Switched on Pop - Heartbreak

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

Why do we love listening to heartbreak songs? What do songwriters do to emote such strong feelings? FEATURING Adele – Someone Like You Kacey Musgraves – I Miss You CeeLo Green – F*** You! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. So when I was a teenager, I was going through many emotional teenage heartbreaks as we tend to do. And whenever I was having a girlfriend, and I had a girlfriend, I had a couple of girlfriends, but not that many. But when I did, and I knew the relationship was coming to an end, I would write a song and I would try to express my love. And it always failed. And so I've always regretted ever writing songs for anybody that'd play it for them and I'd be expressing my love and you could see it on their face and they would be so sad. They were mostly just sad for me and the embarrassment that I was going

through. That is exquisitely awkward to picture. It's terrible and in so many cases I don't even really remember how it ended and whatever, but I can definitely, if I play that song today a decade later, and by the way, my late 20s and I'm married, but I can still feel that teenage heartbreak, that angst and just, oh, that terrible feeling. What is it about music that can connect us to that feeling of heartbreak so immediately and so palpably? I think that's an interesting question. I think that's what brings us here today. Why don't you kick it off and tell us what's going on?

Well, I'm Nate Sloan. I'm Charlie Harding. And this is Switched on Pop. Our aim is to take pop hits and break them down to try and understand why these songs are so successful and so popular. because other people who talk about pop music don't tend to talk about the music. They tend to talk about the clothes, the love affairs. Everything else except the music that we all listen to. And we're going to try and rectify that because these songs are brilliant.

You don't get to the top of the charts without knowing what you're doing. And we're going to try and figure out exactly what that is. So we're going to use the tools of the musicologists and of the songwriter to celebrate, appreciate and investigate what's going on underneath the hood. of these infectious earworm pop songs. Starting with the mother of all heartbreak songs, Adele's, someone like you. So what I think is really interesting about Adele is that what we have here is your very conventional pop song.

And what I mean by that is you have a normal structure we're all very used to hearing. She has her verse where she's talking about the main plot of the song. I heard that you'll settle down. She then moves into a pre-chorus, this sort of build-up. Just before the chorus, which we all know is the refrain, the words that we hear over and over again, the hook that we tend to sing. Never mind someone like you. And then there's also the bridge, which is this sort of other section of new material that never sounds as good as the chorus, but it gives us a little break from the main music.

Nothing compares, no worries or cares, regrets and mistakes. But what's really interesting is that she's using this structure that we all know very well, and she's using it to the best of her abilities. She's actually superimposing the feeling of heartbreak onto this pop song structure. Exactly, because Adele at once uses a totally typical pop song progression, but then does certain things to it that make us intensely uncomfortable and downright sad. How does she do that? She does that in a few ways.

One way that we'll talk about is with the, harmonies and the chord progressions that she uses. The other way is what she does with her voice, what we might call the timbre or the color or the quality of her voice. Okay, so let's kick it off and let's take a listen to the verse of the song. For sure. Just for context, I think it's really interesting, if you look at the video, which has over 400 million views of crying viewers on YouTube, at this point in the video where it's all stark, black and white, walking through the streets of Paris, the sort of symbol of love and emotion. I don't think there's a single other person in the video except her.

No, walking along the set, it must have cost $5 million. And there she's, she's plotting through the, through the sun all by herself and really feeling her heartbreak. And so she's plotting along. Hey, why don't you show us on the piano what's going on here? Sure. So Charlie was describing it as plotting, and that's a good attitude, because these chords, they linger for a while,

and there's not much going on. We have what we call an arpeggio, where we break up a chord into single notes like this. And the first thing you have to know is that, while each of those single notes is distinct, together they make a chord. So the first one, that's an A major chord.

And the next one, that's a C-sharp minor chord. I might have to interject that. Okay, yeah. I know it's maybe a little obvious. Can you explain the major, minor, chord? What's going on? What are we hearing?

Yeah, for sure. It's all, you don't need to know the details, but it's all about the third. And basically, if that third is major or minor, it's going to change how you perceive the chord. It's going to be totally different. Right. So I hear major chords and they sound happy and joyful and gleeful, right? Totally. And you hear minor chords and it sounds sad and somber and melancholy.

So in the verse, we have these plotting chords moving from major to minor to minor to minor and back to major like this. And that repeats again and again as Adele sings about past romance and how it ended. Right, and her words I think are interesting. All this thing is plotting along, her words really drawn out. And what's

neat is that she then goes into the pre-chorus, the sort of build up into the chorus. And at this point, her words start to speed up. There's more rhythmic variation in them. It's getting excited. There's sort of this contrast that's happening and she starts to really build herself up. And the chords are changing here to build

up also this sense of tension. Yeah. And we don't know at this point we don't know exactly what she's going to say, what kind of emotion is going to emerge in the chorus. And the emotion that does emerge is interesting. It's more nuanced than you might expect from a mega hit pop song. Because at once we have these triumphant chords. And this is where what we were talking about earlier, the harmony and the timbre of her voice come together in a really cool way. We have these triumphant major chords. There's the A major we heard in the verse. But then instead of the C-sharp minor that we heard in the verse, we get something very different. We get an E major chord.

