Again, sorry for this delayed reply. As in the case of another posting of yours, this one got buried in the huge volume of postings in this discussion board in early March.
Strictly speaking, there’s a subject-verb disagreement in this song lyric: “All I hear is raindrops falling on the rooftop.” The linking verb should take the plural form “are” because it refers to both the notionally plural pronoun “all” as subject and the plural noun “raindrops” in the predicate, so the sentence should read as follows: “All I hear are raindrops falling on the rooftop.” That this should be the case can easily be checked by putting the sentence in this inverted form: “Raindrops falling on the rooftop are all I hear.” In this construction, it’s pretty obvious that the subject of the sentence is the noun phrase “raindrops falling on the rooftop,” where the head noun “raindrops” is no doubt plural, thus requiring the linking verb to be in the plural form “are.”
Having said that, however, I must acknowledge that the line in question is part of the lyrics of the song by Bythwood Dinavon/Tamia’s “Officially Missing You,” the first few lines of which are as follows:
All I hear is raindrops
Falling on the rooftop
Oh baby tell me why’d you have to go
Cause this pain I feel
It won’t go away
And today I’m officially missing you…
As we know, song lyric writers—like poets—sometimes need to take liberties with words and the language itself to achieve the tonality, cadence, and number of syllables they need for the lyrics of a song. For this purpose, society grants them the so-called literary license in recognition of their status as creative members of society. It’s a license that allows them to take minor liberties with language for creativity’s sake, the better to make their creative works aesthetically enjoyable and the better to entertain us. There is therefore no point in quibbling with the grammar violations that they occasionally are forced to commit for the sake of creativity and euphony.
