The Power of Lyrics

I like thinking of lyrics as rock and roll poetry because that to me is like my background, it's like the city. If you manage to put that to loud drums and flash guitar riffs, that's kind of poetry as far as I'm concerned. Upstarts has a really no nonsense drive, starts with a great riff for example on the album. How do you make a song like that develop? Do you have banjos in the studio or just squeeze things into those one-hour demos? You can get away with anything if you've got an idea but there are some rules about how long they last.