Switched on Pop - IV. Take It to the Bridge (ft. Tayla Parx)

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

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 sometimes they accomplish even more, changing the whole meaning of a song by introducing a note of doubt, or even defiance. This is what the best artists do, from Beyoncé to the Beatles to Taylor Swift, but some critics are concerned that the bridge is in danger of being demolished. On this episode, Charlie and Nate speak to songwriter and artist Tayla Parx, who's worked with everyone from Ariana Grande to Panic! At the Disco, to learn why the bridge matters more than ever — and why an artist might still want to skip it altogether. CREDITS  Reanna Cruz: Producer  Iris Gottlieb: Illustrator  Charlie Harding: Host, Executive Producer  Dion Lee: Art Director  Brandon McFarland: Audio Engineer  Nick Ripps: Video Editor  Nate Sloan: Host  Lissa Soep: Editor  Zach Tenorio & Jocie Adams: Theme Composers  Switched On Pop is a co-production of Vox Media Podcast Network, Vulture, and Rock Ridge Productions. Links: ⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠  Songs discussed: James Brown, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" Led Zeppelin, "The Crunge" Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" Judy Garland, "Over the Rainbow" "On the Sunny Side of the Street" The Beatles, "No Reply" The Beatles, “We Can Work It Out" The Beatles, "Something" Beyoncé, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" Chappell Roan, "Good Luck, Babe!" Maisie Peters, "I'm Trying (Not Friends)" OutKast, "Hey Ya!" Taylor Swift, "Cruel Summer" Taylor Swift, "Getaway Car" Ariana Grande, "7 rings" Ariana Grande, "pov" JENNIE, "like JENNIE" Ravyn Lenae, "Saturday Night" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have been,

made the switch. So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's ODOO.com. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Charlie, I have a question for you. Shoot. Can I take them to the bridge? Can you take it to the bridge? I don't know. I have a question for you.

Have you seen the bridge? Was that confounded bridge? Where is that confounded bridge? Welcome to Switch Don Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And Charlie, what are we talking about? today. The bridge. The bridge. And what did we hear at the beginning of this episode? Ooh, uh, shoot. Which James Brown track is that? Yeah, take him to the bridge. Take him to the bridge. That was get up. Prentices. I feel like being a close parentheses sex machine. Wow. And what else? The bridge is not always the most interesting part of the song, but you've really raised the stakes. What else do we hear, Charles? We heard Led Zeppelin's The Crunch.

These are two iconic moments where the artist are actually calling out one of the signature sections of the modern pop song, The Bridge. And today we're going to devote the fourth and final installment of our series on song structure, the art of the song, to this element, which in a lot of songs is only a small part of it. And yet it kind of has this outsized reputation in the craft and the culture of pop music. It takes a long time to get there. I mean, you got the intro. You have the verse. You might then have a pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus. And then you got to do that all again, right?

Well, no intro. Maybe there's a little interlude. Verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus. And finally, you've arrived at the bridge. Usually at like the golden ratio, around two-thirds of the way through the song. And what's it going to do? Well, this metaphor of infrastructure is so fitting for this because it kind of feels like it's a moment of suspension. You know, you've heard all these sections that we've talked about now over three episodes of our show, the intro, the verse, the chorus, we've cycled through those a few times.

And maybe you've arrived at this penultimate moment in the song where you need a break, you need some contrast, and you get a bridge. get to literally go over something. And before we go any further, I feel like we need to get the sound of a bridge in our ears a little bit. And Charlie, I'm going to return to the song I played you back when we did our verse episode. To me, the Platonic pop song, Aretha Franklin's, you make me feel like a natural woman. Let's not jump straight to the bridge. We need to appreciate it a little bit in its context. you'll remember the song starts with a sort of pensive verse

looking out on the morning Our pre-chorus raises the stakes and starts to put a more positive spin lyrically as we move towards the chorus And that's a really unfortunate pause Because we're about to hit the iconic chorus of the song And no one wants to hear my voice We want to hear a reason

We'll take that whole ride We'll take that whole ride again, verse pre-chorus chorus, but then this time we're going to go to our new section, our bridge. And then final chorus. Wow. That bridge does a lot. Tell me, Charles. Everything here is putting us in suspense. The rhythm section.