It sounds like this. Wow. We totally different. We've moved on. This is like uplifting. It's big. She's all this confidence. Powerful.

Yeah. And this is like her moment, the chorus where she says, I've moved on. I've put this behind me. I'm going to find someone else like you, but not you. And what's interesting is just as she says that, she's soaring at her. Her voice, and then her voice cracked. It's a very talented vocalist, this intentional cracking of her voice. And I love it because that crack really betrays that confidence, that buildup.

And so then we sink back down into that plotting verse. And so it's this contrast of the buildup and everything's fine. And then, actually, it's not, I'm not feeling great. And it's this, I think it's this nostalgic feeling of back and forth. It's over. It's not over. And it's that going back and forth, that dealing with nostalgia and she's going back and forth. It's that nostalgia that really elicits heartbreak.

It's not that quick snap of the twig. It's over. It's that back and forth. And it's worth mentioning at this point a few fun facts about this song. What do you got? So fact number one, this song was co-written by a gentleman from the band Semi-Sonic, which you may remember from their 90s or, I don't know, early 2000s hit. closing time.

I know who I want and take me home. I know who... That's really quite enough. So fun fact number one. Fun fact number two, you want to take this one, Charlie? Fact two, I love this. The song is actually the demo. They have recorded a professional version in the studio,

and they had put all these symphonic strings over it, and they wanted to give this big dramatic structure. But the more successful piece was the demo. demo and the cracking of her voice and all these things is really what elicits that that sense of commonality, that the relationship of heartbreak that we can feel so strongly as listeners, the same heartbreak that she's going through as an artist. Yeah. And these two facts are not incidental. We have the songwriter who's responsible for some of the most melancholy hits of a decade ago, coupled with this like shockingly sparse

accompaniment, which is cool because in a way, the emptiness of, the arrangement actually makes you pay attention to it. Like if you're listening to the radio and it goes from turned down for what to Adele, you're going to, you pay attention. For sure. Actually, because it's quiet. I cry on my commute when Adele comes on every time. I can't help it.

Yeah. If you see a hearty-looking blonde gentleman on 280 just sobbing in his Prius. You know what's me. All right, Nate, why don't you sum it up? So what's really, just to let our listeners know, what's happening in this. song, pop writers are very intentional about the feelings that they're trying to elicit. So again, how is Adele eliciting the feeling of heartbreak in this song? Right. So as we were talking about, it's at once her use of a very familiar song structure, verse, chorus, bridge, but tweaking it

with this sense of instant nostalgia and loss that's expressed both through the chords we heard, which move from minor in the verse to major in the chorus, but then it's then, it's then subverted by her cracking, brittle, quavering, timbre of her voice. And together, this gives the listener a sense of something gained and something lost. And that puts us immediately in the mindset of heartbreak. Powerful. Well, let's take a break now to hear a word from our sponsors. 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.

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Tell us about Casey Musgraves, Charlie. What's so amazing about Casey Musgraves is that 25 years old in 2013, she broke into the country charts with her hit album, same trailer, different park. and she blew everybody away. She won the Grammy for her album. And what's really interesting about her music is she takes those common themes of country music, your whiskey bars, your pickup trucks, your white t-shirts and barbecue stains, and all those things that we're all very used to hearing on the country radio stations. And she subverts them and starts to tell some really real stories about country living,

some of the darker underpinnings of rural life. Just to give you a taste of what Casey Musgraves is all about, Let's just play you an excerpt from her song, Mary Go Around. Mama's hooked on Mary Kay. Brothers hooked on in Shwery. Stuff. Yeah. Today I actually want to spend some time talking about her other tune called I Miss You.

It's one of her less played songs, but I think one of her best examples of excellent songcraft in pop. And what's really interesting going on here is sort of different than Adele. In Adele, what we saw was the combination of. of words and music working together that created that sense of heartbreak. Musgraves does something a little bit different. She's actually juxtaposing music against words. They're not matching up. And it's this not matching up, which is creating tension and it helps elicit the sense

of heartbreak. So let's give a listen to the verse of the song. Here you have sort of your typical love song. Sounds like breakup relationship, but everything's going okay. Don't worry about it. I'm doing just fine. And it's interesting as the chorus builds up. You have these really happy major chords underneath this chorus and she's talking about,

I'm doing just fine. It sounds like she's strong and moved on from this relationship. But it's the very end. She goes from these major climbing chords to this really dark minor chord, the minor four, my favorite chord of all time, which we will surely commit an entire episode to in the future. And so she lands on this minor chord and she says, but I miss you. And it's this juxtaposition of, oh, I'm putting on this shield, everything's cool, but really it's not great. Yeah, that is a perfectly heartbreaking moment. And there's something else going on in this song that I think we need to address.

