Custom Song for Someone: Use Facts, Not Adjectives

Two lines, same woman, same marriage.

"You light up my life."

"You reversed into the same bollard twice in one week."

The first one is a compliment. It fits your wife, my wife, and a stranger's wife equally well, which is the problem. The second one only fits her. It has a February in it, and a car park, and a scrape on a bumper somebody had to explain to somebody. A custom song is ruined by adjectives and saved by facts, and almost every homemade one fails in exactly the same place: the person writing it reaches for how they feel instead of what they know.

This is the method for not doing that. Collect five to eight facts before you write a single line, find the one that carries feeling without naming it, make that the hook, then spend the chorus on the feeling and the verses on the facts.

What you are actually buying, and what you are not

Say this part first, because you will find it out anyway.

We do not make audio. Not now, not later, not quietly in the background. What we do is write the words. Our AI song generator takes a brief and returns a title plus the complete lyric, already split into the [Verse], [Chorus] and [Bridge] tags that Suno reads. That costs 20 credits, which is $0.20 at 100 credits to the dollar (pricing). Then you paste that lyric into Suno, which performs it. Suno is not ours and we will not pretend otherwise.

So the whole thing is two steps and about twenty minutes: ten to fifteen minutes gathering facts and typing the brief, a minute for the lyric, five or six for Suno to sing two versions and for you to pick one.

The comparison that matters is not us against Suno. It is the two of them together against a custom song service, where a human songwriter does these same two steps for you and charges for the labour. Those services are a real business and often a good one, especially if you want somebody to hold your hand. The gap is orders of magnitude, though, and the part they are charging for most heavily is the part you are best at: knowing the person.

The adjective problem

Adjectives are ratings. Facts are evidence.

"Kind, beautiful, always there for me" is a five-star review. It tells the listener what verdict you reached and nothing about how you reached it. Worse, a language model given adjectives gives adjectives back, because there is nothing else in the input to build from. Feed a generator "she is my rock and my best friend" and the honest output is greeting-card verse, because you handed it a greeting card.

The test is one sentence long. Could this line be true of somebody else? If yes, it is not in the song. Run it on every line you write and most of your first draft dies, which is the point.

There is one legitimate exception and it lives in the chorus. More on that below.

Step 1: collect five to eight facts before you write a line

Not seven because seven is magic. Five is the floor because four facts make a fragment, and eight is roughly where a three-minute song stops having room.

Write them as a plain list, on paper or in a note, and obey two rules while you do it:

• No adjectives about her. None. If you catch yourself writing "her lovely handwriting", the fact underneath it is that she writes the letter g with a loop that does not close, and that is the one you want.
• Every item must be checkable by a third person who knows them. If her sister would read it and say "yes, that's her", it qualifies. If her sister would say "I mean, sure?", it does not.

Places to dig, roughly in order of how well they work:

1. Objects she refuses to throw away, and objects she replaces constantly.
2. Sentences she says with the same words every time.
3. A small, repeated failure. Not a flaw, a failure: the parking, the burnt first pancake, the phone charger she has bought six of.
4. One number: a street number, a year, a price, a distance, a count.
5. A place with a name. Streets, shops, bus routes, the specific bench.
6. Something physical: how she holds a cup, where she sleeps in the bed, the sound the stairs make when it is her.

Notice what is missing: her qualities, your feelings, the relationship's history in summary form. Those are the output, not the input.

Step 2: pick the fact that carries the feeling

Now sort the list, and this is where most people go wrong in an interesting way.

The funniest fact is usually not the hook. The bollard is a brilliant fact and a bad hook, because what it carries is comedy and recognition, not feeling. Put it in a verse, where it lands once, gets its laugh, and does not have to survive being repeated three times.

What you want for the hook is the fact that makes you feel something you cannot immediately name. You are looking for the one where, if you had to say out loud what it means, you would hesitate. That hesitation is the song. It means the fact is doing work that a word would flatten.

Concretely: "she will not throw out a dying basil plant, there are three of them on the sill" means she does not give up on things that are nearly gone. Write it as "she is loyal" and it dies on the page. Leave it as three dying plants and the listener does the work themselves, which is the only way anybody ever feels anything in a song.

Step 3: chorus for the feeling, verses for the facts

The division is not a style preference, it comes from how many times each part gets heard.

A chorus in a standard structure repeats three times. Facts do not survive that. The third time you hear a specific detail it has stopped being a detail and started being a slogan, and the listener tunes out. Feelings do survive it, because a feeling is what repetition is for.