The bass is going bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Like, oh my gosh, they almost feel like something is chasing you. You've got to get across this bridge. The string arrangement has these really lush chords with these extensions and suspended moments, literally suspensions in the chords that are looking to resolve. Suspension bridge, wow. And then the harmonies, they're kind of cycling back and forth until they start to move and create some forward progression.

And it's right here. We know we're going to go back to the chorus. You make me feel. Yeah. And then I haven't even thought about the lyrics. Lyrically, the bridge of the song kind of opens up a little window into another side of our narrator's experience, right? She sings, oh, baby, what you've done to me, you make me feel so good inside.

I just want to be close to you. You make me feel so alive. It's kind of like deepening the message of the song, little bit. That extra little bit of musical and lyrical information makes that final chorus hit so much harder. Yeah, it makes it feel less like a crush and more like a relationship that has some time to it. I think that's why the bridge, even though it represents a pretty small percentage of the song overall, kind of has this outsized role in people's imaginations. You know, some artists like Taylor Swift, for instance, are celebrated for their bridges. And some songwriters make it

a point of pride to craft the most hard-hitting meticulous bridges they can't. Confession. Typically when I'm writing a song. Chorus first. Yes. Then verse one. Because you kind of need to know how you get to the chorus.

You know, probably a pre-chorus. Verse two then, you know, comes along. Do we change the second pre-chorus? Maybe. Then you're like, ah, the song's pretty much done. And you're like, oh, really nice session. Oh, shoot. We didn't write a bridge. it's all for an afterthought.

So today I want to understand how the bridge evolved, where it's going, and what it says about why we love pop music. In a lot of these episodes, we've had to go back to the age of the great American songbook, Tin Pan Alley, which of course has been a delight for me. And to understand the bridge, I feel like we also have to return to that era, the 1920s, the 1930s, because a lot of these songs have a bridge. In fact, sometimes it was called the release, which I feel like says something about what this function actually is.

And you find them over and over again, right? Over the rainbow, you sing it to your kids every night. This song has a beautiful release, right? Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me. Very nice. Where troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops. That's where you'll find me. And then that brings us back to the opening line somewhere over the rainbow.

Yeah. What about one of my favorites on the sunny side of the street? You know, the song is all about, you know, life isn't so bad. Just walking the sunny side of the street. We get to the bridge. It goes, I used to walk in the shade with my blues on parade. And literally the chords get kind of shady, kind of dark here. But then as the narrator emerges into the light, it starts to brighten up.

But now I'm not afraid. This rover crossed over if I never had one cent, I'd be rich as Rockefeller. I mean, that is a great bridge because it literally takes you from dark to light and it sends you back into the final line of the song. Clarifying question. So you're going back to the Great American Songbook. these songs are usually structured in an A, A, B, A, form, A section, their main thing is repeated twice. B is a little bit of a little bit of a break to take us back to the A section. Are these, what you're calling the bridge? Is that the B section?

Yeah, exactly. Got it. Okay. B section, B for bridge. Why not? Great. And when we see the bridge start to take a larger role in pop music, we have to bring up a band we've talked about already. Again, the Beatles. Yes. And I know maybe some. people listening, they're like, oh, these Beatles, the guys, all they talk about is the Beatles. But I can't help it. They had a huge impact on pop music. And yeah, I personally love them. They wrote some great bridges. They sometimes would call them the middle eight of the song, because they're eight bars long. Right. What's cool about Beatles' bridges is that they start to become their own little worlds within the song. Take no reply, for instance.

Here's the bridge. Something interesting is happening here. The bridge is expanding. It's lengthening. It's growing into a more important section in the song. And in this particular song, it's kind of a revelation. It's like where the narrator drops his mask a little bit and really gets on his knees and is like, let me show you just how desperate I am for you to believe me.

