Switched on Pop - Anthems of Resilience - Kesha and Imagine Dragons [LIVE]
Episode Date: September 7, 2017This episode of Switched on Pop comes at you live from Block Island, RI, recoded in front of an audience of friends and family following a solar eclipse. Fittingly, the two songs discussed that day fo...rmed their own kind of syzygy. Kesha's "Praying" and Imagine Dragon's "Believer" are inverse anthems of resilience. Both tracks seek catharsis - one through prayer, the other through pain. FeaturingKesha - Tik TokKesha - PrayingMozart - The Queen of the Night AriaWhitney Houston - I Will Always Love YouMariah Carey - EmotionsLalah Hathaway - SomethingImagine Dragons - RadioactiveImagine Dragons - Believer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Attention Spotify.
Has arrived
the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute
of Carolina Herrera,
a fragrance
with a charm ofgant and addictive.
Imagine a jasmine
emvolvente,
toffee caramelized
and tonka-tostata.
A combination
that seduce
from the first instant
and she has aweller.
Good Girl Jasmine
Absolute,
hypnotica, irresistible.
Discover it aoy
the oil and
let you
get to involve
for your
passion in a
business with
Shopify
and batte
records of
the form of
the form of
the world.
You've heard
well the
best conversion
of the world
the incredible
system of
the pay of
Shopify
facilita the
website in your
website and
the website
and in
whatever
that is music
for your
eyes.
No,
you'll
make your
business
is a
super-exit
with Shopify.
Start your
period of
a month
on Shopify
point us
bar records.
Oh,
and welcome
to the
second ever
live
edition of
Switch
on
pop coming at you right here on Block Island. Good people, Block Island. Can you make some noise?
Please. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And the last time we did a live
episode, we had so much fun. We were discussing at that time what was the song of the summer.
and at first we were like maybe we should replicate that for this next edition of our live show
impossible there there was no debate zero this year there was only one song that could possibly
be the song of summer i think we all know what it is there was really no point in having a debate
over the song of summer so we've decided to go on a slightly different tack we are going to be
two songs today as we sit in our identical gingham shirts here I realize that maybe these two songs have a certain
similarity as well they're both on the pop charts right now and I want to break down with you
Charlie and with our friends and babies here today I want to break down a song by Kesha called
praying and I also want to talk about believe by
Imagine Dragons, two anthems of resilience at a time when I think we could all use a little bit of
resilience. Yeah, I'm sorry to correct you, it is believer. Believer. The last time we heard from
Kesha, we were treated to one of the great free spirits in popular music, someone whose first
chart success started like this. This is TikTok from 2000.
Wake up in the morning
Feeling like
P. Ditty.
I'm right
My glasses
I'm out of the door
I'm gonna hit this city
Before I leave
Brush my teeth
With a bottle of jack
Because when I leave
I'm coming back
I'm talking pedicure
On our toes toes
Trying on all our clothes
Close clothes
Boys blowing up my bones
phones phones
Dropped up and playing our
favorite CDs
Pulling up to the parties
Trying to get a little bit
tips
It's been five years now since Kesha released an album,
and her first song since then have just hit the airwaves.
Let's just listen to a little bit of one of her new songs,
Praying, and we can sort of see the evolution in the ensuing years.
Beautiful.
So here's the chorus of praying.
I hope your soul is changing.
changing
you find your peace
falling
it's a real banger
yeah we are a long way
from the days of brushing your teeth
with a bottle of jack
what happened in the ensuing years
this is a sad tale
but it's one that is still ongoing
it's it began with
Kesha accusing
her longtime producer
and the composer
she worked with often Dr. Luke,
who produced that song,
TikTok that we just listened to,
accusing him of sexual and emotional abuse
during their work together.
In turn, Dr. Luke filed a countersuit.
That's messy.
Against Keisha and her mother.
I think in the process of this legal back and forth,
Keshe has not been able to release any new music
for, I think, the last three years.
years now. Yeah, she's been silenced. Yes. So this has been
of Kesha, obviously, for the singer herself and we as
pop music fans have been deprived of her music until
now. And this song, I mean, we'll talk about it, but it definitely seems
to be commenting on this intense
drama that she's been through the last few years. That's completely
upended her life and interfered with her art as well.
So in the narrative of this, of praying, we have a narrative of overcoming pain of getting, of resilience, of getting past the challenges of your life.
