Switched on Pop - D.O.C. (Death of the Chorus) with Emily Warren

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

Listen to Top 40 pop over the last decade and you’ll notice something weird is happening. The chorus—the emotional apotheosis of a pop song, its dizzying high, its cathartic sing-along center—is disappearing. In its place, artists from Bad Bunny to Taylor Swift are toying with new, chorus-lite song forms that introduce a new musical grammar to the sound of contemporary pop. We may not think much about pop structure when listening to our favorite songs, but this is a big deal—the last time pop experienced such a seismic shift was when the chorus first came into fashion, back in the 1960s. What does this mean for modern musicians and listeners? Emily Warren, songwriter for new-guard stars like Dua Lipa and Khalid, joins to break down why the sea change in pop form represents a new horizon of creative possibility. Songs Discussed Bad Bunny - Si Veo a Tu Mamá Future & Drake - Life Is Good Billie Holiday - Blue Moon Beyonce - Formation Travis Scott - Sicko Mode Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman Drake - Laugh Now Cry Later (ft. Lil Durk) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. It would be an understatement to say that we are in a

moment of significant change in so many ways, but obviously we switched on pop, we need to get into what's changing in popular music in 2021. And we're at a 75-year tectonic shift. The blueprint of the pop song song is being rewritten. We're talking about song form. This is the thing we've talked about a bit on the show last year, right? Sorry, you said song form and I just immediately felt asleep, why is that so boring and why should I care about it? Songform is perhaps the most important thing that we don't pay much attention to. It's the underlying structure that supports all of our listening. It's sort of like all of our core assumptions about it.

Oh, come on. Oh, sorry, no, I just got a little narcoleptic. I genuinely am interested in song form. It's the, as you say, it's the building blocks of the pop that surrounds us. And we've talked about it with some really compelling music. last year. We spoke about the song Life is Good by Future and Drake, which was sort of these two

songs mashed together. We spoke about bad bunnies, CVO Atumama, which doesn't really have any chorus. It just has like section after section after section. And even in our analysis of she's building songs in some fairly untraditional ways. And what you and I've been doing,

I think, over the last year, is trying to figure out what is happening with this bigger trend, right? We've unpacked this thinking in a forthcoming New York Times op-ed, and I want to preview that today in a conversation about what's really going on with songs. I want to talk about how it started, how it's going, and what it all might even mean that the chorus is disappearing. That all sounds great, but what are we talking about here? Like,

what are you actually, what is happening? What do all these songs share in common? What is this tectonic shift? Break it down for me. So you and I have been pontificating on how songs may be shifting, But I wanted to sort of hone in here, be more clear about what we're talking about, and more importantly, confirm our theory with someone who is a frequent contributor to pop songwriting rooms. And so I called up our friend Emily Warren, whose credits are long and include artists like Sean Mendez, Khalid, and Dua Lippa. The course doesn't necessarily need to be so much higher than the verse in the pre or so much louder or anything, or such a departure. A lot of things are more all around vibe. So I asked her if there was a hit song that she's written

that has helped break this convention of the idea being that this chorus needs to be this really high, elevated moment. And she noted the track that helped break Duelipa's career. The first one that made me realize that it really would work was new rules. Here's what she's talking about. The verse section has a vocal register, which is about just as high as the chorus section later. You can hear it in the transition from the verse to the chorus.

That chorus is like not really a chorus. I mean, it's not what I learned. When I was learning how to write, that's something that stays in the same register as the verse and has a million lyrics and it would not have been something I would have tried back in the day. So in new rules, the chorus isn't necessarily bigger than the next section. And so instead of calling it a chorus, the big sing-along section, Emily has actually been hearing session songwriters adopt some new lingo. In the last probably four or five years, the chorus has been what it's called.

But I'm finding now that the chorus is getting called the hook more and more. In the session, I think if people come up with like a catchy thing that repeats a couple of times across the verse, like people will say it's another hook. Lots of people call the chorus the hook, lots of people call the post the hook, and the chorus the chorus, and I think it's pretty, tends to be pretty vague. But I think when I hear hook, I definitely think of like a simpler, more like patchy thing that's not so involved. And this changing lingo, the move from calling something a chorus to calling it a hook, has actually affected the way that people are writing songs.

