Marc Hirsh

Eliza Rickman's "Pretty Little Head" is simple yet intricate, a contradiction which helps give it the feel of a nursery rhyme that's just starting to teeter off the rails. Except for the bridge, it's built entirely around two chords, a minor/relative-major pair that trade off inexorably in two-bar cycles without regard to differentiating between the verse and the chorus.

1. Ryan Seacrest's double/triple/quadruple fakeouts. Our host used to screw with the contestants by teasing the results before throwing to a guest performance or commercial. Now he gives those results using sentences so convoluted, with so many double-backs and twist-arounds, that you need a white board to diagram them and unpack their actual meaning. Frustrating the singers, yes. Confusing them entirely, no.