Do abstractions lead to more conventional song structures? I was listening to the Mountain Goats’ Autoclave today on the way to pick up my ping pong table which has a conventional chorus-verse song structure and speaks abstractly about one’s ability to love and be loved. Concrete stories seem to demand that the musician fit the song structure around the story rather than vice versa, which leads to more awkward phrasings, rambling, and non-circularity. It seems hard to tell a story when you’re always going back to the same refrain.