It even calls out the song title at the very last line of the song. the bridge. Another Beatles bridge I love is we can work it out because it really captures the John Paul dynamic. Like here's Paul in the chorus singing, we can work it out. And here's John in the bridge. And here's John in the bridge. Life is very short and there's no time for sing and fighting my...

Whoa, okay, so hold up, that moment when they're fussing and fighting and the song goes into triple meter, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. It's like they're tussling around trying to find their way. It just captures the two personalities. Paul is all bright and optimistic. Yeah. You know, we can work it out. And John is like, life is very short and there's no time.

But maybe the most epic Beatles bridge is from George Harrison on the song, Something. You stick around night. actually has a connection back to we can work it out where you're kind of solidly in 4-4 and then something's falling apart oh yeah in this case I don't think we quite go into triple me to more of a sort of syncopated moment that's cool yeah and I think that's so appropriate because a bridge is a place where you can experiment a little bit you can like try things out musically you can stretch the limits of what a song can do and in this case it almost introduces like a song within

the song. It's so expansive and rich. And what it does for the listener is it really like brings you deeper into the world of the song. It makes you more invested in a lot of ways. If the Beatles helps set a new standard for what this part of a song can do, making it more epic and experimental, when we cast around for examples from the last, say, 20 years of pop music, we find some really interesting approaches. I'd like to propose that we can think about bridges not just as this like locational meaning within a song. You know, it comes right before the final chorus. Yeah. But actually as what they do to the song itself, like how they change it in some way. And the first category I propose is bridges that change the meaning of the song in some way. And I have a

couple examples that might surprise you. The first is one of my favorite hits of the 21st century, a little song by Beyonce called Single Ladies. You know the chorus like the back of your hand. All the single ladies. All the single ladies. And here's the bridge. I've heard this song so many times. I don't think I ever have thought much about the bridge, but there's a lot happening here. So much. It actually reminds me a little bit of even the Aretha Franklin that we heard at the beginning, where that song, We heard that the bridge showed that this isn't just a crush. This is like a real dedicated kind of love. And I feel like single ladies I often think about as sort of like the almost transactional.

You know, it's like you got to put a ring on it. Yeah, if you like it, then you should put a ring on it. It kind of puts together commerce and relationship, the importance of the ring. But this bridge, this is about eternal love. Yeah. I mean, she literally sings, don't treat me to these things of the world. I'm not that kind of girl. Your love is what I prefer.

Yeah. So I think you're on to something. If single ladies is like this kind of fun, buoyant, catchy number with an iconic music video, the bridge kind of makes it something deeper and maybe more profound. It's not just like put a ring on it because I want it. It's like, this is my destiny, you know? She even quotes Buzz Lightyear. How did I never realize this?

To infinity and beyond? How have I heard this song so many times and never realized there's a toy story reference? And then at the very end, this really kind of haunting moment where she says, If you don't, you'll be alone and like a ghost, I'll be gone. And do I even hear a ghost in the background? What a weird moment. There's this like skittering synth that makes it sound like a haunted house, these ethereal vocals. And then we're back to like kind of the happy, you know, catchy aspect of the song.

but this bridge makes like elevates the song into something else entirely yeah i mean i've always thought about the song as like a song about engagement now i realize that the song is yeah it's about the infinite length of that relationship it's beautiful another bridge that i think belongs in this category is more recent it's chapel rhone's good luck babe there's the end of our chorus now our bridge something is happening it almost sounds something like a seance. Oh my gosh. I'm not paying enough attention to bridges.

Okay, what is this song about, right? You can get it's 100 boys and bars. It's the chorus, shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling. Good luck, babe. You're not going to be able to deny your true feelings for me. The bridge kind of brings this all into focus. It does something remarkable. It shoots forward in time, you know?

The rest of the song is in the present. And then all of a sudden, when we get to the bridge, It's like when you wake up to him in the middle of the night, a lot is happening in that sentence. It's like this kind of nightmare of the future, right, that she's painting. It's the opposite of single ladies. It's the opposite of single ladies. And then it decrescendos when she says, you know, I hate to say it, I told you so. And then she just comes back out and screams the final line.

