Lesson 2 · Jolene

The Story Song

A story song is not a story set to music. It is a compression — a whole life, a whole relationship, a whole truth reduced to three minutes and a melody. The story song takes what a novelist needs three hundred pages to say and says it in three verses and a chorus.

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.

Read the rest