And I think this is this hook idea is fundamentally changing their form. It was like, hang on, you literally have no rules anymore. New rules or no rules? Yeah, no, right on, exactly. And I think this lesson that she learned from writing that song is reflected in lots of other pop music like we talked about, right? Like, the future track is just two songs matched together. The Taylor songs are just sort of like hook after hook after hook. the function of this idea of the chorus taking us to this really high point is shifting.

We have a sort of preset expectation that for a long time things have had this nice little verse chorus format and that feels like it's on really shaky ground. Yeah, that's super interesting to hear Emily Warren say that the chorus just isn't as important as it used to be because for a while now, for many decades, it's been all about the chorus in pop music, right? I mean, fundamentally, that is the part that is either going to be the thing that you sing and no, it is the thing that catches you,

or it's going to turn into a Pepsi jingle. That's the chorus. But it wasn't always this way, Charlie. What do you mean? Come back with me to maybe the 1930s. We didn't really have choruses in pop music Take a pop hit from the 1930s like Blue Moon by Rogers and Heart Of course it has a chorus, it's like Blue Moon

No? No, sir. What do you mean? Well, let's listen to Billy Holiday sing this first, sir. I'm going to break down this A-A-B-A form for you. First A section. Blue Moon you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my... Now here's our second A section. Starts with the same title. Blue moon You knew just what I was there for You heard me saying a prayer for Someone I really...

Coming up is our B section It's going to be a contrasting melody lyric. And then they suddenly appeared before me, the only one my arms will ever hold. I heard somebody whisper, please adore me. And that brings us back to the final A section. Blue moon. Now I'm no longer alone without a dream in my heart, without love of my own.

Sacks solo plays us out. And that's the whole shebang. A, A, B, A, B section starts with the title of the song, Blue Moon. Yeah. B section provides a little melodic and lyrical contrast. And, you know, the whole thing's over in less than a minute. Right. This was how pretty much every song in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s was written.

Yeah. It was like an assembly line of A, ABA 32 bar hits. Right. And then that all changed. Dun, done, done. This is something that I don't really understand. And it's probably fruitful to examine because we are in a moment of change now,

and I don't entirely understand what's causing it. I have some theories that we'll talk about. What changed in the 60s? In the 60s, everything changes as pop music starts to embrace these more and more diverse sources, folk music, psychedelic music, Southern blues, rock, and R&B,

it's a completely new landscape from the kind of hits that were churned out of songwriting factories in New York City for most of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Now, all of a sudden, people all over the country are sending their songs into the national consciousness and there's this new approach that's emerging. It's verse, chorus.

And it really centers around this chorus in the middle of the song that's catchy and bright and memorable. Yeah. It makes me think also that perhaps the verse chorus form has a nice sort of built-in narrative structure, a little, right, heroes journey. Right, you start with the basic verse material and then eventually you rise to some sort of climax and repeat and, you know, eventually maybe transform it. It sort of mirrors what's going on in the many cultural revels. that are happening in the 60s and perhaps those sort of new story forms were also ways of saying things that just hadn't been said before now instead of these AABA songs from the 30s like blue moon we've got these verse chorus songs like Aretha franklins you make me feel like a natural woman so we have this verse section that's kind of languid just setting the scene just setting the scene And now we're starting to build up.

A little pre-chorus section. You feel like something's coming. Yeah, it's a whole emotional ride, isn't it? Yeah, and that chorus with the title hook, you make me feel like a natural woman just like, it's just like this blast off. You know, you're just like rocketing through space with Aretha there. everything kind of reaches a climax of intensity and emotion and then kind of comes back down and settles into another verse. And so you're writing these peaks and valleys throughout the course of the song. And it's really, I don't know, it's kind of thrilling to listen to. Absolutely. And she's even

supported by that whole chorus of singers to sort of encourage us along as well. It's a literal chorus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So verse chorus becomes the thing. And we've been in this for a long time. Oh yeah, I mean, there's a dissertation written by Jay Somick at Yale University that actually tracks the increasing number of verse chorus songs over the course of the 1960s. And he shows in 64, only 27% of songs are verse chorus. Oh, wow. By 69, it's risen to 42%. By the end of the 70s, it's risen to 73%. Oh, wow.

