Classic Singer-Songwriter
Dylan / Mitchell / Cohen / Simon lineage. Confessional + literary + concrete-detail-heavy. Asymmetric stanza shapes carry grief; symmetric reserved for resolution.
Quick facts
Try this substyle
One-click starter prompt hand-tuned for Classic Singer-Songwriter. Exercises: SDV + PGI + STC
A classic singer-songwriter song about grief. Verses must use 3-line OR 5-line asymmetric stanzas with delayed rhyme — structure carries the somatic weight. Reserve symmetric 4-line quatrains only for the final acceptance section. No greedy spots: every strong-beat position lands on a content word.
Parent arc · SA#26
“Structure IS feeling. Asymmetry is grief; symmetry is acceptance.”
Folk is the first arc where STRUCTURE is the load-bearing axis. The Structural Deviancy Value detects 3/5/6-line asymmetric stanzas + delayed rhyme + off-downbeat phrasing — the somatic vehicle for grief / panic / uncertainty. The Prosody-Greedy-Index operationalizes Pat Pattison's rule (function words must not land on strong beats). 5 substyles span traditional-folk → freak-folk.
The load-bearing primitive is SDV + PGI — applied to every folk lyric the forge produces, including Classic Singer-Songwriter.
Forbidden Archive · 10 failure modes
Classic Singer-Songwriter inherits the full Folk Forbidden Archive. The critic loop flags any of these by canonical name.
Other Folk substyles
Forge a Classic Singer-Songwriter song
The forge applies the folk substyle profile for Classic Singer-Songwriter, banned failure modes, and SDV + PGI as a pre-output gate.