And especially, and this is kind of what's remarkable about the song coming to a place of forgiveness.
Right.
I would say the song is like forgiveness with a little bit of F you.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Around the edges and it seems cleared.
F you with kindness.
Yeah, who that directed at.
Right.
Any thoughts before we dive in here, Charlie?
I will just say that this is one of the most affective songs I've heard in a long time,
such that when I was playing it with my wife in the car,
she said, we have to play that again because it was one of those just like spine-chilling moments.
And you're going to hear what we're talking about later on
because she really is going to capture her attention.
Let's start with the verse.
of praying.
Anything
for
told me that I was
nothing without you
oh
and after everything
you've done
I can thank you for
how strong I have become
anything standing out for you
Charlie's
we listen to the verse
of this new Kesha track
Yeah the things that come out
for me is that the song
is firmly in the past
to begin with
we're reflecting upon
what has happened to her
her about being torn down by this person and having experienced trauma. The melody is wandering.
It's moving. It's all over the place. It's kind of trying to find itself. And so I think it really
mimics what her experience of the past is. I think we're going to hear that change to the song. It's
going to evolve. Even though underlying the entire piece, we have one chord progression that
moves throughout. It stays at the same chord the entire set of chords, more or less, the entire way
through. And I also find it compelling that it starts on this very solemn G minor chord. That,
I think, is the pass. And then we move through to a major chord, to F, and resolve then to B flat.
And I think that that progression is the same progression that we're going to see her experience,
lyrically mimicking the experience of her overcoming this traumatic experience.
Right.
I mean, she's seeing, she kind of foreshadows this in the verse a little bit when she says,
after everything you've done, I can thank you for how strong I have become.
Right, right.
So that gives us an idea that, okay, this, the delicate piano texture here, the somber G minor
chord that enters us into this song, that might fall away.
Right, right.
All right.
All right.
Let's move from the verse to the pre-chorus now.
Beautiful.
Because you brought the flames and you put me through hell.
I had to learn how to fight for myself.
And we both know all the truth I could tell.
I'll just say this is I wish you farewell.
This really lights you up, Charlie.
I love the pre-chorus.
So what we're getting is build and movement,
a shift in attitude in the song.
The melody goes from this wandering, moving melody.
where she's trying to find herself to almost a one-note melody.
It moves just a little bit, but basically she's stating and asserting herself,
and we've moved into the present about basically saying,
hey, I wish you farewell, I've moved on,
and I'm declaring it by playing this note over and over and over again,
while also picking up the rhythm,
that we get more words, there's more movement, things are escalating,
but they're escalating from a place of being self-assured.
I see what you're saying, like the rhythm kind of ratchets up from a duple rhythm,
Yeah. A division of one and two, and to a triplet rhythm, one, two, three, two, two, three.
So it's really, it's getting compressed. It's getting faster.
She's saying, you brought the flames and you put me through hell.
So the speed of the melody is starting to gear up as we make our way to the chorus.
Exactly.
All right. Let's go to that chorus now.
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your...
It's a very ethereal chorus
And, like, reflects this narrator's ability to move past all the trauma in her life
Into a place of acceptance and even forgiveness.
That's powerful stuff.
And earlier you mentioned that the chords are almost constantly repetitive
without change, with a few exceptions.
there is an exception.
And it's right here
at the end of this chorus,
we get one of the
rare sort of harmonic deviations
from this G minor,
F major,
B-flat major,
chord progression.
Yes.
And where do we go, Charles?
We go to an E-flat.
Yes, we go to the sub-dominant
from B-flat up to E-flat.
And that's a subtle change.
right there, the introduction of this new chord
that we haven't heard until this point.
So we've added that chord at the end.
Yeah, exactly. So that last chord
only occurs at the end
of the chorus.
Why is it there?
What's it doing there, Charles?
I hope your soul is changing.
Yes.
So this is an incredible example
of text painting where she is wishing
that that person's soul is changing
and the repeating chord progression that we're hearing over and over again has a new path.
It lands in a new chord and suggests that change is possible even amongst the constant repetition.
I love it.
And change is possible that E-flat major chord signaling change will not let us down about two-thirds through the song.
Something dramatic happens.
There is a change.
We see sort of the strength that Kesha was referring to.
When out of nowhere, these massive drums just descend onto this song.
It's almost like we've moved from a ballad to a gospel.