And by the end of the 1980s, 84% of songs are using verse chorus form. It's like this sort of invisible change that just gradually takes over and becomes dominant, that we don't even realize the new culture we're living in because it really is, it's that undergirding. It's what's underneath all of the facade. Now, let's be clear, for all those 84% of songs using verse chorus form, there's going to be some outliers that don't as well. Yeah, right.

And there's some really significant ones. Right. You know, like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, that doesn't use verse chorus form. No. No, that's its own point. Let me go. We'll not let you go. Let me go.

Let me go. Let me go. I think about, like, even a lot of funk. Like, a lot of James Brown's stuff is just kind of groove-based and just, you know, takes you from one section to the next and might drag on for 15 minutes, and you're just dancing the whole time. and you're just dancing the whole time. Totally. Make it funky.

Make it funky. You don't need to use verse chorus form to get a hit song. But it helps. Yeah, right, right. So, okay, so that's how it started. And I wanted to sort of bring us into the present from the 1980s with, how's it going? And how it's going is that this verse chorus thing was working out really well until, well, things have started to become shaky in the last two decades.

Right? So I did this analysis where I went to the year-end charts for the years 1999, 2009, and 2019 to see is verse-chorus form still dominant? And when we get to 1999, this is the era of shares believe. And TLCs, no scrubs. Nine out of the ten songs are in verse-chorus form

with a weird exception. in Sugar Rays every morning. It's kind of its own weird form that I can't quite figure out. Who knew? Sugar Ray were so experimental. Originally a new metal band. So in 2009, we're talking era of Lady Gaga's poker face.

Seven out of the 10 year-end top 100 songs are in verse chorus form, with some notable exceptions from the Black Eyed Peas, who's Boom, Boom, Pau, and I've got a feeling. start to infuse some electronic dance music and to pop and these longer songs that are kind of borderline verse chorus. A truly notable exception with Beyonce's single ladies, which if you ask me, I think has two choruses, right? You have all the single ladies, which it starts with, which is for me equally as powerful as the actual chorus.

Okay, so the trend isn't looking good, and by the time we get to 2019, everything starts to fall apart. This is the year of Old Town Road. This is the year in which only three out of the ten songs, by my analysis, were definitively verse chorus. Those were Ariana Grande's Seven Rings. Khalid's talk. And the Jonas Brothers sucker. On the rest of the chart, there's just a lot of experience. On the rest of the chart, there's just a lot of experimentation.

Songs we've talked about in the show, Sickle Mode by Travis Scott, again, a sort of Frankenstein of many different songs all in one. Go on all you with the pick and roll. Totally. One of my favorites is Sunflower by Post Malone and Sway Lee, a song which, like, if you look at the lyrics, like, yeah, it's kind of verse chorus form. But the verses are totally different from each other with totally original melodic material. and the chorus isn't really a high point. It's just kind of got this repeating, lovely little melody. Yeah, this is like what Emily Warren was talking about with new rules.

There's not really a shift from verse to chorus like we had in Ruth of Franklin. It just kind of like cruises right along. So that brings us to today. And, you know, when I look at the 2020 year end charts, there are actually a good number of verse chorus songs on there, but there's also a lot of experimentation. And one of my favorites from 2020 was Drake's Laugh Now, Cry Later.

I think this is a really good example to highlight the ways in which these structures are being played with. Do you know this one featuring Lil Durk? Yes, but refresh my memory. We're going to start out with this nice loop and jump right into technically the chorus. It's pretty low energy.

It's a little trippy Uh-huh And in contrast The verse is where all the energy lives Here's the verse Where did these niggas be at When they said they're doing all this and all that Tired of beef in you bombs

You can't even pay me in a tree That we didn't have Because we started with the chorus So it's kind of just yet another Hook section that takes us into another chorus But the chorus is this down energy section Nothing's making any sense Yeah, there's not these clear

Going crazy down bad What they had didn't last damn baby Sometimes we laugh Yeah, there's not These clear delineations Between different sections And there aren't these high and low points It's more of just like this kind of

Your cruise control coasting Through these different sections Right And you know, it makes sense Because it's kind of a meandering song Lyrically it's about fame, it's about the good life, it's about his past life, it's about relationships, there's a lot going on there, and it's all supported by a single loop that plays throughout. And I think that we are so often now composing in loop-based structures and encourages this sort of more vibiness over a very clear verse and a very clear chorus, but rather just hook an interesting section that re-contextualizes those loops. And this is a really good one.

