Listen closer to pop music — hear how it moves us. Hosted by musicologist Nate Sloan & songwriter Charlie Harding. From Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
550 episodes transcribedMany of us keep a journal, but few of us are able to turn our unvarnished thoughts into cultural moments touching on love, death, and guitars quite li...
Madonna has returned this summer with Confessions II: an album full of huge hooks, pounding bass, and sincere emotion. It’s the queen of pop's first r...
For many people – including Charlie and Nate – studying classical piano as a child always felt like a chore. Now, as adults, there’s a newfound apprec...
Bridges open up the world of a song: they're a breath of fresh air and a point of contrast, typically delivered right before the final chorus. But som...
The chorus was once the part of the song that brought us together, the place we gathered to sing. Now it's the most engineered thirty seconds in music...
Everybody sings the chorus, but superfans quote the verse. On this episode of Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate trace the verse from Shakespeare throu...
Research says you judge a song in under half a second. So why write an intro at all? On this episode of Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate kick off the...
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The quadrennial soccer (or fútbol, depending who you talk to) competition is upon us again: it's the FIFA World Cup! And while the World Cup is a spor...
In case you missed it: How does a country of 10 million people dominate the global pop charts? From ABBA's Eurovision breakthrough to Max Martin's me...
In the last episode of our feral pop miniseries, we take a look at the 22 year old rapper primed to take over the world: 2hollis. Splitting the differ...
This week on Switched On Pop, we’re looking at all things feral pop, the microgenre that takes pop music to its most wild extremes. And no feral pop a...
What would it sound like if pop music was reverted to its most wild state of being? It would sound hyper-digital, influenced by the electronic vanguar...
Olivia Rodrigo is back with her third studio album, you seem pretty sad for a girl in love. As the title might suggest, it’s a deeply personal affair,...
Boys of Dungeon Lane, McCartney's collaboration with producer Andrew Watt, arrived when McCartney was 83 and and he came out swinging: the opening tra...
A sci-fi ballet imagined a 2080 where AI strips people of purpose, and the day before its New York premiere, an actual dystopia arrived. Arc Iris,...
A culture that rewards easily consumable individual identities produces plenty of pop stars and almost no bands. A significant exception: MUNA, the tr...
Canada’s favorite export Drake is back! This month, the Toronto singer-rapper extraordinaire released three albums simultaneously: the long-anticipate...
Kacey Musgraves' album Middle of Nowhere finds the country outlaw taking a break from exploring her inner life to look outward, back to her roots: the...
The pedal steel and the saz both live in the spaces between equal-tempered notes, and that gap is where Rostam built American Stories. Rostam joined...
