Top Sites for Finding Lyrics to your Favorite Songs: Sing the Hits

You've been there: A favorite song suddenly queues up in your iPod, jams out in the barroom jukebox, or floats out of someone's car radio and, in a heart beat, you're stamping your foot and playing air-guitar during the solos. But, when the verse and chorus rolls around, you're left humming the melody blankly without a clue as to what the artist is singing. You need to hunt up artists' lyrics, and fast. Remember: In order to jump on the bandwagon, you have to at least know the band.

Be it rock or hip hop, jazz or bluegrass, folk or country: Artists' lyrics can be hard to decipher. And while many musicians include an official copy of lyrics in their CD booklet, in today's age of downloading and iTunes, CD leaflets are a thing of the past for many consumers. Where then to go for expert sources of artists' music lyrics? Like most answers these days: The internet.

Assuming that you already know the name of the artist who lyrics you want, official artist and band websites can be the most reliable and user-friendly means to access artists' lyrics. For instance, if you want the lyrics to…let's hypothetically say…a Shakira song (I swear, honey, I was just looking for lyrics), simply go to www.shakira.com and quickly navigate to the lyrics section of the page (after a quick pit-stop at "tour pics"). However, lyric-hunters should know that not all artists posts lyrics to their songs on their website. Unfortunately, it's a hit or miss type of thing.

Whether you are left with a situation where an artist or band has omitted lyrics from their official website, or whether you unsure of which artist wrote or performed a specific song, or the name of the song itself, myriad sites proliferate throughout cyberspace to aid music lovers in search of lyrics. Note: These sites are not officially-sponsored by artists, meaning that many of the lyrics were either copied from fans' CD jackets or are unofficial interpretations. Still, overall, these websites provide accurate and complete lyrics to just about every song ever sung.

A few valuable websites for finding artists' music lyrics are: www.azlyrics.com (claiming to catalogue a complete list of artists' lyrics from A to Z); www.lyrics.astraweb.com (a website that allows users to search for lyrics by keyword, song, band, or album); and www.lyricsplanet.com (another large database of artists' lyrics organized by key phrase, artist, album, or song).

Each of these websites navigates differently. Spend a little time checking them out. Some websites are easier to understand than others-especially for internet novices. Also, certain sites might specialize in a certain genre of artists' music lyrics. For instance: one website might have a very complete catalogue of Top 40 material, but you come to find that they are sorely lacking in the lyrics of independent bands or out-of-the-way artists, or simply exclude entire genres (Country, hip-hop, etc…). My advice is to scour around briefly and find a website matched to your needs. Just by osmosis, you should be able to tell if a website caters to the bands you enjoy.

The internet is one of the most valuable and complete sources of information we have-use it. Throughout the catacombs of cyberspace lay websites specializing in everything from 70's television stars to Dungeons and Dragons to finding artists' music lyrics. Just be sure you use a site you understand and one that caters to the bands you like. Do that and pretty soon you'll be accurately belting Shakira during Monday morning's commute to the awe of all in earshot.