Okay. Which is, if you strip away the arrangement and lyrics that Musgraves and her band is adding here, we can actually see that this court progression is maybe familiar. Yes. Yes, of course. What are you hearing underneath me? I am hearing radio heads creep. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. And that song is, I would say, an infamous anthem of, well, as its title suggests, creepiness. And so Musgraves, I mean, and we don't know if this is intentional, but given her songwriting prowess, I'm pretty sure it is. That's an illusion. It's an illusion. So what's going on underneath this song with its transition from happy to sad is this really dark and creepy. Radiohead song. It's like a palimpsest. What the heck is a palimcess? Okay, a palimpsest is in ancient Egypt they would write on papyrus, but because it was precious, they would sometimes

rub it out and then write something else on top of it, but then historians would find the bottom level, the hidden text that wasn't totally erased. That's Radiohead. So what you're saying is there's something underneath is what's making the song work so well. And we're hearing radio head subconsciously and we know that it's something creepy is happening yeah there's something she's singing about all brightness and flowers but underneath we know that it's creepy early 90s radio head and it's not this isn't going to end well it's interesting that she's also wearing flannel in the video like the early 90s very very subtle so this is another kind of heartbreak this is the heartbreak of words and music not aligning

and you feel that again in your gut. It's the misalignment. So I think there's something really cool here. Okay. So in the song she's basically confronting a past lover in a public space and she she's all smiles and flowers and we all know what it's like to have to put

on a fake smile in a public situation. I think it's the chords. They are the metaphorical fake smile. Those chords are putting on that fake smile but really what's happening underneath is she misses that person. Yeah. So the lyrics are the reality or what she's actually saying. That's right. The face that she's putting on, but the music is her inner turmoil and pain.

But they're, oh, okay, so there's something very important that we didn't talk about. Okay, what's going on? So this is interesting because even though these are all major chords, like in, say, the chorus of Adele, what's significant about these major chords is that they're chromatic. So what does chromatic mean? Yeah, okay, so chromatic is not all of these chords belong to the scale of the key that we're in. Okay, good question. So here's a, here's the major scale.

And the chords that you get from this are based around that collection of notes. You can only make a certain number of chords. So if you use a chord that doesn't belong to that set of notes, like, sounds very disconcerting. It's jarring. Jarring. Yeah, exactly, because we're going all of a sudden to some place that feels like it doesn't belong. And so Casey Musgraves, via radio head, is using that chromaticism, that dissonance to give the sense that something is amiss. So it's interesting.

It really is what's happening underneath. We're hearing all major happiness, but there's this darkness, this chromaticism, this aberration to our ear. And that's heartbreaking. When things don't match, when you have to lie. That's, oh, it's, I feel it right now, just talking about it. It's really heartbreaking. It's really heartbreaking. Charlie, let's move on before one of us loses it.

Let's let our tears go. Thankfully, we have something in our back pocket that's going to leave you with a smile. This is Cilos. Can we say it? I don't know. I don't know if we can say it. It's, let's just play it. And this is.

is one of those rare songs that falls into a genre we like to call the Heartbreak Feel Good Celebration Jubilee. I didn't know that genre existed. But we call it that all the time. All the time. Yeah, sure, all the time. And this song takes the whole idea of Heartbreak and spins it on its head. Because while these lyrics are deeply depressing, the sheer abulence of the song. and its rhythm and its allusion to 50s Motown and R&B, just creates this sense of uplift that cannot be denied.

He's actually overcome heartbreak. And we all love this song because there's nothing better than actually getting out of that nostalgic back and forth. Are we in it? Are we out of it? Are we out of it? And he's out of it. He's celebrating.

That's right. He made it and we want to join him. But as joyous as Silo Green's overcoming of heartbreak might be, I do want to suggest how this song might have a very different message if we coupled Seelow's lyrics with Adele's music. Do we dare go there? We dare. This is switched on pop.

See you're driving downtown with them girl I love and I'm like fuck you. I guess the change in my pocket wasn't enough and I'm like, Fuck you. Yeah, that's heartbreaking. Are you sure you can sing those words on the radio? Luckily, we're not on the radio, so I think it's okay. Now, we want to wrap this doozy up. This is an excerpt from an essay that Nick Hornsby,

author of About a Boy and High Fidelity, wrote for McSweeney's magazine a few years ago, and he addresses the experience that we've had today where you as a listener find yourself enjoying someone else's heartbreak. Take it away, Nate. Some people are at their best when they're miserable. Ryan Adams' beautiful Heartbreaker album is, I suspect, the product of a great deal of pain. On Adam's next album, Gold, he seems to have cheered up, and though that's good news for him,

it's bad news for me. His upbeat songs are fine, but they sound a lot like other people. people's upbeat songs. His blues gave him distinction. What rights do we have here? Are we entitled to ask other people to be unhappy for our benefit? After all, there are loads of us and only one of them. And how can you be happy, really, if you are only ordinary in your happiness but extraordinary in your grief? Is it really worth it? It sounds harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone with a real talent, especially a talent for songwriting, then do us all a favor and dump them. There might be a heartbreaker or a blood on the tracks or a Leila in it for all of us.

Thanks. This has been switched on pop. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived at the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera. Intense with character curman and addictive. Imagine a jasmine-envolventy, tofi caramelized and tonka-tostata.

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