According to my most utilized listening platform, my 2025 musical taste has had quite a songwriter vibe. In the spirit of “wrapped” lists, I thought it interesting to look at the lyrical content and poetic stylings of some of my top listened-to artists of last year and draw inspiration for the year ahead. To that end, every songwriter’s style will be integrated into a generative poetry prompt to help kickstart some lyrical, thoughtful, and perhaps first drafts for 2026.

Amigo the Devil

Top listened-to artist in my lineup and I honestly didn’t even need an algorithm to tell me that. His alternative rock music is grounded in dark storytelling. Every song feels deeply personal, but the story comes from a wonderfully twisted point of view. While my most played song was Dahmer Does Hollywood, for the purpose of this list I’ve chosen If I’m Crazy because it illustrates “the twist” so brilliantly well, down to the line breaks (or what I imagine to be line breaks in the breath pauses between lines).

‘Cause I’m a goddamn mess
for you
to clean up
and I like it.

With every little segment of this sentence I, the reader, feel like I’ve got the message figured out, and yet every segment following the first changes the overall meaning. The speaker is both vulnerable and damaged, acknowledging his shortcomings, yet unable to change. All I can say to Amigo’s general song speaker is go on, wave all your read flags, we’re still falling in love.

Prompt: give the voice to your inner villain. Write a poem inspired by the most flawed version of your speaker. Challenge your audience to empathize, regardless.

Casey Dienel

I kept this artist in heavy rotation in anticipation of her new album My Heart is an Outlaw that came out in October 2025. Musically, I’m not sure what genre to assign to this album. Ethereal, self-aware pop. Lyrical indie trance. In either case, it’s the lyrics that bring me back to Casey’s songs. The antithesis of Taylor Swift, she is a true poet without vying for the title. Her lyrics are raw, real, and self-reflective. In People Can Change, rather than bemoaning endings and embodying victimhood, the speaker assumes the responsibility of changing her mind as a symbol of evolution instead of failure. The lyrics are empowered and empowering:

Just 'cause I don't want to mother you
Doesn't mean I never loved you
Doesn't mean I don't hope
You'll find somebody who can

[…]

Remember when we met, you said
"I believe people can change."
And I said: "People can change their mind."
You said: "I believe people can change."
I said: "People can change their mind anytime."

This is confessional poetry gone to therapy, accessing the lyric through a high degree of self-awareness.

Prompt: write a heartbreak poem and then strip the melodrama by making your speaker take responsibility for their role in the heartbreak. Yes, ask a therapist how to do that if you have to.

Arctic Monkeys

This one is partly to show that I’m not an unemotional robot and I do sometimes go for hopeless romance. But also because Alex Turner is a kick-ass lyricist and honestly no lovesick teenager should go through life without experiencing the emo magic that AM has to offer. The song Arabella is one of the sexiest, most beautiful love songs ever written., If you simply must write an ode to that new crush, at least strive to get close to the Arabella standard with lyrics like these:

Arabella's got a '70s head
But she's a modern lover, it's an exploration she's made of outer space
And her lips are like the galaxy's edge
And her kiss the colour of a constellation fallin' into place.

This song is proof that love poetry isn’t always cheesy and it doesn’t have to be.

Prompt: write a love poem by using surprising imagery to paint the feeling. Take the feeling of love out of the body and make the speaker’s physical environment have the experience.

Puscifer

After dealing with the poetics of worldly delights such as love and heartbreak, it’s important to get a bit existential, so here is where Existential Reckoning comes in. Maynard James Keenan creates an experience rather than just music and lyrics. His songs feel complete and integrated, as he often writes lyrics in response to the music, as well as in response to spiritual matters. When it comes to lyrics, he’s a fan of wordplay and elevated vocabulary used with purpose. In Bullet Train to Iowa the lyrics guide the listener through an ayahuasca trip playing with the Iowa/ayahuasca sounds to create and maintain rhythm. The video is equally epic and trippy, enjoy! But my song choice for the list is Bread and Circus because of how the speaker accurately positions himself in the larger socio-political theme of the song:

Here we are in the middle of our existential reckoning
Long ago we all traded, regretfully abdicated
Our voice and our light
Self-sovereignty
Charge our command and means
Trade it all for bread and circus

The pawns and powers that be
Play checkers, chess and monopoly
(The pawns and powers that be play checkers)
For keeps, for lifе, for all
To the death, for our servility

If there’s on thing you should know about me as an editor, it’s that I am absolutely against voices that borrow a perspective not their own in order to access a theme that feels necessary to explore. What Maynard does is access the theme without righteousness, but by deliberately positioning the speaker in the accurate framework of their guilt and responsibility.

Prompt: write a poem about a large necessary theme without losing sight of who your speaker is. If your speaker is a middle-aged middle-class Midwesterner discussing the genocide of the Palestinian people, make sure they’re not speaking as a Palestinian victim, but from their own position as a middle-aged middle-class Midwesterner. Then convince your reader that your speaker’s perspective is valid and valuable.

The Mars Volta

Continuing with the existential lyricism, I bring you Cedric Bixler Zavala’s songwriting on Que Dios te Maldiga Mi Corazon both for the poetic impact and for the editing style. Often using the cut-and-paste method, the band established themselves as a progressive mixed-style phenomenon with cerebral lyrics that embody existentialism by creating meaning from the kaleidoscope of emotion explored through sound. In the song Vigil the lyrics revolve around love, death, and darkness and are often surreal, but manage to stay grounded through the personification of these abstract concepts rather than conceptualizing emotion.

I know the way he makes you hide
Even when the dose is fight or flight
And the orbits wait for a perfect name
Clean all the webs he left behind
And if you want, I can bury him out
By the salt of sea, in an empty grave
The past has a way of comin' clean

Prompt: write about a large universal concept by referring to it as a person.

Bonus editing suggestion: cut the poem into its individual lines and remix them at random. Does the concept character still come through?

Cocteau Twins

This is the kind of music you can get lost in. Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals are nothing short of magical incantation and her lyrics are what The Guardian called “impenetrable” and I couldn’t have used a better word myself. By using echolalia, she creates a sound tapestry that doesn’t need to make sense in order to be poetic. Trying to decipher the lyrics is pointless as they are in a language entirely its own, the sounds often Latin, often Germanic, and somehow neither and everything in between. I’ll share some lyrics as I’ve found them transcribed online, but I don’t necessarily believe they’re accurate and you should probably listen to Little Spacey yourself and make up your own mind.

It's time to go to work and he protests, you're gonna leave me
Then you're gonna punt, you're gonna dig with my pa
It's time to go to work and he protests, you're gonna leave me
Then you're gonna punt, you're gonna dig with my pa
It's time to go to work and he protests, you're gonna leave me
Then you're gonna punt, you're gonna dig with my pa

Prompt: write a poem by letting language devolve into echolalia, repeat a word or a line until it stops making sense and keep writing it in nonsensical language until the poem communicates through sound alone.

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