Song Exploder - Key Change: Jia Tolentino on "I Love You Always Forever"

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Jia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at the New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe V. Wade to the internet to pop culture and music. And today, we’re going to talk about the 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. For more, visit songexploder.net/jia-tolentino.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that change their lives. My guest today is Gia Tolentino. Gia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, the Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at The New Yorker, where she's been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics from Roe v. Wade to the internet

to pop culture and music. And today we're going to talk about the 1996 pop hit I Love You Always Forever by Donna Lewis. Jia, thanks so much for being here. Hello. Do you remember the first time you ever heard I Love You Always Forever? Yeah, I heard it.

I think I was in the third row of a minivan. I was seven years old, and I grew up in Houston, and there was a lot of just driving. a lot of just being put in the back of the car. And I remember it was totally dark. And I think I was being ferried with cousins or the family friends that are called cousins.

And I remember I heard this song. And you know, like that thing where you hear a song that is like enormous and it's the first time you've heard it and you have no context, but you like get that feeling. I think that was the first time I had ever had it. And I love that feeling. Like when you're just like, who is this?

What is this? What is this thing? you know? Yeah. And just to me, like, the song sounded so platonically perfect in every way, and it gripped me so hard. It's so good. And I was just like, wow, like, it felt like the curtains were parting

into an entire world of adult music, and this was, like, my on-ramp to it. Yeah. I think it was the first song that wasn't vaguely child-coded, you know, even though, like, to some extent, like, all, music that sounds like this is. Like, I realize this now that I have a five-year-old. And I'm like, oh, okay, so much girly pop is really for children in a great way, you know? She loves Addison Ray, whatever. And so do I. But yeah, I just remember being like, this is perfect.

This is like the heavenly sphere, some sort of like sacred geometry is just unfolding in front of me. And I remember just like listening in the backseat of the car being like, wow, this is what it's going to be like to be an adult. and be in love and, you know, something like that. It was a really profound experience. When you were a kid, was the radio, basically how you found new music? You know, it's funny. That, like, a lot of my early experiences of, like, independent music discovery was, like,

one of my parents needing to buy something at, like, Best Buy. And I guess seven is around the time that I would have been allowed to leave their side and go to the CD rack. and do the thing, you know, where it was like the big console where you could listen to like one-minute previews of songs. Yeah. I started getting into like Jewel and Mariah Carey and Spice Girls, I think, was around then also.

And so much of it came from being sort of benignly neglected at big box stores and like listening to CD samplers. Yeah. I feel like that's young. Seven years old is young to be even thinking to, find music on your own. I was in third grade, so I was like a little older coded, and I really liked being on my own. And I did do everything on my own as soon as I possibly could.

I was a girly girl, and music hit me really hard as a child the same way that it hits me really hard right now. And I wanted it to myself and to be able to decide and to have like an independent solo experience of it. What do you think it was about the song that you were connecting to? I had this moment. I was watching the Quarone Little Princess movie with my older daughter a month ago maybe. And she had her first grown-up cry. There's this climactic scene at the end. And I was crying. And my five-year-old was crying. And she was like shocked by the nature of this cry. Like she was like, but I feel happy. And she was giggling. She was also really crying. And she was experiencing what it was like to. have an overpowering emotional experience that had nothing to do with something in her own life, kind of. I think this song was kind of like that. Like, it was roughly equivalent to that.

It was different in that, like, music that I would have been into up till that point would have had, like, a really specific narrative and characters. You know, I loved, like, the song from Pocahontas, but that's because I loved the story and what it looked like. But this was an abstraction. It was this pure shot of joy and ecstatic adoration. I mean, the lyrics are totally abstract. The nature of the song itself, it's really like stripped down to this extremely clean structure. And so I think, yeah, like it was the first time that maybe I had been moved so strongly by something that was as simple. And the good kind of formulaic where it's just a pure scaffolding for you to hang all of your

