I should warn you upfront: this post contains scenes of a 44-year-old married man unashamedly fangirling over Danny Jones. Viewer discretion is advised. My wife has already been advised. She remains unimpressed.
I’ve always had what music snobs might diplomatically call an “eclectic” taste, and what everyone else would call completely unhinged. On any given day, my playlist will swing from Garth Brooks singing about his friends in low places, to Mika shrieking joyfully about big girls, to The Beatles rewriting the rules of everything, to Michael Jackson moonwalking directly into your central nervous system, to McFly doing something so infectiously melodic that you forget you’re a grown adult with a mortgage and responsibilities.
And I love all of it. Equally. Fiercely. Without a single trace of embarrassment.
The Bit Where People Give Me The Look
You know The Look. It’s the one people give you when you tell them your favourite artists in one breath. The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, Mika, McFly. It’s the look that says: “I’m trying to find the through-line here and I’m coming up empty.” It’s the look my friends give me approximately every time music comes up in conversation, followed shortly by the look my wife gives me when I fangirl — and I use that word deliberately and without shame — over Danny Jones and Garth Brooks in completely equal measure. Two very different men. One very consistent reaction from my wife.
She knows. She’s heard the argument. She could probably deliver it herself at this point. She chooses not to.
But here’s the thing: there absolutely is a through-line. It just takes a little squinting to see it, like one of those Magic Eye posters. Except once you see it, you can’t unsee it — and suddenly my playlist makes complete sense, and everyone else’s taste seems oddly, tragically limited by comparison.
The Golden Rule of the Irresistible Hook
Every single artist I love is, at their core, a melodic populist. They don’t just write songs. They write songs that feel like you’ve always known them — even the very first time you hear them. That particular alchemy is rarer than people realise, and it is the invisible spine running through my entire musical life.
The Beatles established the blueprint. They proved, definitively, in the 1960s, that you could be both wildly popular and genuinely sophisticated — that a perfect hook and genuine craft weren’t mutually exclusive concepts, but were in fact the same thing wearing different clothes. Every artist I love is, knowingly or not, a direct descendent of that philosophy.
Michael Jackson took it and supercharged it with rhythm and production genius, but strip back Billie Jean or Man in the Mirror to its bones and you’ve got a melody so clean, so inevitable, it could have been written on an acoustic guitar in someone’s kitchen. He was a craftsman first. The glove was secondary.
Garth Brooks — and this is the bit that always surprises people — is essentially a rock musician in a very convincing hat. He grew up idolising Kiss, Billy Joel and James Taylor and it shows in everything he does. His live shows are stadium rock concerts with fiddles. His emotional directness, the sheer lack of irony in everything he commits to, is what puts him in exactly the same category as everyone else on this list. When Garth sings, he means it in a way that makes you feel slightly embarrassed about how little you mean most things you say.
McFly grew up believing, correctly, that pop music was a serious art form worth taking seriously. The harmonies, the key changes, the sheer bloody-minded commitment to the idea that a chorus should make you feel something — these are four lads who clearly did their homework and came back with a distinction.
And then there’s Mika. Glorious, ridiculous, completely committed Mika — who sounds like what would happen if Freddie Mercury and Elton John had a musical child who was raised exclusively on 1970s AM radio and given unlimited access to a falsetto. Grace Kelly alone contains more pure pop craft than most artists manage in entire careers. The man is not subtle. The man does not do subtle. I respect this enormously.
The Three Things They All Share (Yes, This Is The Analytical Bit)
Right, this is where the pub discussion gets surprisingly deep, so bear with me.
First: emotional sincerity. None of them do ironic detachment. Not one. Even when the song is light, even when it’s fun, even when Mika is singing about lollipops, it means it (Yes I am aware of the song’s metaphor). There’s a full commitment to the moment that I find completely irresistible, possibly because sincerity is increasingly unfashionable, and I have never once cared about what’s fashionable.
Second: the unconditional hook. Not a vibe. Not a texture. Not an aesthetic. An actual, singable, hummable, whistle-in-the-shower melody that burrows into your brain and pays rent indefinitely. I regularly go to sleep in a Room on the Third Floor with a Star Girl, my dreams often take me to Transylvania and I’m investigating where all the guitars went, and I wake up to Obviously. Obviously.
Third: broad humanity. These are artists whose music doesn’t belong to one tribe. You don’t have to be a country fan to be flattened by The Dance. You don’t have to be a pop kid to recognise that Five Colours in Her Hair is simply a perfect song. The music reaches out and grabs you regardless of which particular box you’ve put yourself in, which I think is the highest compliment you can pay any artist.
In Conclusion: I Regret Nothing
So yes. I am a 44-year-old happily married man who will fangirl over Danny Jones and Garth Brooks in exactly equal measure, who owns McFly albums without irony, who considers Mika criminally underappreciated, and who thinks Michael Jackson and The Beatles between them essentially invented the emotional language of popular music as we know it. And that Garth Brooks is God.
My taste is not eclectic. It is not confused. It is not, as has been suggested by people I thought were my friends, “a lot.”
It is, in fact, exceptionally consistent — united by craft, sincerity, and the firm belief that a great song should stop you in your tracks at least once before it’s finished.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Five Colours in Her Hair just came on shuffle, and I have fangirling to attend to.