COLUMBIA, Mo 5/11/25 (Review) -- The best example of what I'm about to predict came from the 1984 movie Amadeus, my favorite film ever, for its universal truths about life and love, portrayed with a genius I've never seen equaled.
One of those truths answered a question with surprising simplicity: What makes great music? What makes music great?
Mozart's rival Salieri makes a simple point in Amadeus: musical greatness has a lot to do with how easily a melody is recognized and remembered.
Salieri plays his own compositions, the greatest hits of his day, to a priest he's trying to impress. But the priest recalls none of them. Then Salieri plays this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2zDJPIgwc
My prediction takes a similar track: The Burney Sisters, Columbia natives and rising stars in the music industry, are three, two, maybe even one song away from their breakout hit, their memorable masterpiece.
The melody that will set their world on fire, put their voices in everybody's earpods, their lyrics in every music station in the country, and then, the world.
The breakout hit people like me will recognize and remember.
In a nod to this Mother's Day, HUGE props to mom April Burney Shafer. She has been with her daughters every steep and straight step of the way, as chief promoter, interpreter, protector, admirer, encourager, manager, critic. Friend. Mother.
Mom. (Dad's a big part of the team, too. But that's a story for Father's Day.)
With 2025's Seed I've Sown and now, The Mars Song, the Burney Sisters are inching closer to the big hit, that moment of instant musical recall. Their timing on these new songs is impeccable, just the right amount of lyrics over melody, melody over lyrics, at just the right moments. And the melodies are beautiful. I spent an entire day trying to get The Mars Song out of my head. That is always a good sign in my listening experience. Burney Sisters, 2018
Sisters Emma and Bella are doing all this in a genre -- the ballad -- that may be among the most challenging. Ballads have to address more than just, in the words of Lady Gaga, bad romance. Or good loving.
Rapid beats and pounding rhythms can be the purview of balladeers, but nothing like the way those music staples direct and dominate the usual batch of pop culture traffic.
The Burney Sisters' lyrics are deep, open to many interpretations. The Mars Song asks what happens when we neglect the people, the things, the places, the planet we love, neglect them deliberately, or negligently, or ignorantly.
The Mars Song is about how neglect leads to loss.
Seed I've Sown is WAY ahead of its time, that being the ages of these two prodigies. I could write a book about its deceptive simplicity, its retrospective on a life long lived, how our compromises too often cost us our hearts and our souls. No room for a book, tho, so I'll just say: Listen to it.
From my admittedly amateur status as a music critic, I could envision a Burney Sisters trajectory similar to Taylor Swift's.
A progession of ever more memorable songs leads to the Big Break, You Belong With Me.
"But Mike: You've just compared Emma and Bella Burney to Taylor Swift -- and Wolfgang Mozart."
Yeah. I guess I did. And mom April, a driving force, for all she and the family are contributing to a marvelous genius. It doesn't matter where you are, who you are, or when you are: some things in life are universal, moms and musicians among them.
EmmaA marvelous genius
Bella
Burney Sisters, 2018
