We Won’t Go Back: Pop Music and the Fight For Reproductive Rights (w MILCK and Ann Powers)
On June 24th 2022 the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v Wade and asserting that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion. The decision marked a seismic moment in politics and culture that has affected everyone’s lives, and the world of pop music is no exception. Musicians started responding immediately, from Ch...
28m Jul 19, 2022
28m
275: Harry and the Sledgehammer Horns
As we hit the dog days of summer, the artist that’s started to soundtrack pool parties across the country is former One Direction bandmate and contemporary sex symbol Harry Styles. In May, Styles released Harry’s House, an album propelled by the number one hit “As It Was.” Despite having critical and commercial success, a barb often thrown at the album is the idea of it being inoffensive: plea...
23m Jul 12, 2022
23m
ICYMI: The 90s’ Most Unlikely Hit (with Baz Luhrmann)
In 1999 filmmaker Baz Luhrmann released the song “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen,” a 7-minute-long graduation speech set to downtempo electronic music. It was a highly unlikely hit that made its way across continents and eventually into the ears of a young Avery Trufelman via the album NOW That’s What I Call Music Volume 2. For over 20 years, Trufelman has applied the song’s advice to her d...
52m Jul 05, 2022
52m
Beyoncé's House
The world stops with a Beyoncé drop. On Monday, June 20th, our prayers were answered with “Break My Soul,” the lead single off of her upcoming album, Renaissance. The song draws from several places of inspiration: lyrically, it’s a cathartic dance-floor ode to liberation, soundtracking the current cultural moment that some have called the “Great Resignation.” Sonically, though, “Break My Soul” ...
31m Jun 28, 2022
31m
273: Robert Glasper on jazz, basketball, and his score for "Winning Time"
Robert Glasper is the only artist to have an album debut in the top 10 of 4 different Billboard charts. He's a musical polymath whose resume ranges from Kendrick Lamar to Herbie Hancock. At the piano, he serves up jazz licks worthy of Mary Lou Williams before segueing into a Nirvana cover. Glasper brings his diverse skill set to bear on his latest project, the score for the HBO series Winning T...
21m Jun 21, 2022
21m
Scoring Stranger Things with Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
We recently deconstructed how Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” has found itself at the center of culture due to a placement in the Netflix, eighties, horror, sci-fi show, Stranger Things. For that episode we excerpted an interview with the composers of the show who shared great insights on how they created the iconic theme song and spooky soundscape for the most streamed show of 202...
19m Jun 16, 2022
19m
Kate Bush, Stranger Things, and a hit song four decades in the making
Kate Bush’s “running up that hill” has soared up the charts, performing better than its release in 1985. Heavily featured in Strangers Things Season 4, Netflix’s most successful English language release to date by watch time, Kate Bush has found a new generation of fans via the show. The coming-of-age horror/sci-fi show has leaned heavily on 80s nostalgia since its premier in 2016. Its iconic t...
29m Jun 14, 2022
29m
271: So your song went viral on TikTok. What’s next?
There's been a meme circulating: pop stars lamenting making TikTok videos that labels force them to publish. Supposedly content creator wasn’t in the pop star job description. Since 2020 the short form video social media platform TikTok has utterly upended music discovery. In many cases giving unknown musicians a pathway to enormous audiences. And it's become increasingly important, especially ...
31m Jun 07, 2022
31m
270: The 1980s jam that gave Latto and Mariah Carey Big D*** Energy
If you've heard Latto's swaggering track "Big Energy"—and after 30 weeks on the Hot 100, you probably have—you may have heard a resemblance to Mariah Carey's 1995 hit "Big Energy." That's because both songs borrow a groove from the 1981 hit "Genius of Love," a genre-defying smash made by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. "Genius of Love" was made when Frantz and Weymouth took a break from playing...
24m May 31, 2022
24m
Kendrick Lamar and the big samples
It’s been five years since Kendrick Lamar released his Pulitzer winning album DAMN. Having established himself as a modern rap virtuoso whose songs have become anthems fueling social movements, expectations run high for his latest release. So when he dropped his new album Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, people tuned in - it is the biggest album drop of 2022 so far. Lamar moves his focus presuma...
