A new way to watch the songs

There's a batch of new videos up and they look nothing like the old ones. I want to explain what they are and why I made them, because it's a real change.

Up to now every song had what I'd been calling a lyric video — words on screen, highlighting along as they're sung so you can follow. Those are useful and they're staying. But I've stopped calling them lyric videos, because that isn't what they are. They're karaoke. That's the honest name and it's a good thing to be. They're all still up, now under a playlist that says so.

The new ones I'm calling Lyric Posters.

One line at a time. Big type filling the frame. A flat field of colour behind it, and then it cuts to the next line the moment the next line is sung. No footage, no motion, no slow drift across a beach photo. Just the words, set like a gig poster, held for exactly as long as they're sung and not a second longer.

The reason is simple: I wanted the words to be the thing. In a karaoke video your eye tracks a highlight across a line, which means you're reading ahead and behind at once. In these there's one line on screen. You read it, you hear it, it goes. It's closer to how a lyric actually lands when you're just listening.

Every song gets its own palette, pulled from what the song is about. "Lake Day" is deep water blue, shallow green, weathered dock brown. The ballpark song is outfield grass and infield clay. The beach songs run turquoise and sand with one hot coral for the hook. Nothing is decorative — if a colour is on screen it's because it's in the song.

The recurring line in each song gets a look of its own that never changes, so when the hook comes back around you recognise it before you've finished reading it. That was the fiddliest part to get right and it's the part I'm happiest with.

One practical note, because it's the detail that makes or breaks the whole thing: they cut on the sung word, not on the beat. That sounds like a small distinction and it isn't. I tried it on the beat first and it reads as lag — your ear gets the word and your eye gets the card a fraction later, and even when you can't name what's wrong you can feel it. On the word, it snaps.

There are 82 of them up now with more coming. They're in their own playlist so you can put it on and let it run.

If you've got a song of mine you like, go and look at it in this format. I think you'll notice a line you'd stopped hearing.