Song lyrics hold a special place in our hearts, but what pieces inspire our local talent?

• Radio presenter Vic Galloway picked a song by the Sex Pistols (see below)

Events will include a Voice of a City concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, at Edinburgh's Usher Hall, a range of workshops and discussions to help you get started writing your own song lyrics, as well as gigs, film screenings, panel sessions, and more.

Ali Bowden, Director, Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature Trust, explains, "Over the last five years we've run lots of projects in all sorts of areas but we'd always secretly wanted to do something on song lyrics because they have huge power, and in our City of Literature we're passionate about the power of words. When Glasgow was designated a Unesco City of Music, then we knew we had our excuse to get lyrical! We're hoping folk will hop onto the website and share their story of how the words in a particular song move them."

Everyone in Britain, and especially residents of these two central-belt cities, is being encouraged to visit the Let's Get Lyrical website and weigh in about the songs they love best, by sharing the personal stories that have won these tunes such a special place in their hearts.

Lyrics are the most universal form of the written word. They help us articulate and make sense of the very stuff life is made of: joy, loss, euphoria, or even a broken heart. Dr Gavin Wallace, literature portfolio manager at Creative Scotland, says: "I read album sleeves and memorised song lyrics long before I could call myself a disciple of poetry and literature, and I know I'm by no means alone: song lyrics are literature in its most fundamental, democratic and universal form."

To kick things off here, eight of the UK's best loved musicians and writers have revealed the stories behind the lyrics that carry them through life. Then in February, there will be competitions and prizes, podcasts by leading musicians, and activities to suit every age group.

For information about the programme, to tell your stories, and read the unedited versions of these celebrity picks from 1 February, visit www.letsgetlyrical.com

Vic Galloway, BBC Broadcaster, journalist and musician, has chosen Sex Pistols' Bodies.

When a friend brought back the infamous Never Mind the Bollocks... album one day I was simultaneously astonished, repulsed and smitten. Although the low-slung melodies and noisy guitars were thrilling, it was the sneering vocalist and the subjects about which he sang that really connected. Johnny Rotten was taking on the whole world with words. The monarchy, the government and all manner of social stigmas were put to the sword in three-minute songs. It was empowering and very scary. Sex Pistols moved me then, and still do today. I realised song lyrics could be about anything, and could carry real weight.

As my mother was a staunch Catholic and to an extent had indoctrinated my brother and me, the high (or low) point on the album was the song Bodies, a self-loathing, guilt-ridden account of abortion, screamed at ear-blistering volume. Full of swearing, this was the most shocking thing I had ever heard at the age of ten, and still remains one of the most visceral and frightening lyrical outbursts in the history of song-writing, in my opinion. The full lyrics are available at: www.metrolyrics.com/bodies-lyrics-sex-pistols.html

Barbara Dickson, singer and double Olivier Award-winning actress, has chosen The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, by Ewan MacColl.

I absolutely love this song, which I first heard in the 1960s, in folk clubs. All over Scotland this song would have been sung, usually to a simple guitar or banjo arrangement. When Ewan sang it himself, the subject of the words would have been playing the banjo for him – Peggy Seeger, who apart from being his wife, was also his soulmate. They worked together as a duo, ran the Singers Club in London, and made many wonderful recordings.

In my opinion (this is] the finest love song ever written. It has adoration in its tone and yet is utterly unsentimental. We understand (its] tender feelings entirely and, if we've been lucky in love, can identify the longing to be in physical contact with the object of our own desire.

From The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

I thought the sun rose in your eyes

And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave

To the dark and the empty skies, my love,

To the dark and the empty skies.

The first time ever I kissed your mouth

And felt your heart beat close to mine

Like the trembling heart of a captive bird

That was there at my command, my love

That was there at my command.

Anouchka Grose is a writer and psychoanalyst, but has also worked as a musician. Her choice is Talking Loud and Clear, by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

I knew that OMD sang about saints and science, but that was about it. When I recently spotted one of their albums in my boyfriend's collection I put it down to youthful bad taste. So when he started playing Talking Loud and Clear, I wasn't prepared to find myself crying. Everything about it was beautiful — the voice, the words, the way the melodies locked together at the end like a miraculously-solved Rubik's cube. It was as familiar as a rediscovered diary.

It's about talking and not talking, and how feelings can be given away by tiny gestures. The record was released when I was 14. I was very interested in the whole business of falling in love, but couldn't imagine it ever happening. How did people ever make the shift from speaking to kissing? In the song, the question is answered. If two people really like each other it: "'Doesn't really matter what (they] do or what (they] say, with every little move (they] make (they] give it all away."

Having lived through marriage, childbirth, divorce, and a lot of other stuff, the song must have triggered memories. But at the same time it described a kind of romantic intensity that doesn't seem to wear off. It alludes to the mysterious links people make with each other.

