"I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs"
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There is a politician’s instinct buried in this songwriter’s complaint: people trust sorrow because it looks like sincerity, but happiness has to be engineered. Malcolm Wilson frames “Bewitched” as an achievement precisely because it resists the easiest emotional shortcut. Sad songs arrive pre-validated; they can lean on grievance, loss, and the listener’s own memories. A happy song, by contrast, has to earn its credibility without sounding naive, commercial, or emotionally thin. That’s not just craft talk - it’s a quiet argument about how audiences are trained to read emotion.
The line “as any writer will tell you” is doing political work. It recruits an imagined consensus, the way a public figure might say “everyone knows” to smuggle in a premise: joy is harder, therefore rarer, therefore more valuable. Wilson also implies that happiness requires discipline and structure. Melancholy can meander and still feel profound; joy needs rhythm, clarity, and forward motion, or it curdles into sentimentality. That’s why “happiest” becomes a flex rather than a mood report.
Context matters: a politician praising difficulty and restraint reads like self-description. Governing is often sold as tough-minded realism; optimism is treated as suspect unless it’s tightly scripted. Wilson’s subtext is that creating believable hope - in music or public life - is the higher, riskier art. The irony is that happiness, the thing people claim to want, is the emotion culture most aggressively polices for authenticity.
The line “as any writer will tell you” is doing political work. It recruits an imagined consensus, the way a public figure might say “everyone knows” to smuggle in a premise: joy is harder, therefore rarer, therefore more valuable. Wilson also implies that happiness requires discipline and structure. Melancholy can meander and still feel profound; joy needs rhythm, clarity, and forward motion, or it curdles into sentimentality. That’s why “happiest” becomes a flex rather than a mood report.
Context matters: a politician praising difficulty and restraint reads like self-description. Governing is often sold as tough-minded realism; optimism is treated as suspect unless it’s tightly scripted. Wilson’s subtext is that creating believable hope - in music or public life - is the higher, riskier art. The irony is that happiness, the thing people claim to want, is the emotion culture most aggressively polices for authenticity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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