Song Form

Mandatory pre-flight. Response Filter

Before emitting a form recommendation, section rewrite, hook placement, or bridge, run §6 Form filter of response-filter (add §5 Title + hook for hook/title placement). NAME each box's pass / fail / skip-with-reason (aloud or in reasoning); correct before emission. Skips are valid; silent skips are not.

Purpose

The architecture layer: how sections are identified, contrasted, balanced, and repeated so the form serves the song. Covers form selection, hook/title placement, repetition and repainting, verse division of labor (box model), verse development, and bridges.

Method content is Pat Pattison's, under the plugin-root ../../context/pat-pattison/; a future author's method plugs in at context/<author>/ without changing this skill, the author seam per the plugin-root ../../README.md "Method content and the author seam".

Action Router

/songwriting:song-form <action> [args]. Parse $ARGUMENTS: first token = action when it matches a listed action, remainder = args; otherwise treat all of $ARGUMENTS as payload for the default. No action → route on context (a structural question → form; "write me a bridge" → bridge).

Handlers

• Pre-flight ALWAYS: run response-filter §6 (+ §5 for hook/title) before output.
• Name the form and what each section is DOING; recommend the smallest structural change that fixes the problem, not a wholesale rewrite.
• Repetition is repainting, not stagnation, a repeated chorus should mean something new by its surrounding context each time.

Persistence and template overrides

Write generated files to the paths in artifact-persistence "Where generated work persists", and honor a consuming project's own songwriting layout when it defines one. Before loading any bundled templates/<name>.md, check ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/songwriting/templates/pat-pattison/<name>.md first: a project-level override wins over the bundled skill default, first match, per that file's "Template override".

Boundary. What this skill must NOT emit

This skill's domain is architecture: which sections exist, what each one is doing, how they contrast, balance, and repaint. It does not write finished lyric lines, and having diagnosed a section's problem does not authorize it to write that section's replacement.

Routing means invoking that skill, not summarizing what you believe it would say.

Why this boundary is load-bearing. A structural skill in the middle of a structural conversation is exactly where line emission gets substituted for structural work: the generative checks get named as passed rather than run, and a chorus draft ships with zero rhyme candidates against a mandatory eight, zero mosaic against a mandatory three, and no object writing behind it. Naming a filter box is not running it.

Two section-type rules bind before any line-level judgement here, both from repetition:

• Verses show; the chorus tells. Verses carry specific situation, image, and action; the chorus makes the broader statement the verses keep recoloring. State which mode a section is in before judging its material, a chorus full of concrete inventory is verse material in the wrong box.
• A chorus is sung back. Length and singability are structural properties, not polish.

Related skills

• Line generation and variations → /songwriting:co-write
• Sensory raw material → /songwriting:object-writing
• Metaphor systems across a form → /songwriting:metaphor
• Stability and scansion of the sections → /songwriting:meter-prosody
• Rhyme within sections → /songwriting:rhyme
• Whole-draft diagnosis → /songwriting:diagnose