Arguably it's actually easier to write poetry in song form than on paper, easier to conjure images and manipulate emotions if you have voices and instruments to help you. But still, music reaches people. Phrases in songs have changed the lives around you, and lines in books of poetry mostly have not. The best lyrics can touch people who would have considered themselves beyond words' reach. Storytelling, at least in a pop context, is much harder.
Most pop lyrics are no more narrative than measure-counting.
Even a compact short-story is ten or twenty times as long. But the scale of a story is not measured in word-length, it's measured in conveyed experience, and a song has a human voice to lift its words off the page. Its narrator is not part of its story, so we learn nothing from listening to him that we couldn't learn from reading. We never find out, and indeed we're given no cause to believe it matters. Think how much deeper and more intense the song could have been if the narrator had been a Chippewa, standing outside the sailors' church in Detroit listening to a bell ring for a handful of men whose ship sunk in a storm, weighing this individual tragedy against all the bells that didn't ring for the genocide of his people, and searching for some reconciliation between the two in an animistic biography of the lake.