As attention spans diminish, hit songs are getting longer, again.
AI audio platform Suno offers its users music on demand, generating ‘songs’ with as little as a single‑word prompt. Meanwhile, Harry Styles makes fans wait two minutes for the chorus of his five‑minute, eleven‑second chart‑topping 2026 single, Aperture.
These truths are in conflict and might reveal a habitual change in creators and consumers alike. As creative industry marketplaces are increasingly polluted with undisclosed AI content, we may be recognising the ineffable riches of the patience payoff. No song in recorded history can teach that lesson better than Diana Ross’ Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.
Berry Gordy, the force behind the success of Motown Records, famously ran the aspirational Detroit studio with the strict efficiency of an automotive production line. The former Lincoln‑Mercury auto plant employee was a gifted songwriter and composer. His skills in the recording studio were matched by his ability to identify and develop talent. Songwriters Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford made the latter easy when, in 1966, they submitted their new composition, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, to Gordy as part of their attempted coup to work at Motown, the country’s hottest hit‑making factory.
Tammi Terrell, one of Motown’s most recognised voices, died in 1970 at 24. In the week of her passing, Simpson and Ashford were back in the studio, cutting a reimagined version of the song that Terrell and Marvin Gaye had taken to number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 just three years earlier.
‘Motown’ meant many things to many: record label, recording studio and distinctive ‘sound’. That sound, chased by record makers then, now and every year between, was crafted by Motown’s in‑house band, the Funk Brothers, and one of their in‑house arrangers, Paul Riser. At 83 years old, Riser spoke to me at the Mondo.NYC conference in October.
Paul Riser
“Berry Gordy hated the recording when he first heard it.” Riser was 26 when he arranged the strings and brass for Motown’s 1970 cut of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, sung by former Supreme Diana Ross for her debut solo record. “‘It’s too long,’ he said. ‘They’ll never play it.’ I kid you not.”
Gordy’s concern was understandable. The song’s authors, Simpson and Ashford, had dramatically rewritten their 1967 hit. Gone were the feel‑good R&B harmony and rhythm of Gaye and Terrell’s original version. Instead, the writers created a bed of harmonic melodrama for Ross to forgo her signature girl‑next‑door, no‑frills vocal affect for a four‑minute spoken‑word recitation. Simpson, Ashford, Ross and Riser’s masterpiece clocked in at six minutes, eighteen seconds. The median length of 1970’s number‑one hits, in their full versions, was three minutes, eighteen seconds. The song’s structure and length were unconventional and called for a Riser arrangement to match.
“When Val and Nick sat down with me and played the song, I said, ‘It’s gonna be a great piece,’ because it allowed me to delve into my classical training and adapt it to pop music.” Riser understood the assignment; his theatrical arrangement plays an important role in what is, in my estimation, the greatest payoff in recorded music. “It was the first song at Motown that I was able to do that. And, and, I mean, the rest is history.”
The song’s commercial success was as unlikely as the song itself. Gordy all but sabotaged it by refusing to release it as the album’s first single. He told Simpson and Ashford at the time that he believed the song was too long and should instead have started with its anthemic chorus. When he relented, the single was trimmed to three and a half minutes, yet even the edit held the chorus back until two minutes 30 seconds, proportionally later than the album version. Meanwhile, history called – the DJs had other ideas. They started spinning the full‑length album track, making radio listeners wait four of the song’s six minutes to hear that anthemic chorus. The composition’s delayed payoff paid off. Buoyed by that airplay, the black sheep of Gordy’s paddock rocketed to the top of the charts.
Allow me to demonstrate how truly remarkable that feat was. Convention demands that pop music follow a variation of an established structure:
Introduction
Verse
Pre‑chorus
Chorus
Verse 2
Pre‑chorus
Chorus
Bridge
Chorus
Chorus again
And you’re done.
The 1967 version of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, sung by Terrell and Gaye, generally followed this formula. Ross’ 1970 single version goes like this:
Instrumental chorus
Spoken‑word verse 1
Pre‑chorus
Instrumental chorus 2
Spoken‑word verse 2
Chorus 1
Chorus 2
Bridge
Chorus 3
The full‑length version, favoured by radio DJs, makes the edit’s structure look positively square, piling on extra instrumental choruses and a third spoken‑word verse before the payoff. On that version, chorus one arrives at four minutes 15 seconds, and it is all the more remarkable given that Ross takes a back seat. The background singers take the melody and main lyric, while Ross takes the gospel‑style ‘response’ role. This section of the song features Ross delivering the greatest shriek committed to tape. We finally hear the former leader of the Supremes sing the song’s chorus on its repeat, at four minutes 36 seconds.
We all intuitively understand that pleasure withheld is often pleasure enhanced. Yet when songwriters chase modern listener appetites, clamouring to establish and maintain attention from a song’s first note, they forgo the opportunity to set up and deliver the payoff.
An age‑old conundrum of the entertainment industry is this: do consumers set trends, or are trends simply what writers think consumers want? In other words, do listeners genuinely prefer fast food, or would they, given meat and three veg, prefer its nourishment and complexity? Do listeners really need the chorus within the first minute? Harry Styles and his songwriting team seem to think not. Aperture spent a week at number one, a win for meat and three veg.
The lesson of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough is that we don’t need the chorus quickly. Simpson and Ashford had the nerve to rewrite their own hit. Riser brought his classical training to a pop record. Ross waited four minutes to sing the song’s title. Collectively, those decisions teach us that we don’t need our songs generated at the tap of a prompt. Patience and effort are rewarded.