Yeah.
And it's only going to escalate from here.
Those drums are the point of no return.
Right.
And the gospel tip is accurate because this song has, obviously, has a lot of religious overtones.
Yeah.
And pretty soon, Kesha is about to give us some vocal pirate.
aerotechnics that would not be out of place from someone lost in in some kind of like sermonizing fever.
Okay, is everyone ready for this?
Whoa.
We've come a long way from those super auto-tuned TikTok vocals like Gasha is shining.
She's, that's the highest note I think I've ever heard.
Can we hear that one more time?
That's completely insane.
One more time?
Yeah.
Do you want to just give us an example of how she does that?
You know, I, I, laryngitis.
Yeah, my voice is just not there right now.
But you, you have a rather angelic voice.
No, no, that's quite all right.
This is the point in the song where the narrative has progressed from looking back to the past
to being, I think, firmly in the present.
And it's almost in rejoicing and triumphant transformation.
Yes.
And at this point, we have to take a brief aside to talk about the high notes throughout musical history,
especially this kind of high note, which is sometimes called like a whistle note.
It's almost stratosphericly high beyond falsetto.
It's extraordinary.
I mean, this brings to mind some great examples in history going back to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
This is the Queen of the Night Aria.
This is one of the great examples of what used to be called coloratura.
We should probably bring that term back, I think.
What does it mean?
It means...
Wait, wait, did you introduce yourself at the beginning as a musicologist?
My Italian is a little rusty.
I don't know what it would be.
It's probably something to do with color.
Yeah.
Definitely.
But it's very, very incredibly high, incredibly fast, and difficult passages, such as
this one. And the whistle note continues into the 20th century. In fact, it kind of has a renaissance.
I think that it hadn't enjoyed since the 18th century. I mean, I think this is one of the sort of,
if you're talking about incredibly high notes, you can't not mention this singer.
I forgot about the saxophone. Got that a saxophone. Yeah. Another singer that makes you go,
what did what just happened what did i just here uh as does that was Whitney Houston right I
always love you as I don't think anyone was confused as does Mariah Carey in many places I think
one of the the great whistle tone virtuastic passages of hers is in uh towards the end of the song
emotions I mean that just doesn't make any sense I don't I don't understand and for our last
For our last whistle tone, I have kind of
a wild card. Are you familiar with
the singer Layla Hathaway?
No. Anyone here? Anyone here
down with Laila Hathaway? You're in for a treat.
I'm starting.
It's so unfair that so many people can't
see your face right now.
It's just, I just don't, it doesn't make any sense.
This is superhuman. I mean,
this is literally a whistle tone like
harmonized with yourself.
Yeah. Lela Hathaway. Insane.
In doing this taxonomy of the high note in
popular music, it's, it's, it's,
It's worth thinking about like where Kesha sort of fits into these other examples of virtuastic singing.
Like how is it maybe similar and different to some of those examples we heard?
You're putting me on the spot here.
I think a lot about the Moriah Carey song.
When that beat first comes in, I'm like, I want to dance.
This song is super fun.
And she hits those crazy notes, laughs at herself, talks about, I'm going higher.
But the place that she's starting from is already from a place of high energy.
I think the way that Kesha uses that tone
is that you're starting way down here
and slowly building up to this high note.
And so the transformative nature of her vocal
feels like it matches the song,
whereas some of the other high notes
are just impressive.
Yeah, so I totally hear what you're saying.
It's like, and I love to you mentioned Mariah Carey
actually laughing at herself
after hitting those notes because it is.
It's just such a technical feat.
Yeah.
And just something as a listener
that you just kind of sit back and are astonished.
Right.
But Keshe doesn't seem to be wanting you to laugh.
No.
And I didn't even know that she could do that, right?
Like having heard Keshe on the radio, I hadn't heard her entire catalog of work, but I had no idea that she was such a powerful vocalist.
And so in some ways, I also see her referencing all of her earlier work sort of an antithesis and saying, by the way, I'm a super legit artist.
I write my stuff, which is another one of her songs.
Her choruses, I write my stuff.
She makes the money.
A song is called Woman.
It's a great tune.
So she writes her stuff.
She sings her stuff.
She's written for lots of other people.
Right.
She's a master and she's a master at her art.
So she's showing all of that while she's also matching the narrative of this piece, which is overcoming major adversity and demonstrating it through joy and transformation.