Because the loop has this very confusing little stutter in it. Like, I don't know if you caught this, but when I first was listening to this song, I was like, what time signature is this in? Like, I can't quite count it. Where am I? And there's no drums or bass at the beginning, which kind of leaves you unmoored. Yeah, definitely. Here, let me show you what I'm talking about, right?

Like, here's our core loop, right? The end of each loop ends with a dun-dum-bon, don't. And that can kind of get go as long as it wants. So the next time we hear that loop come around, it actually only does that bum, bum, bum, two times instead of three times. And it actually like restarts the loop in a place before restarting again. Here's what I mean. Restarts. Restarts again.

It's less about generating these emotional highs and lows than it is about manipulating a single sample to make it continually. interesting and to hold your attention while maintaining this, to quote, Emily Warren vibe throughout. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I felt like when we listened to the Aretha track, it's like it's taking us on this whole emotional journey, this upswelling of emotion, as opposed to, I feel like this song just puts me in a place and really lets me ride there as you put it kind of in cruise control through the entire song. Yeah.

Aretha is a roller coaster and Drake is a carousel. You like that? You like that? Okay, so we've talked about how it started, we talk about how it's going. We need to figure out how did it happen and what does it mean. And let's do that right after a quick break. 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?

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.

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today, that seems to be changing. Charlie, is there a new form on the horizon? And if so, how did we get here? There's definitely a correlation causation issue. But when we look at sort of the big picture, I think we could look at breaking it down into changes in technology and changes in music culture. So why don't you take us through technology? What are the big things that have shifted? Well, one factor has to be the economics of streaming platforms, which is something we've talked about on the show before, right?

Right. Streaming platforms like Spotify want to grab your attention and then hold it through the course of a track. that's the reason we've talked about on the podcast things like the pop overture emerging where starting

with the hook in order to like be like hey hang around for at least 30 seconds please right right but then of course if they can get you

to listen to the whole song that's another payout that means the song might get added to playlists so it's like that vibe is all about keeping you in that place where you just want to

keep listening right They want to, it's not about giving you that emotional payoff of a intense chorus. It's about kind of like putting you in a good, vibey place and keeping you there for roughly two minutes, two and a half minutes, maybe. The other obvious technological shift is the move to our entire digital culture and social media. And that's kind of a really broad thing to say. But when I talked to Emily Warren about it, I thought she was actually particularly. particularly insightful as to how celebrity online culture intersects with what we want from our music.

Maybe it does have fun to do with social media and Instagram and the fact that everybody has access to the artist. It's not really as compelling to hear songs that were amazing. I don't think you would get like a TikTok or a teenage dream or anything right now because it's way more like what actually is happening to you because we're seeing you all the time. We know what's really going on with your love life and all this stuff. That's what people I think want to hear about. Wow, so people almost want something that doesn't sound as formulaic as verse-corrhous form. Yeah. And as a result, perhaps more authentic in a way.

And like matches the expository nature of your social media feed. Stream of consciousness. Yeah, for real. Yeah. Interesting. Like these things aren't disconnected, where it used to be that you would sort of have to do a rebranding at every album drop. Now there is a much greater ongoing level of interaction

and people are... Actually, when I talked about it, she talked about how songwriting sessions really can feel like a six-hour-long psychological evaluation because what they're trying to do is find the real underlying story to tell. Though she also mentions that this can have some downsides.

I've always felt like genuine lyrics kind of cut through and honesty cuts through. but it's definitely a tricky balance. Like if you're, and if everyone knows who you're dating and you're writing a song about them, that's obviously going to have repercussions in your relationship.

So it's a really, really tricky balance of being honest and not being too honest almost. That is tricky. I do not, and I do not envy her. That's like you're like half songwriter, half therapist. That's a lot of hat story. That's a lot of responsibility.