A verse is heard once. That is exactly the budget a fact needs: arrive, land, leave.

The exception I promised: the hook line itself is fact-derived, so one image from your list does live in the chorus. One. The other three lines stay on what it means. If two or three facts creep into the chorus you have written a list set to music, and you will hear it on the second pass.

If the chorus is the part you find hardest, how to write a chorus goes at it properly, with the repetition mechanics and where the title line sits.

The worked example: a song for Marta

Marta is invented, so nobody's actual wife is in this article. Everything else below is real in the sense that matters: it is exactly what I would type, in the fields that exist.

The fact list

Eight items, and not one adjective about her in any of them:

1. Three half-dead basil plants on the kitchen sill. She will not throw any of them out.
2. A jar of five-grosz coins on the windowsill. She calls it the holiday fund. Six years in, it holds about forty zloty.
3. She says "okay, but last thing" before starting a new subject. There are always four more things.
4. She learned to make pierogi from a YouTube video with 112 views, because the woman in it was from her grandmother's village.
5. She sleeps with one foot outside the duvet, in February included.
6. She has read the same paperback four times and the spine is held together with tape.
7. She reversed into the same bollard outside the Lidl on Kolejowa twice in one week.
8. She answers the phone "yes, hello?" even when the screen says who is calling.

Facts 1 and 2 both carry feeling. Fact 2 carries a slightly sadder one, a holiday that never happens, so it goes in a verse. Fact 1 becomes the hook.

The theme field, verbatim

theme is the only free-text field on the generator, and it caps at 300 characters. That cap is the best thing about it, because it forces the choice. Here is exactly what goes in, 280 characters:

For Marta. Three half-dead basil plants she will not throw out. A jar of 5-grosz coins she calls the holiday fund: 40 zloty after six years. Reversed into the same bollard outside the Lidl on Kolejowa twice in one February week. Says "okay, but last thing", then four more things.

Count the names and the numbers: three, Marta, 5-grosz, 40 zloty, six years, Lidl, Kolejowa, February, twice, four. Ten anchors in 280 characters. That is the density you are aiming at.

The rest of the settings

• point of view: second, because the song is addressed to her and not about her.
• song language: en.
• audience age: 25-44, a run of two bands. This mostly steers vocabulary away from either playground or nostalgia register.
• structure: classic. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.
• hook direction: title-line, so the hook repeats the title instead of hiding in the middle of a line.
• vocal: male.
• music style: Folk, one of the 53 curated root styles in the select.
• emotional tone: love, playful, calm. Three is the cap and three is right here, because playful is what keeps the bollard from turning into a complaint and calm is what stops love becoming a power ballad.

Note that the tone list has twelve options and nostalgia is not among them. That absence is useful discipline: nostalgia is what you get from facts, not what you request.

What came back

Title: Nearly Gone

Chorus:

You keep the ones that are nearly gone. You water them. You leave the light on. You never say it, you just don't let go. I was nearly gone. You would know.

One image from the fact list survives here, the watering, and the other three lines are about what it means. Nobody is called loyal. The rhyme runs in pairs, gone/on and go/know.

Verse 1:

There's a jar of five-grosz coins up on the sill. Six years of them, and it's forty zloty still. You call it the holiday fund and you mean it. You've never once said where you'd spend it.

Five facts across four lines: the jar, the denomination, the six years, the forty zloty, and the name she gives it. Rhymed in pairs, the second pair slant (mean it / spend it), which is on purpose: a perfect rhyme there would have made the line sound pleased with itself.

Verse 2:

Twice in one week you reversed into the bollard outside the Lidl on Kolejowa, in February snow. You said "okay, but last thing", and then came four more things, and the fourth one was the thing you'd been trying to show.

This one rhymes only on lines two and four, snow/show, and leaves one and three open. The asymmetry with verse 1 is deliberate: two verses rhymed identically start to sound like a form being filled in.

Every noun in both verses came off the list. That is the whole trick.

The same person, done badly

Same wife. Same marriage. Here is the theme field almost everybody writes on the first attempt, 257 characters, so barely shorter than the good one:

A song for my amazing wife Marta. She is kind, beautiful and always there for me. She lights up every room and makes me a better person. She has a heart of gold and I cannot imagine my life without her. Thank you for everything, my love, forever and always.

Four adjectives, one heart of gold, and not one thing in there that could only be her. The output is not the generator failing, it is the generator being accurate about what it was handed:

You light up my life in everything you do, you chase away my clouds and make my skies blue. A heart of gold, a love so pure and true, I can't imagine one single day without you.

