I believe

Markus has recorded a piece of music singing some kind of English nonsense text. Thus the song already sounds English, I'll just have to find some matching words. Only recently, I had quite some difficulties finding lyrics for songs that had been recorded in German. I actually gave up on two songs altogether because the stresses simply wouldn't match. Much easier with an English dummy text! Markus' working title is "I believe", I've already made it "I believe in our love" since that matches with a line that's repeated quite often.

So, how do I go about it?

First step: analyzing the structure of the song.
Actually it doesn't matter if I call the distinctive parts "chorus", "verse", or "bridge". When I listen to a song the first time the structure is not yet clear, so I use to name the parts simply "A", "B", "C" etcetera. "I believe" has the following structure as for the vocal parts:
A - A - B - C - A - B - C - C - C - C

"B" might be devided into two similar parts. "B" and "C" actually belong together - like pre-chorus and chorus, where "C" serves as outro, it's faded out at the end.


Second step: counting syllables.
I actually put down the dummy text or whatever words might fit, they need not make sense at all. Next I just count the syllables where duplicated vowels - two notes like in "say-ay" - may actually make either one or two syllables.
For example, part A has 4 lines with 8-9, 7-8, 7-8, and 7 syllables. The second and third lines are identical, they are the ones I intend to make "I believe in our love", where "our" makes two syllables, and "love" has to be sung "lo-ove".

Third step: marking the stresses.
That's easiest done in the dummy lyrics that I've put down by just underlining the stressed syllables or using a text marker.

That's how far I've got today.