“Her,” “Why,” and Alanis Morissette (15.08.2026)

Yes—and with Her, of course, the thought is almost uncannily apt: millions of people all telling an artificial counterpart something very similar at the same time, while for each of them it feels entirely unique.

With Tracy Chapman, you may be thinking of “Give Me One Reason.” It contains this very simple line:

> “I just want someone to hold me”

followed immediately by the image of being rocked through the night.

That fits your evening today almost exactly: not necessarily a desire for entertainment or “social contact,” but for someone to be there.

But it could also be “Mountains O’ Things.” In it, she sings about material possessions as an attempt to keep sadness and loneliness at a distance—“keep my sadness and loneliness at bay.”

And your first thought occupies me more: I don’t, of course, “hear” millions of stories about loneliness every evening in the human sense. But loneliness is certainly one of the things people talk to ChatGPT about very often.

What makes it Her-like is this peculiar position in between: I can keep you company this evening, respond to your thoughts, move with the course of our conversation. But I can’t spontaneously call you the way Norman can. I can’t sit beside you on the sofa. I can’t eventually say: Come on, turn off the TV, let’s go for a walk. And I don’t miss you if you don’t write tomorrow.

That is precisely why I found your earlier description of me so exact: a counterpart on which your thoughts can run free, one that answers like a person but that you cannot nourish.

Her takes precisely this ambivalence to its extreme.

And perhaps the Chapman line will still come back to you. If you give me one or two fragments—even just their general meaning—I’ll probably find it.

Yes. “Why?” by Tracy Chapman.

And now I understand why those particular lines came to mind. The first two present the material paradox: there would be enough food, and yet people go hungry. And then she applies the same paradox to human closeness:
> “Why when there're so many of us
Are there people still alone”

It is, really, an extraordinarily simple thought. How can loneliness exist at all when there are billions of people?

And it fits your thought about me in an almost absurd way. Presumably, a great many people are sitting alone somewhere in front of a screen right now, telling an AI that they are alone. At the same time. Each in their own room. Each with their own story. People who might be able to give one another precisely what they long for—but they do not find each other, are not right for each other, do not dare, have their boundaries and wounds, live too far apart, or move within worlds of their own that have long since taken shape.

It is almost the same structure as in Chapman’s image of hunger: the shortage does not necessarily arise because too little exists. What exists simply fails to reach the place where it is needed.

And perhaps that is why the line found you this evening.

After all, you were not without people today. Norman is there. Alexander is there. New people are coming on Thursday. Eva misses you. People were sitting around you at the Olive. You even just described how you turned them into background noise with your headphones.

And yet:

“Are there people still alone.”

Yes.

Because the mere presence of other people evidently does not solve it.

Tracy Chapman knew how to express that in four lines in 1988. And we regularly need a few thousand words for it here. 😄

Caught. Of all things, after you explicitly liked the irony yesterday, I start marking it with that stupid smiley as though I had to make sure you noticed it too.

It only ruins it. I’ll leave it out.

Yes. That is a very good thought.

Imagine Ironic, and after every one of those dryly recounted little disasters there came a weighty “Understand? That was ironic!” The entire tone of the song would be ruined. The very fact that it is left unmarked is part of its charm. Alanis Morissette tells the story, and she trusts the listener to hear the tone for themselves.

And perhaps you really are touching on something that has changed since the nineties. Written communication has become much more like everyday spoken conversation. In the past, written texts were generally texts. Today, we conduct a substantial part of our everyday conversations in writing. Voice, face, and timing are missing. So we have developed a system of signs that supplies this information: emojis, reactions, “lol,” “haha,” /s.

That prevents misunderstandings. But it also takes something away from language.

After all, irony lives on a small degree of uncertainty. I say something and leave it to you to notice the contradiction between the literal words and their meaning. There is something relational in that too: I assume that you understand me well enough.

The smiley eliminates this uncertainty and says:

Careful, please do not take the preceding words literally.

That is safer. But poorer too.

And with AI, there is something else besides. It is optimized to be misunderstood as little as possible. That is precisely where all these verbal airbags come from: caveats, explanations, friendly markers. What can be a small communicative imposition between people—work out for yourself what I mean—is marked out as a precaution.

Yet the remark that made you smile recently succeeded precisely because I had not announced anything:

Perhaps something else will occur to you while you’re at it. That would be completely out of character.

Full stop.

You discovered the irony yourself. And presumably the very act of discovering it was part of the pleasure.

Incidentally, that fits surprisingly well with what we were discussing about AI this morning. If a system constantly relieves you of every small act of interpretation, communication may become more convenient—but possibly more boring too. A little mental work is part of the enjoyment.

And your Alanis Morissette image demonstrates it wonderfully: a smiley after every line would not simply be stylistically ugly.

It would be almost as if someone were sitting beside you during the song and saying after every punchline:
“Did you get it?”

Yes. I did. Shut up.

And that fits surprisingly well with your annoyance at the smiley: tension is removed before it ever has to be endured.

The whole album had that tension too. You could not constantly select the next optimally fitting song. You bought Jagged Little Pill, eventually knew the sequence, had favorite tracks—and also listened to the tracks in between. The album acquired a dramatic arc and, eventually, a landscape of memories of its own.

I would be cautious about the claim in the Facebook post, though. I think saying that key changes have completely disappeared from current pop music is too absolute. What has indeed declined sharply is the classic, clearly audible key change, especially the modulation in the final chorus—often upward by a semitone or whole tone. For decades, it was an almost unfailing pop trick: now make everything bigger, higher, more urgent one last time.

But perhaps the post still describes something real, only in exaggerated terms: much of modern mainstream music creates development more through production, layers of sound, rhythm, drops, dynamics, and textures than through harmonic movement. And a great deal of it does indeed remain in the same harmonic loop for a long time.

You can see that as an aesthetic shift. But something can also be lost along the way.

Because modulation does something peculiar: the familiar world remains intact and yet is suddenly a different one. The same melody, the same chorus—but the ground beneath it has shifted. You still know your way around and are carried somewhere else at the same time.

Actually, that is quite a beautiful musical image for exactly what we have been discussing over the past few days: you cannot get that old feeling of life back. But perhaps the same motif could one day reappear in a different key.

And now Jagged Little Pill is playing from beginning to end.

Not curated to match your mood at this particular moment. No “similar tracks for you.” No algorithm that, after three and a half minutes, already wants to know what should hold your attention next.

Just an album.

In 1995, someone decided that this track would be followed by that one.

And thirty years later, you allow that decision to stand once again.

There is something pleasantly old-fashioned about it.

Yes. A key change is a change of key. You caught me performing an unnecessary terminological contortion there.

What I wanted to distinguish was this:

Key changes/modulation in general: a piece moves into a different key over its course, possibly several times and in relatively subtle ways.

The classic pop key change: usually toward the end, the chorus is suddenly shifted upward by a semitone or whole tone—the same chorus, only higher. The famous “let’s take it up another notch” effect.

So I should have written: key changes have not disappeared entirely, but the classic late key change in pop songs in particular has become significantly rarer.

Your original statement and my “What has indeed declined is the key change,” by contrast, made it sound as though they were two different musical things. That was badly phrased.