like the songs of MacColl and Leonard Cohen A further complication One draws its inspiration from traditional song - one does not. I don't think there's much difference. Cohen used an idiom based on French chanson (which has a folk underpinning) and apart from a few gestures towards rock&roll, stuck to it. MacColl ranged more widely, from "Shoals of Herring", which is faux-Hebridean, to "The First Time Ever", which is somewhere in between Jerome Kern and Steven Sondheim (I don't like it and I don't much like Sondheim either). As a music-theatre composer he had to be a stylistic magpie. At any rate, the singer-songwriter genre is not defined by stylistic features, but by social ones - who performs it, where and when, under whose auspices, and who for. (And thanks for starting to make an effort with the whitespace).
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