I like the paleontological analogy: There is rarely anything new in good songs, just old emotions described in a new way. It also implies the need for care and patience--like the bones of a tiny dinosaur, the images and idioms that make a good song are fragile--a forced rhyme or inappropriate diction can mess up an otherwise terrific song: I love Townes van Zant's "Pancho and Lefty," but I am jolted by two word choices in one verse:

The day they laid poor Pancho low,
Lefty split for Ohio;
Where he got the bread to go,
There ain't nobody knows.

Pancho Villa was killed in about 1916, and if Lefty were his betrayer, he'd have been "growin' old" in the thirties or forties, maybe the fifties. "Split" for left suddenly and "bread" for money were jazz musician slang maybe in the sixties, and got picked up by hippies in the late sixties and early seventies. Van Zant clearly places the story teller earlier, so the diction strikes me as anachronistic.

This is a very minor point, and only struck me after I had heard the song enough times to have memorized the words without consciously trying to do so, and the song survives the flub quite well, thank you, thanks to the other five verses which are uniformly great. But a similar kind of thing could have the effect of a vapor trail in a western movie.

So finding just the right pieces of emotions and images for a song requires a very careful pick hand and a brush, not a back hoe.

--seed