I am not a songwriter in any professional sense. I write badly and slowly and then take the results out to a street corner. But I do study, and this is the list I study from.
A caveat about the word "popular" in the title. These are not the ten best-selling acoustic artists, and this is not a ranking. They are the ten names that show up on every credible list of great acoustic songwriters, which makes them the obvious curriculum for someone trying to get less bad at this. What follows is what I actually listen for in each one.
1. Bob Dylan
Start here because everyone else on this list did. "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" are the two I return to, and the second is the useful one: a breakup song that never once states the emotion, delivered over a fingerpicked pattern simple enough that any beginner can play it badly within a week. The lesson is that the words carry the weight and the guitar stays out of the way.
2. Joni Mitchell
Blue (1971) is the album, and "A Case of You" and "Both Sides, Now" are the entry points. Mitchell built her sound on open and non-standard tunings, which means the chord shapes under her songs do not exist in a normal chord book. That is the intimidating part and also the point: she was after harmonies that standard tuning cannot easily give you, so she changed the instrument rather than settling.
3. Paul Simon
"The Boxer" and "American Tune" are the two I have spent the most hours failing to play cleanly. Simon's right hand is the most technically demanding thing on this list that still sounds effortless, and "The Boxer" is worked out in an altered tuning with a capo rather than in open position. What I take from him is that the guitar part can be a second melody instead of an accompaniment.
4. Leonard Cohen
Cohen was a published poet and novelist before he was a folk singer, and it shows in the order of operations. "Suzanne" began life as a poem. "Hallelujah" accumulated verses across notebooks over years, and a major label passed on the record it eventually landed on. The craft lesson is unglamorous: the lyric gets rewritten far more times than anyone rewrites a chord progression.
5. Nick Drake
Pink Moon (1972) is a masterclass in taking things away, and "River Man" is the one that stops me every time. Drake used unusual tunings so that one-finger and two-finger shapes produced complicated harmony, which freed his picking hand to do the detailed work. That trade, simplify the left hand to liberate the right, is the single most practical idea on this page.
6. James Taylor
"Fire and Rain" and "Sweet Baby James" are the standards, and Taylor's fingerpicking is the reference point for what a warm, unhurried acoustic guitar sounds like. He is on the list for phrasing more than for writing. Nobody rushes less. If I could steal one thing it would be his willingness to let a line sit before the next one arrives.
7. John Prine
His self-titled debut came out in 1971, when he was twenty-four, and it contains both "Sam Stone" and "Angel from Montgomery". "Sam Stone" is about a veteran with a Purple Heart and a heroin habit, and Prine wrote it not long after his own army service. He wrote about ordinary people without condescending to them, and he was funny in the same songs where he was devastating. That combination is rare and I have never once managed it.
8. Tracy Chapman
Her debut arrived in April 1988 with "Fast Car" and "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution" on it. "Fast Car" is a whole life compressed into four verses and a repeating figure, and the arrangement is close to nothing. The reason it belongs on a busker's study list is that it works with one voice and one guitar in a room, which is the only configuration I ever actually perform in.
9. Elliott Smith
Either/Or (1997), and specifically "Between the Bars", a two-minute waltz about drinking that treats the subject almost tenderly. The title works on two levels at once and neither is explained. Smith's quiet arrangements hit harder than his loud ones, which is a fact I keep having to relearn every time I am tempted to add another part.
10. Gillian Welch
Time (The Revelator) (2001), written with David Rawlings and performed largely on two acoustic guitars with close harmony over the top. "Elvis Presley Blues" has been covered by a long list of people including Joan Baez. Welch is the most recent writer here and the one who most convincingly proves that the austere version of this format is not a period piece.
What I am still trying to take from them
Three things, none of which I have. The first is patience with a lyric, which Cohen and Prine both demonstrate in different registers. The second is the confidence to subtract, which Drake, Chapman and Smith all share and which argues directly against my instinct to solve songs the way I solve software. The third is harmonic curiosity. Mitchell and Simon both went looking for chords that standard tuning would not hand them, and my own chord vocabulary is small enough that I mostly do not know what I am missing.
The street sorts this out faster than any amount of listening does. Play a song built on any of these principles to people walking past and you find out inside a minute whether you understood the lesson or just admired it.
More in this pillar: Music · What busking teaches you in the first sixty seconds · The instruments, and what each one is for
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