29m May 24, 2022
29m
Modern Classics: PJ Morton on Stevie Wonder & Nas
PJ Morton is one of the hardest-working musicians on the scene today. Maybe you’ve seen him playing keys with Maroon 5, or fronting a full string section in his NPR “Tiny Desk” concert. Maybe you’ve immersed yourself in his Grammy-award winning album We Are. On all of these projects, Morton evinces his mastery for taking classic soul and R&B and updating it with modern sounds. Other musical leg...
27m May 17, 2022
27m
Will Ukraine win Eurovision 2022?
Greece, Spain, UK, Sweden, Italy and Ukraine are the frontrunners in the 2022 Eurovision competition. Switched On Pop analyzes the top six songs as well as some of the more oddball picks. Songs Discussed Amanda Tenfjord - Die Together Chanel - SloMo Britney Spears - Work Bitch Sam Ryder - SPACE MAN Elton John - Rocket Man Cornelia Jakobs - Hold Me Closer Zdob și Zdub - Trenulețul  Citi...
27m May 10, 2022
27m
Belle and Sebastian on the value of staying "young and stupid"
Belle and Sebastian released the first album Tigermilk in 1996, and they’ve released eight more since—a catalog that helped define the sound of rock and indie in the new millennium through buoyant melodies and verbose lyrics.  Their new album, A Bit of Previous, continues to refine their unique sound but also embraces new musical directions. We spoke to Stuart Murdoch, leader of the 7-piece ban...
25m May 03, 2022
25m
The New Alternative
In March 2022 an unusual entry made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart. 90s grunge band Nirvana entered the chart for only their fifth time in history with the 1991 track “Something In The Way.” The song’s success is owed to being heavily featured in the 2022 reboot of The Batman. According to director Matt Reeves, Kurt Cobain inspired the brooding performance of Robert Pattinson, who plays th...
29m Apr 26, 2022
29m
Jumpstarting the creative process with Allison Ponthier
Allison Ponthier knows that the hardest part of making anything is getting started. For the New York based Texan singer/songwriter, “starting the song is so difficult.” When she was young she “always wanted to write songs,” fanatically scribbled rhymes in a diary. But she gave it up as an adolescent. The prevailing narratives of natural talent, artistic genius and spontaneous inspiration nearly...
18m Apr 19, 2022
18m
263: A Higher Power Ballad
There was something different about Justin Bieber’s performance of his hit song “Peaches” at the 2022 Grammy Awards. The recorded version, which spent thirty weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, opens with a full-blast chorus featuring driving percussion and ringing guitars. But performing live, the song’s instrumentation was stripped down, with Bieber alone at a grand piano, crooning into the...
26m Apr 12, 2022
26m
How sound becomes hearing
We love listening to music at a ridiculous level of detail. But the other day we heard a podcast that made us fundamentally question the accuracy and reliability of our own listening skills. In it they played a familiar melody, “Yankee Doodle,” in such a way that we couldn’t recognize it at all. Our brain plays so many auditory tricks on us — some truly spectacular and unexplainable. In fact th...
40m Apr 05, 2022
40m
262: Listening 2 Britney: Gimme More
There’s no more iconic Britney lyric than the opening of “Gimme More.” It's 2007, four years since her last album In The Zone was released, and Britney is affirmatively back with the uptempo track leading off her album Blackout: “It’s Britney, Bitch.” The song echoes the dance-pop Neptunes sound of “I’m A Slave 4 U.” It's built around a driving riff and off-kilter drums produced by Floyd Nathan...
27m Mar 29, 2022
27m
261: Listening 2 Britney: Toxic
In 2003 Britney Spears released “Toxic,” a song that would make converts out of pop skeptics, be named one of the greatest tracks of the 21st century by multiple publications, and become a personal favorite of Switched on Pop. Despite its success, when “Toxic” was released as the second single from Spears’s fourth album, In the Zone, even the song’s writers thought it was too “weird” to become...
27m Mar 22, 2022
27m
Listening 2 Britney: ...Baby One More Time
On a crisp Autumn morning in 1998, the world was introduced to the voice of Britney Spears, and pop would never be the same. Britney’s mix of vocal fry, percussive pronunciations, and timbral play on “...Baby One More Time” hadn't been heard before. As successful as they were, these techniques were derided by critics as parts of her manufactured “baby voice." Listening in 2022, we can hear Brit...
