Luckiest Music Generation: Joni Mitchell, Help Me

[Genki Hikari]

6. What shocked me

Was that he not only didn't hate Torn Between Two Lovers, but declared it better than 90% of Top 40 since the early 90s. I didn't believe him, until he started showing me videos of Billboard's Top 100 of successive years--it kept getting worse and worse. Just awful stuff. And I was trying to find the good, because I'm an ornery cuss. If you tell me something is bad out of hand, I will go out of my way to find something good about it.

But it wasn't good.

I'll admit I'm an idiot who doesn't understand things like key changes or modulation or chord progressions, but I do know when something doesn't sound, "right." My son the music whiz tried to explain why my ears weren't deceiving me, but it went over my head. He finally said, "It doesn't sound right to you because so much of it is flat-out crappy songwriting."