The Greats

How do you react to hearing, say, a Motown tune written by Holland/Dozier/Holland or a Burt Bacharach classic? Does it make you want to run to your piano and emulate the almost perfect sound you have just heard?

Does it make you roll your sleeves up and say “I could do all that, and more?”

Well, I wish this were true for me, but more often than not it has the opposite effect.

I wonder to myself how anyone could have written anything that good and resign myself to the fact that even if I were to write the very best song I could, it could not even be measured on the same scale as what I had just heard.

But what can you do. Lower down the food chain, us mere mortals have no choice but to plug away, borrowing a chord sequence here or a rhyme there, and hope that no one notices.

Perhaps Smokey Robinson wrote some absolute stinkers. But somehow, I doubt it!