From Talking Loud and Clear

Saying just what we feel

Lying in the grass

We've got time on our hands

Body next to body

With silence all around

We understand each other

But didn't make a sound

Promises and promises

Of vows we shall return

Facing one another

I thought my heart would burn

You turn to move away

But then get closer to me

Talking loud and clear

Saying just what we feel today.

Alan Bissett is a novelist, playwright and actor. He chose Time, by Pink Floyd.

Song lyrics make the heaviest impression on you when you're young, and Roger Waters is all too aware of it. The band's most famous album, Dark Side of the Moon, is about the everyday stresses and strains that drive us to the edge of madness. In Time, Waters focuses on a feeling which almost everyone can relate to: that life is passing us by. When we're young we think we'll live forever and that we have absolutely loads of time to do whatever we want.

I remember being very inspired by this as a teenager. I didn't want to feel like the figure in the song, who becomes aware too late that they've frittered their life away. The song urges us to realise our potential, and not just get dragged down by the grind and boredom of daily life. Waters is telling us to get on with living and exploring ourselves to our full capacity while we're here. "The time is gone, the song is over," Waters finally tell us, "Thought I'd something more to say." I never want to feel like that, and because of these song lyrics I don't think I ever will.

From Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over,

Thought I'd something more to say

David Greig, a playwright and theatre director, chose That Summer Feeling by Jonathan Richman.

I was 17 when I first heard this song drifting out of the tinny speakers of my radio cassette. I was sitting in my bedroom listening to Janice Long. My window would have been open because I would have been blowing cigarette smoke outside in the ludicrous hope my mother wouldn't smell it in the room. I'd be looking out across the lush green woodland lining the Water of Leith. A summer breeze would be blowing in. I would be writing my diary and wondering if I would ever dare to ask Jane Shanks out... or was it Gillian Ferrier? Or Adrienne? I don't know anymore but I can still conjure the feeling of that summer. The longing, the gathering knot of anxiety, the sense that time and those girls and my heart were all mixed up and somewhere amongst them was a chance at something... at I didn't know what exactly but whatever it was it would slip away unless I did something – reached out from dreaming and jumped into life.

That Summer Feeling is, essentially, a song sung by an older man to a young man. Its verses conjure up a teenage summer but each verse is ended by the sweetly sung line - "this summer feelin's gonna haunt you the rest of your life", at once both a warning and a lament. The singer is saying: "Whatever it is you have to do kid, do it now, while you're young, because if you don't, If you wait until you're older/A sad resentment will smoulder one day/And that summer feelin' will come taunt you/Woah woah/That summer feelin' will come haunt you/Woah woah/That summer feelin' will hurt you, later in your life.'

From That Summer Feeling

When there's things to do not because you gotta

When you run for love not because you oughta

When you trust your friends with no reason notta

The joy I've named shall not be tamed

And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it

When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it

When the teenage car gets the cop down on it

That time is here for one more year

Author Janice Galloway has chosen Lou Reed's Perfect Day

What's recalled in Lou Reed's Perfect Day is in no way extraordinary – "Sangria in the park, feed animals in the zoo, then later, a movie ... and then home." It's wholly attainable. What's perfect is the cumulative effect of all these tiny concessions to grace and simply being in the world. Who is this "perfect day" being spent with? Well, it could be anyone and anything: that's part of the beauty. The listener can imagine it being a recollection of a loved one, a wished-for friend who as yet does not exist, an absent lover or family member, a child or vanished possibility. They can even make it into anything they like and not a person at all. It's frequently claimed Lou Reed wrote the song about heroin, which adds a whole new dimension again. The cautious hope of the words speaks to anyone who ever yearned for pleasure in small things.

The song means a lot to me because I've lost a lot of people and I can remember the feeling of being with them, in these words: "You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good". "You're going to reap what you sow" is always a good thing to bear in mind.

From Perfect Day

Just a perfect day,

Problems all left alone,

Weekenders on our own.

It's such fun.

Just a perfect day,

You made me forget myself.

I thought I was someone else,

Someone good.

Oh it's such a perfect day,

I'm glad I spent it with you.

Eddi Reader is a singer and songwriter. One of her favourite lyrics is Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man

Every time I try to think on a lyric, this one is constant. The second half of Dylan's verse caught me in the late 1970s and as soon as the lyric got my attention – (I spent my late teens in the late 1970s not knowing Bob Dylan. I had no elder brothers or sisters to play me their better than TOTP music that was available on my radio. I had to leave home before I was exposed to music that was not popular culture of my time or of my parents era.

The first four dramatic lines lead me Alice in Wonderland/ Snow White running from the huntsman like through the drama of our fear. The haunted, frightened trees ... I see that bleak dark forest landscape finally disappear to an open but cold calm.

Then Dylan gives it MASSIVE peace and redemption in the next four lines… My ever after favourite... Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands/With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves/Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

He writes like a painter, his paintings planted into my memory. As if I have experienced exactly that. Because of the song lyric I have sought it out and sung it in my head whenever I felt I was silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands ... usually on Irvine beach. No matter what crap was lying about it.

'Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves

The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves.

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.'