I’ve been musing lately – as I am wont to do – on what makes for a well-written song. A couple things prompted this most recent musing. First, I received the feedback form from songs I entered into the Great Lakes Songwriting Competition (two of which received honorable mentions); and, second, I listened to Emily Shackelton on this week’s Prairie Home Companion. No great insight from the feedback forms, except that my songwriting in general was praised for good stories and vivid imagery and nice melodies; the songs were faulted for being too long (one reviewer seemed to see 4 minutes as the longest acceptable length) and the lowest rated aspect of all of them was the “hook.” Which I’ve heard before, although, honestly, if Between the White Lines doesn’t have enough of a hook, I’m pretty much doomed at hook-writing. Emily Shackelton, on the other hand, can write hooks. She was, ages ago, a 10-year old girl competing on the Prairie Home Companion Talent from Towns under 2,000 competition. I’m enough of a longtime PHC geek that I even remember listening to her on that show. She was back on the show a decade and a half later this past weekend. In the interim she went to Berklee College of Music and now makes her living as a songwriter in Nashville. And her songs were extremely well-written. I found myself paying extremely close attention, because they were so carefully crafted. The first one was called “memories don’t” (the hook!), and that line was used to complete several different phrases in the chorus. (“This world can keep on changing, cause I know what they won’t: people change; memories don’t” was the first iteration; the next time around it was “feelings fade; memories don’t,” and finally “people die; memories don’t.”) But what I realized was that I was listening to her songs as songwriting lessons (which they were!) but not as songs. They would have won the Great Lakes Songwriting Contest. But if you’re spending your listening time appreciating how well-written a song is, you’re not experiencing that song. And that’s what I’m looking for in a song. Maybe for some people the hook is what makes that happen – and certainly the hook is what’s going to make the vast public of listening-in-the-background audience members like the song. But for me I want to be drawn in to the song, and a textbook-perfect song might not be the one that does it for me. I want the one with the good story and vivid imagery.