I don’t usually engage in these discussions. I tend to prefer the comfort of the bleachers.

But I had to jump in this time, because this one seems so simple. Unless you’re just bloody lucky – like the Beatles were – you don’t get a hit coming out of the box unless you’ve got the basic skills down pretty pat. Learning the skills teaches you when and where you can get away with breaking them. And push the envelope. If you’ve got “spark”, but no skills, there’s no way you’ll get your message across. If you’ve got the skills, but no spark, you’re just a mechanic, and mechanical doesn’t move too many people. But build on those skills and twist them to your own “artistic” vision, and you might just have a chance of being the next 10 year journeyman overnight success.

You gotta hone your skills, whether you’re a baseball player, a video game designer, a machinist, a teacher, a rocket scientist…or a songwriter. When you’ve got the basics, then you can push the logarithms in an unexpected direction, and come up with the next big breakthrough. But unless serendipity comes a’calling, without the skills, nothing’s going to happen. And you’re not going to accomplish it in a vacuum. You learn from books, from example, from Zen songwriters, JPF posts that work and don’t work for you, anywhere you can, even NSAI guys. A lot of it you can chuck. But you can’t figure out what to chuck until you’ve practiced, practiced, practiced it all.

Those NSAI guys were just mechanics. They’re working from the manual, and lots of times the manual is myopic. It can’t see the forest for the trees. Think about your car. How many times have you taken it into a mechanic and they can’t fix it? Or they try, and you end up coming back over and over again before – if you’re lucky – it’s almost as good as it was before. Most mechanics can barely fix your car, much less turn it into a finely tuned racing machine. It takes an intuitive imagination to be a great mechanic. What makes you think the NSAI guys are any different from the average mechanic?

Paul and Van’s lyric here, IMO, is still rough around the edges. But it’s got spark. It’s provocative. Some people are not going to like the message. After all, this is America, and we’re not the slimmest of cultures on this planet. It hits close to home. But it is reminiscent of those classics mentioned earlier, even though it’s not on a par with them. Quite yet. Go back and pull up “Fool On The Hill” and read it again. It’s a great lyric (IMO), but one that is still debated to this day as to what it really means. Because of that, the NSAI guys woulda torn it up and sent John and Paul packing, even though it has strong mechanics; good rhyming, great meter, especially in that all important couplet. It’s just not wrapped up nice and concrete. The mechanics don’t like that. But the Boys had the skills down well enough by then to use all the tools correctly, then take a step beyond them, in a different direction. And now it's a classic.

I’ve rambled. A lot. Sorry. So what’s the point? If the NSAI guys of the world point out mechanical errors of rhyme, syntax, meter, rhythm, tense, plotline, POV, cliches, redundancy, lack of direction, and stuff like that, well, listen up. They might be onto something, and that something may make you a better songwriter. But when they start talking about revising the motives and fates of your characters, or what you should and shouldn’t write about, beware. Remember. They’re just mechanics, not race car designers. Stick to your vision.