write-song

name

write-song

description

Use when writing a new song lyric for any of the seven bands (Guessed, Laundry, Lucy Might, Purple Dog, The Bell Knows My Name, Coase Guard, Ultracoase). Triggered by requests like "song for Guessed", "another laundry track", "make new song for purple-dog", "another gypsy-emo song", "write me a lucy-might song", "a Coase Guard track", "an Ultracoase song", or a bare theme with no style named (in which case ask which band). This is the only entry point for song requests — the seven style specs are reference files it reads, not separate skills.

write-song

Writes a new song for one of the seven bands, checks it against the shared trope library so nothing gets reused across the catalog, and saves it using the existing file convention.

Band lookup

Resolve the request to a band folder using this table (persona/genre names are historical aliases — users may say either):

Band folder	Persona / genre aliases
guessed	Guessed, lurker, lurker trip-hop
laundry	Laundry, dissociative-hardcore, dissociative hardcore
lucy-might	Lucy Might
purple-dog	Purple Dog, institutional-hardcore, institutional hardcore
the-bell-knows-my-name	The Bell Knows My Name, gypsy-emo, gypsy emo
coase-guard	Coase Guard, industrial hip-hop, the Foreman, the Quartermaster
ultracoase	Ultracoase, synth new wave, Ultravox-adjacent

If the request names a theme but no band and it isn't clear from context, ask which band before doing anything else.

Workflow

1. Resolve the band (see table above).

2. Read <band>/template.md (persona, structure, devices, band-local rotation rules) and <band>/styles.md (Suno style-prompt variants for this band).

3. Read .claude/tropes/library.md.

4. Draft the song per template.md, picking a fresh theme/dial/arrangement per its own "don't let it calcify" guidance.

5. Two-layer trope check, both mandatory:

   • Mechanical (deterministic): run .claude/tropes/check.sh <draft-file> on the draft. A PERM or BAN hit means the draft changes — revise and re-run until it exits clean. A WATCH or COOLED hit (stock words like frost/Tuesday, or a ban whose last use is 60+ songs back — the script computes this) is allowed only with a stated, song-specific justification in the conversation — never as an unexamined reflex.
   • Fuzzy (judgement): check the draft's constructions-with-slots and imagery motifs against the Constructions and Imagery / Motifs sections of .claude/tropes/library.md. The mechanical pass only covers exact anchors — a fresh sentence in a retired grammatical shape or a re-instantiated motif will pass the script and still must be caught here. Any match, in any category, means revise the draft to avoid it, then re-check. A device only needs to appear once in the library to be off-limits; there is no "safe to use twice" tier.

6. Build the style prompt from styles.md and the song's dial position, and state the adaptation decision out loud before saving: name the dial position, then either (a) what you changed from the base variant and why, or (b) why the base variant already fits this specific song exactly. The .style.txt is always saved per song — it's the paste-target Suno actually uses, so an unchanged default still gets its own copy, and identical files across songs are fine when considered. What's not fine is skipping the consideration: a variant pasted wholesale with no stated justification is a skipped step, not a default.

   Adaptation is graduated — reach for the lightest rung that fits:

   • Reorder (the usual move): Suno appears to weight terms by position — front-loaded terms dominate, and very long prompts risk losing the tail — so moving this song's lead texture to the front of the same term list changes the emphasis without changing the band's vocabulary. A wink-heavy song leads with the spoken-breakdown term; a chant-forward song leads with the gang-hook term; the default order is itself a statement that the song sits dead-centre.
   • Swap or add a term when the dial position needs a texture the base list lacks (or needs one removed) — per that band's own styles.md rotation guidance.
   • Rewrite only when a song genuinely departs from the band's core sound.

   Then save both output files:

   • <band>/<slug>.txt — the lyric, where <slug> is a short kebab-case phrase drawn from the song (matching the existing convention already used across all other band folders).
   • <band>/<slug>.style.txt — the flat, single-paragraph Suno style prompt. No markdown, no headers — just the prompt text itself, exactly as it will be pasted into Suno.

7. Log the new song's notable devices into .claude/tropes/library.md: add each one under the right category (Constructions / Phrases / Imagery / Motifs) with a one-line description, one example, the source song, and a "Logged at catalog size N." line (N = current lyric-file count across all seven band folders — check.sh prints it on every run) — following the exact entry format already in the file. Then mirror every entry that has a greppable anchor into .claude/tropes/banned-patterns.tsv (severity BAN with LOGGED_AT = N, or WATCH only for stock-word-style flags; PERM is reserved for devices that calcify across multiple songs, never a first use): a distinctive substring for exact phrases, a regex skeleton for mechanically-expressible constructions. An entry logged in the library but not mirrored into the TSV is invisible to the next song's deterministic check — the two files update together, in the same commit. This is what makes the next song's check in step 5 catch a second use, and the LOGGED_AT value is what lets it cool 60 songs later.

Trope library discipline

The library is cumulative and cross-band by design — a device logged from a Purple Dog song blocks reuse in a Bell Knows My Name song just as much as in another Purple Dog song. Never skip step 5 or step 7. Never edit or remove an existing library entry to make a draft pass — if a draft collides, the draft changes, not the library.