Elton John isn't impressed with modern pop songs: "they're not real…"

Sir Elton John expressed his disappointment with the lack of actual writing in modern pop songs in a recent interview with BBC Radio 6 Music.

COS:

"[Father John Misty] reminds me a little bit of me, the way he writes songs," he praised, adding, "Conan [Gray's] from America and he's the only person in the American Spotify Top 50 to actually write the song without anybody else." John was referring to "Heather", a track currently sitting at No. 12 on the US Top 50 Spotify chart - below three Juice WRLD songs, BTS' "Dynamite", and reigning champ "WAP" from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.

John continued, "Everybody else there's four or five writers on (a track). You look at most of the records in the charts - they're not real songs. They're bits and pieces and it's nice to hear someone write a proper song." And John's right; none of those songs is credited to fewer than two songwriters, save for Gray's. (To be fair, Juice WRLD's Marshmello collab "Come & Go" is credited to only those two artists.)

He went on to suggest pop music now is churned out for unsophisticated listeners and mass consumption. "I like people who write songs. And there's plenty of people that do, but a lot of them don't get played on the radio because they're too sophisticated and we get songs made by a computer all the time and I'm not interested in that," he concluded.

P.S. Fifty years ago this week Elton played The Troubadour.

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50 years ago today, I played in America for the first time at @theTroubadour. As I wrote in @britishgq last week, that show changed my life. When I walked on stage on August 25, 1970, I was just a little-known pop singer from England. It didn't take me long to realise afterwards, though, that things would never be the same again. Swipe through to see original video from that show, plus the scene from @rocketmanmovie that captured the emotions from that night so beautifully.

A post shared by Elton John (@eltonjohn) on Aug 25, 2020 at 9:58am PDT

image via Eltonjohn.com