I believe in the perfect song. I believe, that is, in perfect songs — that such a thing is possible, that such a genre exists. A perfect song is a song that can't be improved upon, that would be ruined by the subtraction of any element from the whole, that communicates its wholeness, its integral quality, to listeners. You can never turn off a perfect song, no matter how many times you've heard it. You always have time for a perfect song, for that a perfect song always plays at the perfect time is the first rule of perfection.
Everybody knows a perfect song when they hear one, everybody has a list of perfect songs, and everybody's list of perfect songs is pretty much the same as everybody else's: "Amazing Grace." "You Are My Sunshine." "Hallelujah." "He Stopped Loving Her Today." "Summer Wind." "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." "Let's Stay Together." The rules are so well-known that there's even a perfect country song about the rules of perfect country songcraft, David Allan Coe's version of Steve Goodman and John Prine's "You Never Even Called Me by My Name," in which Goodman boasts that he's written a perfect country song, and Coe reminds him that "he hadn't said anything at all about Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk." What Coe's really doing, of course, is confirming what everybody already knows — that there's a formula for perfection, and the perfect song is the song that follows it and rises above it at the same time.