Totally.
And like sort of repurposing this virtuastic high note in the process for her own narrative.
Yeah.
of resilience. Okay, we're going to fast forward to the very last moment of this song. Literally the last
moment of this song because I think it's worth discussing for a moment. So if we just flash forward
to the very end of this song, there's something that happens that's almost unnoticeable that I find
really fascinating. So here's the very end of praying. Did the piano go out of tune? No, it's not the
piano I'm interested in. One more time.
She catches her breath. Yeah.
What's that about?
Let's open it up to the
in-studio audience.
What do we make of
this halted breath
at the end of
Kesha's narrative of
resilience? What is, it's a very weird.
It almost sounds like she's about to sing something
and then doesn't.
What does that mean?
She's still ongoing with your court case and
there must be things that she's not allowed to say
or do. And so there's this moment of wanting to say more, but she's caught up.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Wait a minute. Like in the pre-chorus when she sings, and we both know all the truth I could tell.
And so then at the very end, she's like, I could, but I'm not this time.
Oh.
Whoa. Does anyone else want to offer an interpretation? I don't think you should because that was
by far the best one we'll get.
I was thinking that it was a moment of vulnerability
to hear someone's breath like that, so intimately.
And that could also be true,
but I think what you said is even better.
So there's probably much more to uncover
about this new anthemic track from Kesha.
But we're going to take a quick break and come back and examine another song rocketing up the charts.
That also is an anthem of resilience when we return.
Beautiful.
Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.
What's the first step as a podcaster?
Well, you have to ask lots of questions.
I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.
Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at,
the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path
to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat
something for me. No. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top
executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.
Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their
pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.
Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.
President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations.
Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday.
We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the
places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talking. It's talking to
Talk about America and politics beyond the current president.
So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period?
I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.
When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated.
My sense is that people want border at the border.
They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time.
the view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down.
That's this week on America Actually.
Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds.
Welcome back to Switch on Pop.
On Side B, we turn to another song.
Currently, number four on the Billboard Hot 100.
It's a song that also has religious overtones and a song that is a narrative of,
struggle and overcoming pain.
This is Imagine Dragons Believer.
And if you're familiar with Imagine Dragons,
you're probably familiar with them from their hit song, Radioactive.
And in their new song, Believer, they continue many of the musical themes of radioactive,
huge percussion, batteries, massive sing-along,
choruses, an incredible rhythmic drive, lots of big bassy synthesizers and steering electric guitars.
Let's listen to the verse and get acquainted with the world of believer.
Man, what's the first thing you hear in this song, Charlie?
You cut it short.
I did.
I did cut it a little short.
The introduction, I think, has the most important piece.
All right, let's listen to the very beginning.
Keep me kosher here, Charles.
That.
Do it again.
That synthesizer is the very beginning.
That synthesizer is the whole song for me.
Really? Tell me more.
Well, the whole song we're going to discover is about pain and overcoming pain.
I think that that synthesizer represents that feeling of pain.
I mean, it's a painful sound.
and we're going to hear it transform
from this introductory element
which is, I mean, honestly,
at first off-putting, you don't know where you're going to land.
That could be, you could hear that in a horror film.
Yeah, it's very menacing.
But then you get a beat.
Okay, so you follow that beat.
And that womp sound
is actually buried in the verse.
We heard it in the verse.
They filter it out so it's not as strong
so we can hear the vocalists.
But it recurss throughout the entire track.
It ends up being the hook of the chorus
that we're going to get to as well.
Oh, so that sound that we heard at the very beginning is sort of like the telltale heart
of this piece.
Like it'll come back again and again, even if we don't notice it at first.
I'd say that it's chronic.
Okay, so you're talking about pain, Charles.
And that means we have to go to the chorus of this song because this chorus is all about pain.
And this chorus is where the song really comes alive.
and it all hinges on that moment of suspense we get at the very beginning of the chorus
where we might expect a sound there on the downbeat,
and instead we are met with nothing but a great, wushing silence
before rushing in to occur only on the third beat of this measure,
an eternity in popular music.
Do we get the actual hook of this song, and it is pain?
And let's just hang out in the course.
chorus for a second because I think if you want to talk about this song as describing an arc of
working through struggle and heartache and learning how to overcome pain itself to become a
believer I guess in whatever higher power sort of exercises you from that right this is the moment
because I feel when we every time we hear that word pain we are going through some kind of
emotional tunnel or something.