28m Mar 08, 2022
28m
258: Chartbreakers (ft. Megan Thee Stallion and the Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Presenting Chartbreakers, in which Nate and Charlie listen to the Billboard Hot 100 chart from top to bottom and discover a TikTok controversy, a Nashville music mystery, a rogue duck-billed platypus, and Megan Thee Stallion's debut piano concerto. Songs Discussed Gayle - abcdefu Muni Long - hrs and hrs Ckay - Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah) Dustin Lynch featuring Lauren Alaina or Mackenzie Porter - ...
34m Mar 01, 2022
34m
257: Leon Bridges and Khruangbin Sing a Song of Texas
Leon Bridges is the soul singer hailing from Fort Worth, Texas, who burst onto the music scene in 2015 with the album Coming Home. Since then he’s established himself as an adventurous musician whose latest album Gold Diggers Sound combines retro sounds with contemporary production. Khruangbin is the Houston-based power trio——Mark Speer on guitar, Laura Lee on bass, and DJ Johnson on drums—who ...
35m Feb 15, 2022
35m
256: Shaking Out the Numb with Sylvan Esso
The last proper, blowout concert Charlie attended was devastatingly long ago, back in the winter of 2019. Bringing some funk to buttoned-up Walt Disney Concert Hall, the duo Sylvan Esso rocked Charlie’s world with epic performances of songs like “Die Young.” When live music, and the world, shut down shortly after—well, it was a great note to go out on.  Now, that moment comes full circle, as S...
32m Feb 08, 2022
32m
255: We *do* talk about Bruno
The number one song on the charts is a bit of a mystery. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the unlikely hit from Disney’s sleeper animated musical Encanto. Set in a  mountainous village in Colombia, the film was a middling commercial success when it was released in Nov 2021. But in recent months it has become a pop culture phenomenon for a confluence of reasons: an expansive discourse on Colombian...
26m Feb 01, 2022
26m
254: 32 Albums in, Elvis Costello is Just Getting Started
Elvis Costello burst onto the music scene in 1977 with the album My Aim Is True. Songs like “Alison” established him as a powerful new voice in rock. His next album, This Year’s Model, introduced hits like “Pump it Up,” which has resounded through stadiums and arenas across the country ever since.  From then on he released album after album, decade after decade, becoming a force to be reckoned...
33m Jan 25, 2022
33m
253: Accidental Kpop star Eric Nam quits the system
Eric Nam is an accidental K-pop star. Growing up in Atlanta, and graduating from college in Boston, he did not expect that in his twenties he’s sign to a K-pop label, be named 2016 Man of the year by GQ Korea, and become a go-to television personality in South Korea. His music, imbued with his charisma and charm has charted globally. As fun as it is, the K-pop machine can be a real grind — it c...
36m Jan 19, 2022
36m
252: The Weeknd drives through purgatory (with a little help from Jim Carrey)
Dawn FM is The Weeknd’s most narratively compelling album yet. More than just a collection of eighties-nostalgia single bait, Dawn FM is a concept album that picks up on a multi-year meta narrative. Abel Tesfaye, seemingly killed off his character at the end of his last album, After Hours. Getting caught up in the “Blinding Lights” of fame and excess, the narrator ends up overdosing in the back...
36m Jan 11, 2022
36m
251: Why do new Christmas songs fail?
Why are there no new Christmas songs? One one hand, there's more holiday songs than we’ll ever need. Every year pop stars drop countless holiday-themed album. But despite the annual glut of Christmas releases, few of these new songs join the rotation of holiday classics. On Billboard's Holiday Hot 100 chart right now, there's only four songs from the past ten years that have made it to the top ...
27m Dec 21, 2021
27m
250: Tai Verdes TikTok-ed his way to a breakout hit
Whether you’re a TikTok fanatic, or the app’s K-hole-inducing stream of content has forced you to delete it from your phone, its influence on music is undeniable. In 2020 the platform bragged that over 70 artists on the platform signed with major labels. TikTok’s success was linked to pandemic-related stay-at-home orders -- people were stuck at home and musicians couldn’t tour. And while trendi...
31m Dec 14, 2021
31m
249: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raise The Roof
Robert Plant is in his own words “cold” and “prickly” while speaking about his new album with Alison Krauss, Raise The Roof. First thing upon joining the Zoom call from London, Plant jovially launches into the much misattributed quote “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” But he is neither callous, nor coy. For Plant the music is ineffable, a joyous celebration of friendship...
