The reason it's taking me so long is that I want to make the best choices I can. I'm down to 7, so I'm almost there. Picking my favorite was the easiest. It caught my eye right away, and was the only song that I knew was one of top five from the start. There are some well-crafted songs that I really liked in the last cut, and a couple that are not so well crafted, but have a bit more life in them. Some are clever, some are meaty. They're all good.

I would definitely agree with the comment that not making it into the top five doesn't mean the lyric's no good, or even that it's not as good as one in the top five. I made some close calls for purely arbitrary, personal reasons. There are flaws in my top seven, and there are some great lyrics in the top dozen, and some really good ones in the top twenty. Now I have to figure out what I value more. I think, in the end, it's what the song has to say to me, whether I think about the song the next day, when it just pops into my head, whether I want to read it again. But I don't want it to be because I feel obligated because it fits in with what I learned in some songwriting workshop, or because it's what I think a lyric's supposed to be. In other words, it's gotta have heart.

Award-winning, original acoustic songs with "the kind of lyrics that make Nashville writers salivate."