That's a really unusual. gesture because the bridge up until that point is building and building and building. And that's often what's going on. And the bridge is you're trying to bridge back to the chorus so you can get one more chorus. Ideally, you have transformed the meaning as well. But there is a sonic purpose, which is like, let's hear the memorable part one more time to make a hit. And instead of giving you the thing you expect, it drops down one more time so that she can really tell you her message.

And boy, is it vengeful. It also makes you think about that final chorus a little differently. It has a little bit more of a sting now. Yeah. That sentiment, good luck, babe. It's more potent than it was before that bridge somehow. That's the category of bridges that introduce some kind of new depth to a song. Then I feel like there's another category where the bridge becomes its own kind of universe.

One contemporary artist who's really good at doing this is the singer-songwriter, Maisie Peters, she is kind of known for writing these epic bridges that sometimes become the focal point of the song. A Sterling example is her 2020 track, I'm Trying, Not Friends. But at least I'm trying. At least I'm trying. Bridge. Not friends. Now we're somewhere in between because you're awful and I miss you and I killed you in my dream last night. Even then you didn't care. It's a low and even in my dreams you still don't want me there. Girl friends.

Got at least a healthy five. Yes, some people think I'm funny, baby, don't look so surprising. We think that your girlfriend is a bore, but we're nice to hurry. It feels like it should have ended right now, but it's still going. Because when I asked you on the train, why you hurt me and you couldn't really actually explain. I cried. Then I told you it was cool. God you haven't.

And then we're back in the chorus. It's an odd bridge because it feels like it goes on a lot longer than it should. but I think that's exactly the point. It's kind of the fulcrum of the song. It might actually have a more powerful message than the chorus itself. And this is known to happen from time to time in popular music. A bridge might kind of outshine the other aspects of the song. Take an example that was actually selected by Billboard Magazine

as the greatest bridge of the 21st century a few years ago. It is none other than Hey Ya by Outcast. One of the original memes, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture. One of the original memes, shake it like a Polaroid picture. I'm definitely not here to impugn the legendary chorus of Hay Ya, but in some ways this bridge with its imperative of Shake It Like a Polaroid picture might be like the most famous part of this song. And the part of the song that like really kind of gets everyone out on the dance floor. Yeah, I mean, in many ways, hey, yeah, even takes his central thesis and reinforces it with the bridge, right?

The thesis is, you don't want to listen to me. You just want to dance. To a song that's about failed relationships. And the bridge is just, yeah, just shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it. You've ignored all the rest of my message, and that was the part that stuck. Shake away the pain and just lose yourself and dance. Yeah, exactly. My next and final category are bridges that have a narrative twist.

Ooh, I love a twist. And here we have to talk about Taylor Swift. Inevitably, whatever one's feelings about Taylor Swift, I feel like you have to acknowledge she is in many ways a consummate songwriter. She at least puts a lot of attention in detail. And that really comes through in her bridges. I feel like Cruel Summer is maybe one of her most famous ones and also a nice example of this narrative twist.

So this song is about a cruel summer with a relationship that seems to be going nowhere, but you also can't quit. When we get to the bridge, though, there's like something else going on here. People are keeping secrets sneaking in through the garden gate and screaming for whatever it's worth, I love you, ain't that the worst thing you ever heard? I think there's a way to read this song as, I kind of want to say like almost an abusive relationship. Yeah. What at what point felt like this like messy summer fling has now gone a little darker with this bridge.

I mean, it really adds meaning to the word cruel. Like, it's not a passively cruel summer. It's like actually this was a truly bad relationship. People might say like, oh, yeah, this is just a casual thing. No one's going to hurt any feelings, but then it stretches on too long and feelings really get hurt. Something goes truly wrong. She even ends this song with the bridge as if to say, like, look a little deeper here. This is one of her most famous bridges, but I think the one that best represents the idea of the narrative twist is her song Getaway Car off the reputation album.

This is about two people fleeing a scene, fleeing a relationship, perhaps. perhaps together. But what happens in the bridge of the song? Little modulation. So, okay, this is a little bit of like a love story-like twist, where in love story, Romeo and Juliet, get together, everything's perfect. Here, she's like, we're Bonnie and Clyde, we're going to get away together. It's the opposite.