32m Dec 07, 2021
32m
248: The Beatles get back to their roots
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ final album, Let it Be. To commemorate the occasion, the remaining members of the band have remixed the album and unleashed an eight-hour-plus documentary directed by Peter Jackson that lays bare the making of the record. For super-fans this video memoir reveals a lot about the messiness of the creative process: The Beatles nearly b...
41m Nov 30, 2021
41m
247: Taylor, Adele & Silk Sonic’s broken hearts club
This week we are having a blast feeling really sad. Guest Brittany Luse, cohost of the acclaimed podcast For Colored Nerds, joins Nate and Charlie to dig into this fall's slate of breathtaking breakup albums from Adele, Kacey Musgraves, Summer Walker, and Mitski. Some have been calling this confluence of releases, "sad girl autumn," but the melancholy moment goes beyond gender, with even Bruno ...
43m Nov 23, 2021
43m
246: Snotty Nose Rez Kids on hip hop and Indigenous protest
Merging hip hop and Indigenous culture, rap duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids are creating a sound that goes hard for a cause. On tracks like “War Club” with DJ Shub, Young Tribz and Yung D connect Indigenous protests to the Black Lives Matter movement, and on “Boujee Natives,” Snotty Nose Rez Kids celebrate traditional culture through a modern lens. But as much as this music has a message, it also bang...
28m Nov 16, 2021
28m
245: The State of the Pop Union
From time to time, it is our constitutional duty to provide an update to the people on the current state of pop. What are the sounds? Who’s making the hits? What are they singing about? We take the musical temperature by consulting the charts, the platforms, and the people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
36m Nov 09, 2021
36m
244: Why ABBA songs just hit different
Swedish supergroup ABBA is releasing their first album in forty years, making this the perfect time for Nate and Charlie to investigate what makes their music so beloved and reviled in equal measure. For every ABBA stan, there’s a hater lurking, like legendary pop critic Robert Christgau, who once said of the group: “We have met the enemy, and they are them.” That suspicion was earned through A...
35m Nov 02, 2021
35m
The Healing Power of Pop with Esperanza Spalding
It’s. been. a year. We’ve felt it, you’ve felt it. Sometimes it’s comforting to consider how universally-shared that overwhelming sense of blah is. Other days, woof - it can be tough to see the light. That’s the subject of today’s episode, brought to you by our producer Megan Lubin. When Megan hit an especially low point earlier this year, she noticed something in the music she was listening t...
36m Oct 26, 2021
36m
Janet Jackson's Legacy After 'Control' from It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders
Sam Sanders is one of our favorite friends of the podcast. His NPR show, It's Been A Minute, has released an outstanding three part series exploring crossover in pop music. We want to share with you the 2nd episode form that series on the legacy of Janet Jackson. From It's Been A Minute On the 35th anniversary of Janet Jackson's first No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit, we look back at Control, her c...
46m Oct 22, 2021
46m
242: James Bond and the Sound of Spycraft
The latest installment of the James Bond franchise, No Time To Die, closes the book on the Daniel Craig era of the international superspy. The film’s theme song, “No Time to Die,” by Billie Eilish, Finneas, and Hans Zimmer, also marks the conclusion of one of the great musical sagas in recent cinema. Monty Norman’s and John Barry’s now-iconic “James Bond Theme,” written for 1962’s Dr. No, has r...
36m Oct 19, 2021
36m
241: James Blake & The Return of Harmony
For a decade James Blake has crafted an idiosyncratic sound. His early work as a minimalist electronic producer fused lush R&B chords with lyrical collage and unfiltered synthesizers. He describes his hit 2013 song “Retrograde” as apocalyptic yet also romantic. This single was in stark contrast to the bubblegum pop of the early 2010s. But other artists recruited him to spread his subversive son...
37m Oct 12, 2021
37m
240: Sparkle spoke out against R Kelly. It cost her her career.
On this week’s episode we're sharing a story fromThe Cut where senior writer Angelina Chapin and co-host Jazmín Aguilera talk about and talk with Sparkle (born Stephanie Edwards), who first reported R. Kelly to the police for allegedly sexually abusing her 14-year-old niece. Back then, no one believed her, but following the explosive documentary Surviving R. Kelly and the R&B artist’s trial, at...