shit on the way that pop music is. Like, the song was, it was so purely that. When we were emailing, you said that I Love You Always Forever, helped you understand what pop music is and what pop music should be. And I'm curious about that. What do you think pop music should be? So there's like a kind of song that sounds like this. Like Mario Kart, Rainbow Road, pure dopamine, like, you know, angels opening their pink

wings, sunlight, like all of the chemicals in your body just coursing and late afternoon and like a car driving as fast as it can, like pure sugar, cotton candy. I love you, you love me, we're going to be in love forever. Like it's this perpetually suspended present of pink fluffy ecstasy. I mean, pop music contains so much more than that. But this kind, this lane of it, where it was like, the song is going to summon this feeling of the purest expansiveness from an extremely simple pattern. That's so legible that a child can understand that it's about the happiest you've ever been or could be somehow, and it has something to do with loving somebody.

There's maybe something about this kind of music and the just like direct to your body that just overrides all of the parts of me that are normally thinking. And yeah, it's like that specific lineage that I think this song was my first experience of. And so then did you specifically try and seek out other music that would give you that feeling? Well, I think what I realized that I could seek out in music and what I still seek out in music is that sense of like, I can't think about anything else but the song. and this instant, all-encompassing transportation and, like, miniature surrender to a three-minute thing. There were Mariah songs that would do it for me and, like, Whitney songs. And, yeah, I think I realized, like, music could do this.

Music could make me feel like this. I can summon this feeling on demand or I can be surprised by this feeling. And so, chasing that feeling is certainly, like, a tendency within me that has driven a lot of my life. I was a festival rat for a decade plus. I was like starting as like a teenager. I was just always like pressed up against the front of the speakers actively losing my hearing. Like wanting to leave the venue totally emptied out with my ears ringing. I wanted that override.

Like yeah, like almost like a shortcut to this thing that I feel like I chase in a lot of ways. But this was the quickest and like in a way the most transcendent way of getting it. these have in many ways been the purest moments of my entire life, really. And I can't remember one of them before this. My conversation with Gia Tolentino continues after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these. incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Do you remember the first time that you wanted to write about music? I guess this wasn't really writing about music, but it is nice how kind of explicit the childhood of the sort of 90s and teenagerhood of the 2000s made your relationship with music. And I was on Live Journal as a teen. There was like, I think, a slot to put whatever music you were listening to.

And then there was my space. And, you know, like, so much of it was like, really, you were waving this song like a flag. And that was the currency and the language. And then I think for like a full year when I was in grad school in Michigan in 2012, which is when I started like writing on the internet in general. Like I was blogging for the hairpin for no money. And so like my friends were music blogging. And because I was writing and could write quickly.

and easily they would have me write for these music blogs. And then when I got hired at the Hairpin by my now best friend, Emma Carmichael, it was just like the two of us running this website and we had to just like fill space. I think it was like nine posts a day just between the two of us. And both of us love music. And so we would just kind of just to keep putting stuff on the website. Like we would write about music almost every day. And it seemed kind of like a natural extension of anything that I'd been thinking or writing

before, like even as a kid. Like, I think I was always trying to sort of like have and share transcendent experiences with music. Nowadays, when you write about pop music, how much is your perspective still informed by the experience you had, you know, in that minivan and the feelings you had when you were seven years old? Like, is there a standard that other music is being held to that was established by that experience?

This is interesting. I've never thought about this before, but maybe it's why bad pop music is, you know, it's offensive in a way that other music that I don't like is not. Because it's like a perversion of this thing. It's stevia and I want sugar, you know? And I find things like stevia, like quite offensive to my physical form. Like I, not to offend anyone that might need to eat stevia for dietary purposes or whatever.