Run the test on it. Replace "Marta" in the brief with any name at all and every line still works, unchanged. That is the definition of a song that is not about anyone. It will still be pleasant, Suno will still sing it nicely, and she will still say thank you. She will not play it again.

Two briefs, 280 characters against 257, one minute of typing apart. The difference is entirely in whether you spent those characters on evidence or on verdicts.

Troubleshooting

"It came out generic"

Nearly always the theme field is the culprit, and you can diagnose that without rereading the lyric. Count the proper nouns and numbers in your 300 characters. Under four, and there was nothing in there to be specific about. Add streets, names, amounts, dates, and run it again. The second run costs another 20 credits, which is twenty cents, so iterate freely.

The rarer cause: you wrote good facts but wrote them as summaries. "She is always losing her keys" is a summary. "She has left her keys in the front door overnight three times this year" is a fact. Same event, and only one of them has a number in it.

"The name sounds wrong when sung"

Suno guesses stress from spelling, and it guesses badly on names outside English. Three fixes, in the order I would try them:

1. Respell it phonetically in the lyric text only. Not in the title, not in your brief, just in the sung line. Suno performs what it reads.
2. Move the name off the strong beat. A name that lands mid-line survives a wrong stress far better than one that lands on beat one.
3. Cut the name. This is the one people resist and it is usually right. If your facts are doing their job, the song is already unmistakably about her, and the name was only ever insurance against weak facts.

For Russian and other Cyrillic names, pronunciation in Suno covers the respelling patterns that actually hold up. And if the vocal sounds wrong in a broader way, that is a style-field problem rather than a lyric one: how to write Suno prompts is the right place for it.

"It is too sad"

Check two things, in this order.

First, your tone selection. If longing, sadness or heartbreak is among your three, that is the model doing what you asked. Swap one out for playful or hope and re-run.

If the tone chips look fine, the problem is upstream in your fact list, and this is the more common cause. Go back and read the eight items. If six of them are things that are gone, ending, broken, or dying, you have built a eulogy out of a birthday present. Marta's basil plants work because they are dying and she is fighting it, not because they are dying. Swap two facts for things that are still happening: what she is doing this week, not what she used to do.

"The in-joke does not land for anyone else"

This one is not a bug, it is a decision you have not made yet. Decide the audience before you decide the facts.

If the song is for her alone, at the kitchen table, go as private as you like. Eight facts nobody else on earth would understand is the correct answer and the whole point.

If the song is being played into a room, at a wedding or a fiftieth, the ratio changes. Roughly one universally legible fact for each private one. The private ones make her cry, the legible ones let the room in, and a room that cannot follow along drifts off well before the second chorus. The reliable move is to put the most private fact in verse 2, after the audience has already been given something they can hold.

The other lever is the setup line. One clause of context turns a closed joke open: "she calls it the holiday fund" does the work that "the holiday fund" alone cannot.

FAQ

Do you produce the finished audio? No. We write the title and the full lyric in Suno's section tags. Suno performs it. Two steps, two tools, and we would rather say so on the way in than have you find out on the way out.

What does it cost? 20 credits per generated song, which is $0.20 at 100 credits per dollar, and it is a subscription feature. Current terms are on the pricing page. Suno bills separately for the performing part, on its own plan.

How long does the whole thing take? About twenty minutes, and most of that is you thinking about the person. The generator takes under a minute. Suno takes a few more. The fact-gathering is the part worth slowing down for, and honestly the part worth doing even if you never make the song.

I am not a writer. Can I still do this? The facts are the writing. You are not being asked to rhyme anything or to find a metaphor. You are being asked to remember eight true things about someone you know well, which you are already better at than any model will ever be. Everything after that happens on the generator page.

Can the song be in a language other than English? Nine are supported: ru, en, es, de, fr, it, pt, ja, ko. Write your theme field in the same language you want sung, since the facts carry the texture.

Can I use their real name? Yes, and read the name section above before you do. A real name sung with the wrong stress is more jarring than no name at all.

What if the first version is wrong? Re-run it. That is what twenty cents a generation is for. The thing to change between runs is almost never the tone chips or the structure, it is the theme field: swap one fact out, put a different one in the first position, and watch what the hook does.

Is a gift song actually a good gift? As an occasion piece, yes, and personalized gift songs in Suno covers the practical side of handing one over. As a surprise for someone who hates being the centre of attention, think twice, or make it and play it to them alone.