She turns Bonnie and Clyde into, psych, I'm stealing the money, I'm in the getaway car. It's like she took whoever that person wasn't cruel somewhere and left them on the side of the road. It's a great moment because it takes the structural function of the bridge as connecting these two final choruses to actually like twist the meaning

to be about not us riding off into the sunset together, but me betraying you. And then when you get to that final chorus, it's like I'm in the getaway car and you as a listener, just like, damn, that was savage. The Twist Bridge is one of my favorite kinds of bridges. Like, because you get to the final chorus,

which is a thing you probably are going to have heard for the third time, and it might feel like it's going to be predictable. But once you have that bridge, now there's a new way of hearing the chorus. It's that much more satisfying. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

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I've just offered a taxonomy of the bridge in modern pop. And yet, despite all the rich uses of this part of the song, there are a lot of people out there who are very worried about the bridge. What's wrong with the state of the bridge? We need a build back better program for the bridge, honestly, Charlie, because our infrastructure is crumbling, according to these critics. There was an article written in The Guardian a few years ago with a provocative title, is TikTok killing off the bridge.

And the bridges can't be killed off. They are not living entities, but we could blow them up. We could demolish them. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, we could, uh, go with that. Uh, this article quotes a, uh, podcaster, uh, who's, oh, who, oh, oh, uh, yeah, songwriter Charlie Hartnell. What did I say?

Do you have any recollection of, uh, contributing to this? article, I think three years ago? Yeah, absolutely, but you could refresh the whole memories of his ears. He lies through his teeth. Well, you were very sanguine about the future of the bridge. You were like, you know, forms change as musicians change and audiences change. And, you know, just because the bridge might be changing, it doesn't mean it's something we need to be sad about necessarily.

Yeah. However, someone else in the article disagreed with you. that was the rock musician Sting. He said the bridge is disappearing and he wasn't happy about it. But Charlie, I'm not sure that's the case. I don't know how I feel about you pitting me against music legends. I'm trying to start some beef here. I think it'll be good for our ratings.

Okay, okay. But my instinct is to align myself with you, Charlie, my old friend, my podcast partner. Thanks. Because I was going through the. year-end Hot 100 charts from like the last 10, 20 years. And all the top songs, well, a lot of them had bridges. Take that sting. But I also think what you said is true.

I think the bridge is changing. And if we want to understand how and why the bridge might be changing, we probably need to talk to someone who's in the trenches where pop music is being made. Ideally, someone who's worked with big stars on tracks like Thank You Next by Ariana Grande. High Hopes by Panic at the Disco, Pink by Janelle Monet, and maybe even had a number one country hit with Dan and Shea's Glad You Exist. The songwriter is deep. Who are we talking to? Who could possibly feel such a role? What's up? I'm Taylor Parks. I'm a singer, songwriter, all of the things.

Taylor. Yes, it's Taylor Parks, singer, songwriter, artist, former Switcher. I'm pop guest and farmer? You know, I'm out here. We have about 65 animals. We do regenerative farming over here at the sage estate in Nashville. So my day is like, we start off, you know, tending to the animals. And then, you know, I'm going and make some music. Takes Animal Husbandry to really understand how to write a bridge.

I wanted to get Taylor's thoughts on the bridge through a discussion of some of the most interesting ones that she's worked on. And since Ariana Grande just dropped a new album, I feel like it was appropriate to ask Taylor about how Ariana approaches a bridge. And while Taylor's best known sessions with Ariana are probably Thank You Next and Seven Rings, I think one of my favorite bridges that they wrote together is the track POV off the 2020 album positions. Here's the bridge. Wow, that's not some simple middle eight. When I asked Taylor about the song, she actually said that the very first thing you need to do as a songwriter is decide whether the song needs a bridge at all.

It's interesting because I feel like we, there's kind of. been an evolution of the bridge over the past few years, right? Where we are now in a bridge is people are either like, it's a vamp or it has, or there's no bridge, or you have three options. And that third option would be, or it actually has to be something that adds to the storyline or the sonic palette. And I think that that is what the goal was for this particular bridge, because I hate as a writer just to have something there just to say it's there. I'm like, If it's not adding to the song, delete it. Like, or revisit and make something that adds to the song.