Yeah, and you have to, get to this place where the song is both matching the expectation of like, hey, I know what's going on in your life and I want to hear from you, right? So it's a way of, it's a unique way of narrating what's happening personally. And at the same time, I want to be able to read my own experience into it. So it's got to have just enough detail and closeness, but plenty of distance at the same time. It is a total catch-22 for me. Okay, cool. So there's some technological shifts that might explain us to,

starting to leave the chorus behind. Yeah. But what else is going on? Because there's got to be things happening in, in culture, just like there were in the 60s, right? Right. Like, what is, what's going on in the world of music right now that's changing song form? Well, I think when we look back to this analysis that I did, right? It feels like this has been happening over the last 10, 15 years gradually, and we're kind of hitting this.

a slow erosion of the dominance of the chorus. Right. And we've now maybe sort of crossed a threshold it's feeling like. So we could look at the sort of major genre trends. We could look at the sort of EDM takeover that happened in the early 2010s. We've talked about a song like We Found Love in a Hopeless Place by Rihanna and Calvin Harris, in which the pop drop gets introduced into popular music. This is the adding the extra section after the chorus, the big sort of,

of danceable moment. And this really solidified the importance of some kind of material after the chorus, some sort of post-chorus, whether lyrical or not lyrical, that sort of up the ante. Made the verse chorus form in many ways, like it's not even a roller coaster, but like a loop-de-loop roller coaster. One of those things I've never been on because they terrify me. And that brings us back to new rules, actually, which also has one of these pop-drop instrumental post-c choruses. I mean, there are vocals in there.

Yeah. but you can't sing along with them the way you can sing along to Aritha Franklin. I'd love to hear you try, Charlie. No, you wouldn't. So there's the idiom influence. Right. Obviously, there's the dominance of hip-hop

as the popular genre in pop music. And there's just so many places you could point to whole sub-genres. You could look at the culture of remixing, the fact that interludes are dominant on hip-hop albums, songs that just don't really have any particular structure and are just meant to take you from one to the other,

you have the fact that many hip hop songs will have hooks, but also many won't have hooks. They might just be verse, verse, verse, verse. So I think you just have a lot of creativity in the way in which popular hip hop is presented and plenty of artists who play with that form. Yeah. Artists, I know, like Charles Cambino, Kendrick Lamar,

we point to in our piece, the Beyonce's formation as I think a really pivotal piece like single ladies also has sort of two hook sections the formation section as well as the sort of formal chorus if doing the show for the last six years has taught me anything it's that hip hop is the most experimental genre in the pop umbrella yeah probably I mean I think it would it's also worth pointing out though

that there's plenty of experimentation happening in R&B as well, right? True, true. And these genres that are ever blurred together, especially when it enters into the top 100, where so often a hip-hop song might have an R&B chorus in the center of it. And so we see a lot of interplay.

But notable examples would be something like Solange's last record, when I get home, which went number seven on the billboard. And it's an album full of short interludes, really strange musical interplay with lyrics that are abstract and avant-garde. It's everywhere. I just want to wake up to the sons and say no $100,000 on the fronts and the blunts. I just want to wake up on get that only at a in a rose that's renting. So what I'm getting from your analysis is that if we want to blame anyone for the death of the chorus, it's the Nol's family.

They are incredibly creative. Beyonce and Solange have killed the chorus. No, I'm not saying anything so bold, but yes, they are incredibly creative folks who make stuff that changes what everybody else wants to hear. And I actually think that is what is most important here. It's like musicians have always played with how to write a song. Many of my favorite artists have been doing so for many decades. But what's shifting now is the music in the most popular. popular format, stuff that's happening in the Hot 100.

This is where our sort of collective consciousness is willing to accept songs that don't fit into this very clear normative structure of verse chorus. Now things can move around and be their own thing, which points to perhaps the other really important shift, which is a new generation taking over popular music. And that Gen Z has a very different culture of consumption, of creation, different aesthetics. as soon as something is dominant and interesting and popular and cool, there's always going to be a new generation who's going to want to usurp that. Yeah.

It's like we're starting to hear the effects on top 40 hits of what happens when you make music completely in a digital vacuum and it's experienced completely in a digital vacuum. It's going to sound different, you know? Totally. Right. And that's going to cause a lot of anxiety, I'm sure, by people who are like, where is my chorus? Where's my cathartic, emotional, powerful, high point?

Give me that chorus. Where's the real music? Is that what you're saying, Nate? I want real music? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Kids these days, you know, glued to their laptops. All right, Nate. So what does this all mean?