But I find it unbelievably offensive when it's the worst. part of pop music without the thing that animates and makes transcendent the good stuff, you know, which is like a kind of utter sincerity. It's sincerity and commitment and like real sweetness and real open-ended ecstasy. And when something is borrowing all of that for more likely product placement in an old Navy commercial or whatever, it like it hurts. Like it hurts me. Like the artificiality of pop, when it's magnificent and when it is. soul crushing. I find that very interesting. And so much of that is just how it hits you in your body. So you've name-checked Donna Lewis, obviously, but Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. So many of the

paradigms of like the perfect pop song that you've mentioned, they're all sung by women. And I was wondering if you think that that's part of what's necessary in order to achieve the feeling that you had, Or if it just happens to have worked out that way? No, this is a me thing, you know? It's like women are angels, you know what I mean? Like, I prefer a female subjectivity, you know? I just do. There's something about the female subject position

that is negotiating around so much more to begin with, you know, disempowerment, submission, receptivity, that them singing pure sweetness hits harder for me and means more to me. And, you know, it's also like the baptism into pink, fluffy clouds, angel wings, parting, rainbows and cotton candy. It's obviously not purely coded for girls, but it basically is. Like, there's a reason that, like, gay men who also court this feeling and, like, also prefer

the female subject position in, you know, in music and art in a lot of ways, right? Like, maybe there are exceptions, like, Justin Bieber and. Sorry, right? But this is the girls zone. It belongs to girls. It always will belong to girls. And men can listen to it. They can ghost write the songs.

They can produce the songs. Max Martin did Teenage Dream, right? But they can't do it. It's four girls and it's by girls. And there's like a fourth grade part of me that loves that. What I think I like about this kind of music is it's kind of prelapsarian. It is the Garden of Eden. And it's a sort of willful summoning of a type of feeling.

when anything is possible and nothing will ever go wrong. And like as a kid, you don't have any thoughts about that other than the feeling itself. Like you're just like, wow, what an incredible feeling that this song can summon. And that like I feel on my own anyway probably, you know, about just being alive. And I guess slowly in time,

as one comes to realize in a personal and then structural sense that the world is not like that, these songs still pretend that it is kind of. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was your daughter, who you said she's five. I was wondering, how much do you feel like you can play a hand in shaping her musical taste? Or how much is she like you when you were younger and fiercely independently wants to make her own choices about music discovery? Like, have you played her, I love you always forever? Yes, I did actually?

And I was like, did you like it? And she was like, yeah, I liked it. And then she was like, can you put on Pink Pony Club or whatever? You know, it's so funny. When she was like an infant, I don't know whether this was projection, but it did seem to me that I could soothe her by putting on cotton candy songs. Like I did play Teenage Dream for her a lot. And they would soothe her.

But maybe it was just because I got happier when I listened to them. And, you know, and I was holding her and then she would get sued. Like, I don't know. But it seemed for a while that she would really respond to them. I do remember Teenage Dream made her stop crying once. And now in the last year, it's like, yeah, you know, like, I don't know how many four-year-olds you have in your life right now, but it's like they love Chapel Roan. Like, they're obsessed with Chapel Roan. So she does like this kind of music already.

She likes some Taylor Swift. She likes the Taylor Swift songs that are made for children, like shake it off. And I can see her, and she's a mini-me in every way. Yeah. And she loves music. You know, like she's locked in. She's really tapped into all this stuff. She asks to, if she's in a bad mood, I can, like, turn on a disco light and play, run away with me, you know?

And in a way, I'm like, oh, wow, you're just like me on someone's rooftop in Williamsburg, like, you know, in 2015 when the song came out, you know? It's funny to see it come together because I still like this music too. Like, I went to an Olivia Rodriguez show at MSG, like, when Paloma was like three. And I was looking at all of the little preteen girls that were in their, like, first little halter tops. and, like, first makeup and, you know, really trying to pretend they were teenagers. And I was like, wow, like, I'm pretty close to doing that with her, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I'll be kind of sad when our tastes diverged.

But I kind of suspect we'll have a lot of, like, maybe she'll be like me, and she'll still, she will want the sugary stuff forever. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Gia Tolentino's best-selling book, Trick Mirror, is available everywhere. and you can find her writing at The New Yorker. Her website is gia.blog. Visit songexplor.net slash keychange

for more key change episodes and for a playlist with all the songs that have been discussed. This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm watching and listening to and thinking about, you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexplloter.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh, your way. Thanks for listening.