Well, I think it's really important to note that often on our show, we don't go into
the author's personal narrative because we really want to see songs speak for themselves.
But I think, like, the Kesha track, the narrator's point of view is really important.
The lead singer of Imagine Dragons has two chronic diseases, chronic arthritis and
ulcerative colitis, both of which can cause immense chronic pain.
And so this experience that we're getting through the song of this pain moment coming
through every moment at the very beginning
is the first thing we hear. It's underneath
the verse, even though he's singing and
sort of claiming his space. Yeah.
Right? He says, first thing first, and he's going to tell
you his story. And underneath it, we can still hear that
pain motif.
When we get into the chorus,
it introduces the chorus
and then it gets picked up by the guitar.
Almost escalated. Like, that pain is emanating throughout
its entire body.
Right. And then in the
chorus it kind of explodes into the picture.
Yes.
Because we hear that synthesizer on the word pain, right?
Right.
There it is again, lurking.
Yeah.
So that's interesting because this sort of complicates my interpretation of it because
the pain is always still there in your reading of it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's ebbing and flowing, I think, with some sort of control asserted by the singer.
And that I'm hearing it as that pain is his teacher.
It's always there.
You can't necessarily do anything.
with the pain. It's not going to go away. These are both incurable chronic diseases that he has.
So that musically what we're getting is it's all throughout the song, but at some point, it makes
itself very poignant and you can't escape it. And then even when it's at its strongest, it's
during the chorus when he is saying, hey, pain, you've made me a believer. I'm able to overcome
this pain, even when you're most present in my life and take my space and share that with
the whole world of thousands of people in a stadium singing along.
that's deep.
So not trying to abolish pain.
No.
Accept it.
Accept it and live with it.
In that respect,
this song might have more in common with the Kesha track than I realize.
What were you thinking?
Well,
in the sense that I think both of them are sort of narratives of acceptance with very different lenses.
Right.
Right?
Because this song is loud and hyper rhythmic.
Right.
And aggressive.
and sort of a rather dark vision, I think, of pain.
And the Keshe song is rather triumphant and delicate.
But I think they're dealing with similar themes,
and there's actually maybe a direct link between these two songs,
which is they use the same chords,
one minor and one major.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Because the Kesha song, as we talked about,
goes from G minor to F major.
to B flat.
Right.
And then all we have to do
to get to the world
of believers
is to make that B flat
major
into a B flat minor.
And now all of a sudden
we're in the home key
of Believer,
which has a very similar
progression
going from B flat minor.
So this time it starts
on the home key.
But still,
B flat minor
to G flat
major,
which is the minor
equivalent of,
the G minor we had in Kesha and then to F major.
Right.
So if you were to sort of count it out,
they go through the same cycle,
the same number chords.
Yes.
They're slightly transmuted.
Exactly.
They're made up of both the same collection of chords,
starting on the one of the scale,
the six of the scale,
and the five of the scale.
Right.
But the Kesha is in major
and the Magic Dragons is in minor,
which obviously matches the rest of the feel
of both of these songs.
which feels more overcoming and one which is sort of living in that pain.
Totally.
And this, I think, is a moment as to pause now and open it up to everyone and reflect on
what each of these songs might offer us.
Granted, we've only been just introduced to these two tracks,
but between Keshe's praying and Imagine Dragons believer,
which would you, do you think you would turn to as a sort?
of resilience and strength or some sort of beacon in hard times.
I mean, I think praying is much more.
It's like the breath I've made this in there.
Yeah.
I see what you mean.
There is a very sort of Nietzschean sort of like Uber-Menshi approach to struggling through pain,
Confung-Zieg sort of.
And perhaps in this sort of crazy time in which we're living,
that's not what we really need
in order to, for catharsis.
It makes you feel strong
when you're in pain
is hearing someone else
going through pain
and being vulnerable
in an intimate moment
or maybe for other people
it's seeing a display of force
and maybe that's the difference
between those who'd be
attracted to each of those songs.
It's what you bring up the moment right now
and I don't know
which way that cuts
because the Imagine Dragon song
being about living with pain and being a sort of harsher feel sounds a little more where we are America,
summer 2017.
You know, it's not as hopeful as a Keshe's sign.
