Lesson 8 · Jolene
The Porch Test
Would you play this song sitting on a porch at dusk? That is my test for every lyric that comes across my desk. Not "is it good" in some abstract critical sense. Is it real enough, human enough, grounded enough that it would hold up in the open air, with the crickets and the dark coming on?
The rest of this lesson
Jolene takes this apart properly inside Songmatter — the rest of the lesson, the exercise that goes with it, and a critic who reads what you write back.
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