You finish a verse, play it back, and the question arrives before the last chord has faded: is this song any good?
Most songwriters know that moment well. It feels like quality control but more often, it’s the very thing that stops a song in its tracks.
Nashville composer and singer-songwriter Jonah Kraut has a different take. In a recent guest essay for Hypebot, he draws on more than 20 years of recording projects to argue that “good” and “bad” are the wrong questions to ask about your own music while you’re making it.
The better question is whether the song sounds like you.
Kraut writes mostly about the studio. But his ideas apply just as well to the writing desk, so let’s look at what they mean for songwriters.
The Real Problem Is Judging Your Song Too Early
Kraut points to a specific stretch of the creative process: the space between the idea in your head and the finished thing you can hear out loud. That’s where every decision gets made, big or small, conscious or not. It’s also where self-judgement does the most damage.
He compares setting judgement aside to a meditation practice. You notice what’s there without labelling it. Done that way, it helps you understand your own voice and vision.
For songwriters, this middle stretch is the drafting stage. It’s the half-finished chorus, the verse with a placeholder line, the melody you’re not sure about yet.
Ask “is this good?” here and the answer is almost always “not yet”, because it isn’t finished. Plenty of songs get abandoned on that verdict when they only needed more time.
Kraut also makes the point that feelings rarely sort neatly into good or bad. Technical knowledge fades, but the feeling of a piece stays with you. If that’s true for listeners, it makes sense to hold your own drafts to the same standard.
Good Enough, And The Ramones
Kraut retells a well-known story about Johnny Ramone telling Paul Simonon of The Clash, more or less, that the Ramones were terrible and couldn’t play their instruments.
Whatever he meant by it, that roughness became part of what punk was. The music did fine without anyone’s approval on technical grounds.
He pairs that with an observation from Nashville, where he’s lived since 2009. In a town packed with talent, he realised you don’t need to be good to succeed there, just good enough. Quality turns out to be a lot more relative than it looks from the outside.
The lesson for songwriters is that the things that make your songs distinctive can look like flaws when measured against someone else’s yardstick.
An odd phrasing, a melody that doesn’t resolve where people expect it to, a lyric that’s plainer than fashion allows. Sand all of that off and you might end up with something technically better that nobody remembers.
Five Lessons For Songwriters
Kraut shares six moments from the recording studio where good versus bad turned out to be the wrong question. Here are the ideas behind them, translated for the writing stage.
1. Let the song set the rules
On one of his early band albums, the engineer worked by a simple rule: if you’ve booked 12 hours to mix a track, you spend 12 hours mixing it.
Now, that suits a detailed, layered production but Kraut’s band recorded loose and live with few overdubs, so hours of fussing over small details barely changed how the music felt.
His takeaway was that the music itself should decide the approach, not the other way around.
The same goes for songwriting. A rough, conversational folk song may not need five rounds of line-by-line revision. A tightly structured pop song might. Neither approach is right in general. It depends on what the song is.
2. Know what “done” looks like
Kraut tells a story about veteran Nashville session player David Ferguson. Asked whether a session had gone well, Ferguson reportedly replied: “Better than good, it’s done!”
You could read that as someone keen to pack up and go home. Kraut reads it differently. Knowing when something is finished is a skill that only comes with experience. It means the options have been tried, the decisions made, and the piece has found its identity.
Many songwriters never learn this, so they either abandon songs early or tinker with them forever. Try deciding what “finished” means for a song before you start revising it. Once it meets that bar, call it done and move on to the next one.
3. Check it still sounds like you
Kraut once heard a demo vocal of his own that had been comped, built from small pieces of different takes stitched together. It didn’t sound bad. It just didn’t sound like him, or like anything he’d sing live.
Songwriters can do the same thing to a lyric or melody. Rewrite a line enough times, swap in clever words, follow every bit of feedback, and you can end up with something polished that no longer carries your voice.
Kraut’s point is that knowing your own voice, sound and style tells you more about which decisions to make than any rulebook of quality.
4. Fit matters more than polish
Convinced a song needed more bounce, Kraut once re-recorded a bass part himself, doing his best impression of the band’s regular bass player. Listening back now, all he hears is the attempt. The original groove should have been left alone.
The lesson is all about how parts fit together, not whether each part is impressive on its own. In songwriting terms: does this line serve the melody? Does the chorus lift out of the verse?
A brilliant lyric that fights the rhythm of the tune is a worse choice than a plain one that sits right.
5. Leave some space
Two of Kraut’s projects point the same way. During a solo home-recording stretch, he layered parts as heavily as he could and still found that simple underlying changes in chords, texture and structure were what made the music his. He also ended up craving the experience of playing with other people rather than stacking up copies of himself.
On his recent project, Strange Passages, time limits stopped him filling out demos with extra parts. He left the empty space alone and focused on the performance and the emotion in the words.
Accepting the result only worked once he stopped judging it.
For songwriters, that’s a reminder that a strong song often rests on a simple foundation, and that not every gap needs filling. It’s also a nudge toward co-writing and playing with others, where you get a response from someone who isn’t you.
Write With Guilty-Pleasure Permission
Near the end of his essay, Kraut raises an idea worth sitting with. We all have guilty pleasures: songs, films or books we seem to enjoy for no sensible reason. We give them a pass, and we give ourselves a pass for liking them.
His question is whether we can make art the same way.
Children do it all the time. They sing, draw and make up stories with no thought for skill or standards, simply because the thing wants to exist.
Taste also shifts. What counts as good music changes as people and the world change. Writing to match today’s idea of quality means aiming at a target that’s already moving.
Why This Is Important From Here On
Kraut doesn’t mention AI, but his argument connects differently in 2026. AI tools can now turn out polished, competent, perfectly “good” songs in seconds. Clean rhymes, tidy structure, a hook in the right place.
That changes the economics of songwriting. When polish is cheap and endless, it stops being what sets a song apart. What a machine can’t hand you is your own way of hearing, seeing and experiencing the world: the phrases you’d actually say, the chord change you keep coming back to, the subjects only you would write about.
So the question “is this mine?” isn’t just a kinder way to treat your drafts. Over the next decade, it’s likely to be the question that decides whether your songs stand out at all.
Four Habits To Try
If you want to put Kraut’s ideas to work, here are a few simple places to start.
- Write the first draft without rating it. Get the whole song down before you ask any questions about quality. Judgement can wait until there’s something finished to judge.
- Set a “done” line before you revise. Decide what finished means for this song, whether that’s a complete structure, a melody you can sing from memory, or a lyric with no placeholder lines. When you hit it, stop.
- File it, don’t bin it. A song that isn’t working today might be exactly right in a year. Keep unfinished ideas somewhere organised so you can come back to them with fresh ears. Always remember… never, ever throw anything away.
- Listen back for you, not for good. When you play a draft back, ask whether it sounds like something you’d say and sing. If it does, you’re on the right track, even if it’s rough.
My Final Thoughts
Kraut’s message comes down to this: stop chasing an outside idea of good, and start chasing your own identity.
Listen inward rather than to the noise around you. Give yourself room to try more and go further, because that’s how you come to understand what your music actually is.
Your songs aren’t neither good or bad. They’re yours and that’s worth protecting.
