"LOL MAB, Was Stairway to Heave a typo or a comment on the song? "

Lol! That's pretty funny Gavin. Sorry about that. Was a typo, but I've felt that way about some of those songs from time to time. I always bored pretty easily so was not really impressed by those overly long songs either. Was just referring to the length of songs.

On Edmund Fitzgerald, yeah I always felt the same thing. "Damn! This song goes on longer than it took the ship to sink!" I recently read this biography on Gordon Lightfoot and that "Monotone vocal" that Gordon did was what his fans expected and wanted. That was kind oif his deal. If you listen to all his music, most of them are pretty much the same minimum in melody. Again, this is part of the "looking beyond the song" on songs. What makes for "HITS"? Who can determine them?
Basically it's the public.

There are many many many things in music history, particularly in the past 10-20 years ,that I'd wonder "HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT BECOME A HIT?"
But I'm not a customer for any of that, so it makes no real difference to me. When I work with other people, my main thing is to try and help them to write songs that do one thing. GET PEOPLE TO PUT THE CELL PHONE DOWN FOR A FEW MINUTES.
Getting, and keeping attention for a few minutes is the real challenge of the day.

I think that Brian has it mostly right that in the future, music will mostly be on the "front porches" of social networking. There will always be some artists and songs that break through, and people will be as befuddled as ever that they did. No one can predict it, no one will be able to know till it rises up. But unless you get someone to put the cell phone down and actually LISTEN to what you are doing, it's gonna be hard to go forward from there.

MAB