its good to know that even my songwriting heroes like adam levine from maroon 5 can get down sometimes… tom from one of my favourite blogs music thing has written an article on why all records sound the same, which led me to this clip. its adam and the rest of maroon 5, in the studio struggling to piece together the song that would eventually - after what seems an unbelieveably painful, uninspired and above all tedious process of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s - become a number one hit “makes me wonder”:

It’s fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track, and how it doesn’t have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again.

adam levine actually says: “honestly its so boring that when i sing it, i’m like ‘when is this gonna be over’.” strangely this is very close to the feeling i have when i hear the song. without wanting to spoil the ending, there are no excited high-fives when the song is completed, no joyous celebration of their finely crafted pop hit, no release of tension - nope, the video actually more or less ends with footage of levine closing the door on the camera saying something along the lines of “i’m sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits”…

the song went on to be a number one hit in nine countries, and a couple of weeks ago won a grammy for best pop song. whooo pop music!