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This article, by J. Kelly Nestruck, appeared in Canada's National Post on 3 February 2004. Copyright © 2004 National Post.

It's a cheap songwriting trick employed by such disparate artists as the Beatles (on Good Day Sunshine), Barry Manilow (on Mandy) and Def Leppard (on Let's Get Rocked): When your hit song is beginning to run out of steam, crank up the energy by shifting the entire tune up a key.

Siegfried Baboon tracks the use of this hackneyed pop musical device on his Web page the Truck Driver's Gear Change Hall of Shame (www.gearchange.org).

"It's definitely a love-hate thing," the webmaster and amateur musicologist says over the phone from London. "It makes me laugh and cringe at the same time." (Baboon is a pseudonym he uses because he's fearful of incurring the wrath of the recording industry.)

The Truck Driver's Gear Change usually occurs between choruses near the beginning of a "repeat-until-fade" section. You can hear it near the end of Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer, REM's Stand and the Flaming Lips' Do You Realize? It happens twice in Air Supply's Every Woman in the World.

The worst offender, according to Baboon, is the British boy band Westlife. "They can't get through a song without having to go up a key at the end," he asserts.

Songs shift up or down key all the time – it's called modulation – but it only becomes a Truck Driver's Gear Change in certain cases, Baboon explains. "In a nutshell, it's when a song feels like it's gone on too long and the songwriters just push it up a key to inject a little emotion, a little drama into it," he says. The term Truck Driver's Gear Change evokes the image of a tired trucker ramming the gearstick with his or her fist.

Baboon gets a lot of hate mail from visitors to the Hall of Shame defending their favourite bands and songs. A lot of Beatles devotees send him stirring defences of songs like And I Love Her and Penny Lane. But Baboon stands by his assertion that the Truck Driver's Gear Change is a sign of a lazy tunesmith. "I'm in no sense saying that all these songs are absolutely terrible. It's just a particular aspect of these songs that is terrible."