28m Oct 05, 2021
28m
216: The Mystery of Montero AKA Lil Nas X (feat. Take A Daytrip)
Lil Nas X has a talent for creating productive controversy. First with “Old Town Road,” he challenged expectations about blackness in country music. Now with “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” he takes aim at anti LGBTQ+ messages propagated by the religious dogma from his youth (he came out as gay during Pride 2019). The song describes a romantic encounter without innuendo. Sure it’s raunchy, bu...
37m Sep 28, 2021
37m
239: Deja Vu: Why Olivia Rodrigo keeps giving up songwriting credits
In the last few years music copyright claims have skyrocketed. More and more artists are giving songwriting credits away. Frequently, credits are given retroactively to avoid the cost of long jury trials like when Sam Smith credited Tom Petty. Smith’s melody for “Stay With Me” clearly drew from Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” On rare occasions these cases go to court, where music litigation is at ...
1hr Sep 21, 2021
1hr
238: CHVRCHES and the sound of 80s horror
CHVRCHES is well-known for their comprehensive use of synthesizers and their updated take on “synthpop”, a subgenre of pop we most closely associated with the 1980s. While gearing up to make their second album in 2015, CHVRCHES members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty spent much of the recording budget buying up many of the original synthesizers used to make those iconic 80s dance tracks. Contempor...
33m Sep 14, 2021
33m
237: From Taylor Swift to Bon Iver, Aaron Dessner Finds Meaning in Musical Community
On August 27th Big Red Machine, the joint musical project of Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner - artists known for their work as Bon Iver and in the rock band The National, respectively - returned with new music. You’ve most definitely heard Dessner’s production work elsewhere, like on Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums evermore and folklore. The Big Red Machine album, titled How Long Do You Think it...
25m Sep 07, 2021
25m
236: Modern Classics: Carina Del Valle Schorske on Cat Power's "Manhattan"
Recently the hosts of Switched on Pop kept seeing the same byline next to their favorite pieces of music writing. A moving profile of Bad Bunny? There was the name. A searing critique of West Side Story? There it was again. An elegy on love, loss, and an Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson duet? By now it was committed to memory: writer and translator Carina Del Valle Schorske. So we knew we ha...
31m Aug 31, 2021
31m
235: The Joy of Music Festivals
For the past two weeks, our series on summer music festivals has uncovered the interplay of festival fashion and music and examined festival subcultures. But we've so far overlooked an essential reason that people attend music festivals: to experience transformational joy. At the start of summer 2021 it seemed like the pandemic was waning and that live music was coming back. But now, heading i...
28m Aug 24, 2021
28m
234: The Beauty and Horror of Insane Clown Posse's Summer Festival
The Gathering of the Juggalos is the music festival centered around the rap duo Insane Clown Posse. Their songs are hyper-violent and profane; their stage show features grotesque clown makeup and blasting the audience with their favorite drink, Faygo soda; and their fandom has even been designated by the FBI as a loosely organized gang. Musically, they’ve historically been rejected by critics: ...
41m Aug 17, 2021
41m
233: Summer Festivals: How Coachella co-opted the Woodstock look
The co-hosts of The Cut, Jazmin Aguilera and B.A. Parker, think deeply and incisively about fashion. For this special episode of Switched on Pop — the first in our three-part miniseries about summer festivals — we invited the hosts of The Cut, Jazmin Aguilera and B.A. Parker, as our honorary co-hosts to help us break down the connections between festival fashion, music, and culture. With the ad...
27m Aug 10, 2021
27m
232: Modern Classics: Mark Ronson on Ginuwine's "Pony"
Mark Ronson has a CV too long to list here. Suffice to say he’s a musician who’s worked with everyone from Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa, has one of the highest selling singles of all time with Bruno Mars in “Uptown Funk,” and has been making just really good music since the turn of the millennium. He’s also the presenter of one of our all time favorite TED talks on the history of samp...
40m Aug 03, 2021
40m
231: Summer Hits: Jack Antonoff on Bleacher’s “Stop Making This Hurt”
We’ve been wanting to speak with Jack Antonoff since we started Switched On Pop back in 2014. We've had countless hours of conversation sound tracked to his productions with artists like Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Ray starting in just our second episode. When we wrote a book about 21st century pop, we devoted a chapter to the song “We Are Young” by his band, Fun.   And so we're excited to fi...
42m Jul 30, 2021
42m