Have I gotten tricked into liking songs?

A few years ago, when I was on a massive Toto binge, my wife asked me a question about one of their songs that I am still not able to answer. We were driving around the countryside outside of Bozeman, Montana (where we lived at the time), and Mary Beth indulged me in listening to a Toto playlist. One of the songs was a favorite of mine at the time. It’s from their wonderful and obscure 1992 album, Kingdom of Desire. The album careens between heavy rockers and power ballads, and the song in question — “2 Hearts” — is one of the latter.

I’ve never been into power ballads. In fact, I usually can’t stand them (though, as I noted in a recent post, Aerosmith’s “Dream On” is a notable exception). The first several times I listened to Kingdom of Desire, I wasn’t impressed by “2 Hearts,” and sometimes I would skip it.

Eventually, though, I came around to it. I’ve never really understood why, and I didn’t think much about why I grew to love it…until the day that Mary Beth questioned me on it. The way she framed the question made it especially hard for me to grapple with.

“So, what makes this song different from a Bon Jovi song?”

The implicit challenge in that question is that I have never liked Bon Jovi’s music. I couldn’t just say, “Bon Jovi bad, Toto good,” so I stammered and sputtered and failed to come up with a coherent reason. To this day, I know that “2 Hearts” is better than a Bon Jovi song, but I don’t know why.