Wit & Attitude Quote by Dan Fogelberg

There’s a bruised precision to Fogelberg’s phrasing: a “shot in the head” followed by an album “shot down.” He turns disappointment into ballistic metaphor, not for melodrama’s sake but to capture the dizzying whiplash of making work in good faith and watching it get executed by people who weren’t listening in the first place. The first “shot” is self-inflicted risk: committing to an album is an act of vulnerability, a leap that scrambles your sense of safety and certainty. The second “shot” is institutional: gatekeepers, reviewers, label executives, programmers - the machinery that can erase a project with a shrug.

“Nonmusical idiots” is the tell. It’s not just anger at criticism; it’s anger at misrecognition. Fogelberg isn’t claiming the album is beyond critique. He’s claiming the verdict came from a place that lacked the basic equipment to judge it - people treating music as product positioning, demographic math, or branding, not sound and feeling. The insult is less about intelligence than about literacy: an accusation that the culture industry promotes authority without expertise, power without taste.

It also reads as a defensive flare from a musician often coded as soft, sentimental, even “easy listening.” Fogelberg’s catalog is meticulous, and the line insists on craft against condescension. The subtext is a familiar artist’s fear: not that you’ll fail, but that you’ll be dismissed by the wrong jury, and the sentence will stick anyway.