’ve studied music, an analog to this is like a pickup to the downbeat. Another foot is called the trochee, which is the inverse of the iamb and goes strong-weak. There are also feet for three syllables, like the anapest, the dactyl, the amphibrach. It can be hard to keep track of the many and varied feet. So honestly, most of the time I just make use of two simple feet categorizations: duplet and triplet.

So when I jot down some lyrics in Obsidian, I make sure to tag them something like #duplet #tetrameter. And when I record a melodic idea onto my phone, I eventually share it to my desktop and drag it into a new note, Obsidian embeds the audio file, and I tag it something like #triplet #trimeter. (Obsidian even has a built-in audio recorder plugin, which I admittedly might benefit from using more often.)

Keep in mind, I’m counting the strong and weak notes of the melody, just as I would for the words. When in doubt, just scat, and take note of which scat syllables are strong and which are weak. Once you’ve collected your lyric and melody notes, it’s time to make a new note that will serve as a database for each poetic meter. In my “Stuff in triplet trimeter” note, I use Dataview to list all notes with the relevant tags.

Obsidian plugins like Dataview use in-line code blocks to perform functions. You can learn more about all the functions of Dataview here, but the code to list all notes in a poetic meter is simple. Just copy and paste this into your note:

```dataview
list from #triplet and #trimeter
```

“Stuff in duplet tetrameter” would follow suit, simply replacing the tags for such. Now I can find if I’ve got any tunes in duplet tetrameter that suit my words, or whatever.

I often use this technique when songwriting, as it helps me integrate musical and lyrical ideas that hadn’t fully incubated. When I was writing “‘Til Everybody’s Free” I poached some old lyrics from a song that didn’t come to fruition in order to complete verse two. I also used this technique heavily when writing “Thinking ’bout John Prine” to collage together a rambling bunch of disparate thoughts that interacted together interestingly.

Thanks to this method, chances are I have some decent parts in the junkyard lying around, especially if I take the time to write down every little lyric or record every ditty that occurs to me. If you decide to give this approach a go, let me know if you improve upon it or have any questions.