There's something appropriate about, you know, the song we turn to being the song of a woman
that's gotten past her, the people who have stood in her way.
There's like, there's like a counter history, like counterfactual to that.
That's nice to live in for a little bit.
He says, the second line, I'm fired up and tired of the way that things have been.
You could almost see that on a political sign running around, rallying.
I'm sick of tired of the way things have been.
I think that probably different audiences might even hear that differently.
Also, Keshah is talking to us more.
And this is more thought, even though it's much more second person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's a special, that's a certain kind of strength to turn around and forgive.
the person who hurt you and damage you.
That's, like, ultimately the more sort of powerful gesture.
The Kesha song is also, like, more specific in its detail.
Like, the Imagine Dragon song could be, you know,
because most people who are listening to Kesha
have heard at least something about her ordeal with Dr. Luke.
Like, it's a much more public struggle than, you know,
the Imagine Dragons, you know,
singer's medical history and chronic illnesses,
which are still horrible,
but, like, it's, I think the pain in that song
is abstracted to a level, or, like,
that could be a song about a breakup.
That could be a song about, you know,
I had a really bad day,
and, like, somebody cut me in the grocery counter,
you know, the grocery checkout line.
Like, we don't have any signals about, like,
really what the scale of that pain is.
With Kesha, like, everyone knows what she is talking about.
So in the second stanza,
He says, second thing second, don't you tell me what you think that I could be.
I'm the one at the sale.
I'm the master of my sea.
And I actually was not aware of that until I clicked on Genius, which you can do.
And he's actually referencing the poem Invictus.
This is a William Ernst Henley poem, a Victorian poet.
And he has the line, I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
so it's suggested that perhaps he's making a reference here,
maybe intentionally or not,
but even the metaphor of being at sea,
you're right, goes directly to the abstract,
rather than to the personal.
And I remember hearing that for the first time,
I'm thinking,
I don't quite see how this relates to that first stanza,
where you've just taken me to a different narrative point of view.
Any final thoughts about this,
about Amanda Dragons or Kesha, Charlie?
There was another great moment of text painting in this song,
and I love text painting.
Ooh, where was that?
Oh, you missed it.
I was broken from a young age, taking my soak in to the masses,
writing my poems for the few.
They look at me, took of me, shook of me, feeling me, singing from heartache,
from the pain, taking my message from the veins, speaking my lesson from the brain,
seeing the beauty through the...
He says, I was broken from a young age, taking my sulking to the masses, writing my poems
for the few that look to me, took to me, shook to me, feeling me.
That look to me, took to me, shook to me feeling me is an incredible example of
painting.
Interesting.
That is like illustrating all the people trying to take things from him.
I think it's illustrating, look at me.
So he's grabbing your attention, right?
Even though you didn't quite know what the words were the first time you heard it,
it's super rhythmic, right?
The da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
And so all of a sudden you're like, ooh, what is that?
So look to me, shook to me.
And so you're like, it's grabbing your attention.
wanting you to move.
Maybe he is taking a very different narrative point of view,
maybe being more abstract about his personal experience of pain,
but he's using some really great songwriting techniques
to grab our attention,
even if it's at a really visceral level.
I love the way that he does that.
In dark times, it's nice to know that the radio dial
has some salvation on offer.
And right now, depending on what you need,
if your anthem of resilience is one of forgiveness
or one of sort of living with pain.
You can find those.
Kesha and Imagine Dragons are here.
Thank you to our incredible studio audience here on Black Island and to all those listening
at home.
This was certainly a less abelient sort of topic than the last time we did a live show.
Thank you for your evening entertainment.
And it was possibly foreshadowed by the solar.
eclipse that we all witness today when the skies turn dark and the temperature dropped and
does seem like the days of summer are coming to an end.
I hate to keep closing on such emotional.
Reaching for extended metaphors.
I think it's beautiful.
Switch on Pop is produced by me, Nate Sloan.
And me, Charlie Harding.
Edited by The Incredible Bill Lance.
Our design is done by Luke Harris.
We're a proud member of the Panoppley Network.
You can catch more episodes of Switched On Pop at Switchedonpop.com.
Get in touch with us.
Contact at Switchedonpop.com and on Twitter at Switched On Pop.
It would mean a lot to us if you would leave us an iTunes review.
We're going to be back again in two weeks, back to our regular schedule.
And until then, thanks for listening.
Thank you, everybody.