Can we pinpoint what this has broken down into? Are we thoroughly in a new form? what do you see emerging? Hard to say. I think it feels like we're in an inflection point because those traditional fist pumping sing-along choruses are still with us, right? Right. I mean, don't make me sing Rachel Platon's fight song to you.

Yeah, it's a good build. But I will. This is my fight song. I mean, that is like an anthemic cookie cutter chorus. Yeah, and it works well. And there were plenty of them on the end of year charts last year as well. Definitely. But there seems to be like an equal number of songs that break all those rules,

like Emily Warren was saying, that opt for hooks over choruses, that opt for vibe over emotional highs and lows. And this kind of matches my experience of what I've observed as well. I've actually been taking this online songwriting class with Ryan Tetter, who, you know. Bragg. It's an online class. Anyone can sign up for it. Bragg.

So braggy. And for those who, you know, Ryan Tedder is the lead vocalist of One Republic and has written songs for pretty much everybody who's released a hit record in the last decade, Adele, Beyonce, Ed Shearine, Jennifer Lopez, Arna Grande. And your best friend? No, we've never met. Anyway. The new, I see the new host of this show? No, he's the host of the NBC's Songland competition. I'm just saying, all I hear you is just rhyme this,

Ryan this, Ryan that. Okay, here's my point. He demonstrates how he writes a hook. And he, in this chorus, does basically a, here's my verse, here's my pre-chorus, here's my chorus. Now I'm going to do four different versions of that. And he's just sort of like improvising melodies. He's not even making lyrics.

He's just sort of scatting. because he believes that the melody is the most important thing. Then what's nuts is he starts moving all of these sections. He's like, I like the third version of the chorus that I did, and I'm going to make that the verse.

And then I'm going to fly the pre-chorus to after the chorus, and really what he's going for is just like, I want hook, hook, hook, hook, hook. Every section needs to be as good as the previous section and as good as the next section. It's got to be standalone, excellent,

awesome, and it's all written to one loop all throughout. I hate to say, but that was an interesting anecdote. Thanks, man. This conversation makes me reconsider a little bit of some of the analysis that we did last year, looking at this idea of, we've spoken about pop drops. We've spoken about post-choruses. We've spoken about pop overtures, these maybe sections at the beginning of the song,

which are like a mini-chorus. And we're kind of, I feel like instead of like any one of these things is the way that things work, it's more the Emily Warren, like, throw the rules out of, approach where there's kind of like, I don't know what to call it. For me, it's like you could call it like collage form. We have all these meandering hooks. I don't know, what do you, what would you call this? Carousel form.

Carousel form. Cruise control form. All right. I like this. It's almost, you know, if you go back 100 years, like we were talking about, you'd find ABA form. Yeah. but if you go back even further than that you'd find like these kind of folk forms like strophic forms what's

that that's where you just have the same music over and over again right like a ballad like danny boy the pipes the pipes are calling it's just the same melody over and over again right with new lyrics it's almost like in 2021 we're going back to the deepest roots of american pop music and we're recreating this like folk form, this strophic form where you just use the same loop to like tell us a story that just vibes and keeps you hooked to your seat and it's an intimate story drawn from your own life experience and it relates to people and it holds your attention for two minutes and then you're on to the next. So future folk.

Future folk. Ooh, big takeaway for me, the chorus isn't dead, but we have moved into this place where you can kind of write a song in the structure that you want as long as it's catchy and it doesn't really matter what the various sections are.

And that's kind of cool. Like, I think that that means we're going to hear a lot more music this coming year they will surprise us. Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, at a moment of great upheaval and change and uncertainty, it kind of makes sense that pop music is experiencing something similar.

Yeah. The first retrenchment of pop formula that we've had since the 1960s. That's a big deal. So it's something we've got to keep paying attention to because it's going to say a lot about what's happening in our world. Switched on Pop is produced by Bridget Armstrong, Nate Sloan. That's me. Oh, Charlie Harding.

You do, too. That guy. We're mixed edited and engineered by Brandon McFarlane. Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb and social media by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Nashok Kerwa and Liz Kelly Nelson and we're a member of the Fox Media Podcast Network. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop wherever you listen to podcasts. And tune in next week as we continue to explore the musical phenomenon of. this bold new year that lies ahead of us.

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