Write it backwards.

Put an unusual rhyme second & the word found to rhyme with it first.

In my song, Ol' Bum Toe -- not an unusual song -- I have this as a second verse.

I can tell there's a change in the weather
In this Ol' Bum Toe of mine
When I'm torn twixt a one and a t'other
This toe gives me a sign
And when it gets to screamin' like a special edition
Tellin' me which way to go
There's a whole lot of people I'm wishin'
Were as smart as my bum toe.

I wanted to write There's a whole lot of people I'm wishin' were as smart as my bum toe. I thought it was clever and cute. But that left me with a hard rhyme -- "wishin'." I started looking at variations on a rhyme and came up with "edition" -- I remembered the newsboys yelling on the corners "Special Edition!" and I had my rhyme. It also gave me another way to go on the idea that my toe give me the news - it's screamin' like a special edition.

Bob Dylan did it, often.

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

The idea that you must grab it fast if you wish to keep it is stronger than what you need that you think will last. So he uses the weaker line first and the stronger line, the more logical rhyme, second. Whether he did it intentionally or automatically is not the point, if he had done it enough in the past, it would have been second nature.

And later in the same song,

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence

Coincidence is a toughie to rhyme, tougher than "see" or "you," so he takes you to a simple rhyme first -- use your sense. You think, "oh, how clever, to have thought of such a complex rhyme for sense." But it wasn't really, he worked backwards.

It's not just the hard rhymes, sometimes easy rhymes can be written the same way. In Goodbye Jackson, I wrote,

Old enough for rambling, like my daddy done.
He was just a hobo. Iím a hobo's son.
I was only seven when I saw him go
Down to the Jackson train yard and out on the B&O
If that midnight train that's passin',
Is the one that took my daddy, Goodbye, Jackson

I liked the idea of using the name of a railroad, like it seemed to me that someone "riding the rails" would say it: he went out on the B&O.

So I wrote my line Down to the Jackson train yard and out on the B&O and then I wrote the line before it, I was only seven when I saw him go.

Most of this song was written the same way, I took the line I wanted and wrote the first line to rhyme with that,

Never had much schoolin', never had the time.
Never paid the taxman, never made a dime.

And the same with,

Count the country's cross-ties, takin' whatever comes.
Learn me a diffírent language, the slang of the railroad bums.


One way to handle that would be to write the key words you want, such as "never made a dime" and "railroad bums" in a hobo song, and then write the rhymes for them, work them in so the second rhyme comes first.

People will begin calling you clever.


Jon Batson
www.jonbatson.com
Author of The Songwriter's Hook Book at www.cdbaby.com/jonbatson3.