Oh, this is my problem. I don't think that the bridge is going to happen, so I don't write the bridge, which it sounds like it's a perfectly excusable thing to do, even though I do feel like great songs often have great bridges. I can see why Tela and Ariana felt this song needed a bridge. It kind of reminds me of what we said about Aretha back in the beginning of the episode. It kind of makes it like a little more serious in a way. she's singing in the bridge about all of her baggage fading away,

how she's like thawing. You really sense that there's something transformative happening in the bridge of the song. And for Taylor, you know, that has to come from the artist themselves. Like it has to reflect their real world experience. A lot of that was literally, like me as a songwriter, my whole thing is, you know, making things tailor-made to that person. And so that takes spending time.

with that person or knowing that person, me and Ariana, I've known each other. I feel like we've seen each version since like 15. And at this point, she was dating this guy and it was the way that they looked at each other. And it was the way that, you know, all of those things, I was like, oh, P-O-V. Like, there is something there. And that was kind of the seed of the song is just being I'm like, woo. Like, when you see the way that two people look at each other in love, you know that only they look at each other like that and see each other like that. And so that's kind of where we went off from.

So there's different styles. And for her, especially a singer, when I work with a singer, singer, I need those moments to actually say, like, look, this is what the audience expects the same way they're like, well, the Taylor Sliffs on. They know they're going to get some team. Like, it's the most famous part of, like, she's the artist. could never not do a bridge because they're looking forward to it. And so it really does go based off of each artist, that artist audience, and all those things of whether you have a bridge and what

kind of bridge, you know, you're having. It's a whole universe. It's not just the song. It's the audience expectation. It's the artist and all that they're bringing to their life. It's their lived experience. I know. I'd never thought about it this way. Like there are bridge artists and non-bridge artists. A nice example of tailoring the song to the artist is a track that Taylor co-wrote for the artist Jenny of the K-pop girl group Black Pink when she released her solo debut album Ruby in 2025. That track was like Jenny. And Taylor recognized that it needed to introduce her as a solo artist. And so she didn't think it needed a bridge. She didn't even think it needed a pre-chorus.

She didn't want anything to slow this song down. Charlie, I think you're really going to appreciate what she did in place of a pre-chorus in this track. Special edition and your AI couldn't car. I can't buy a room spinning like it's crazy. Don't burst. Take it to the chorus. Whoa. I like a lot of things about that.

Uh-huh. The verse makes a nice knock at AI. Yes. It includes a moment about tea. You know that I'm a very big tea drinker. That's right. It makes a nod to the song Tipsy, which was revived by Shaboozy in his interpolation and Bar Song.

Yes. And then Don't Boris gets at the chorus. Don't Boris. Take it to the chorus. I've never heard that in a song. I was floored when I heard this because like we say this, you know, I don't know, every other episode at some point. And in this series, we probably said it a dozen times.

And now Taylor's putting it in to as the. like self-referential moment in this epic like Jenny track. It's it's kind of a very tongue-in-cheek Easter egg of like yeah, I'm not going to give you a pre-chorus because in this song, we just need to get to the chorus. Yeah. And remind everyone who this artist is, Jenny, let's say it a hundred times. And let's make sure everyone knows that this solo artist is about to break out. I mean, as much as you say that the song doesn't have a bridge, doesn't need a bridge, it feels like a bit of a nod to James Brown as well, where, you know, James Brown is telling his whole band

when we're going to the bridge. Can I take him to the bridge? Take him to the bridge. And she's kind of doing the same thing, but moving it to the more important part of the song of the chorus. Here's what Taylor had to say. This song flew. And I was just like, we were trying to decide,

should we have a pre-hook? And that is something that I say I'm song with a lot of other people. It's just like, nah, don't boy. It's tick us to the course. Like, we hadn't even written the hook yet, but I knew there wasn't going to be a pre-hook because it didn't need one, you know? And so we used it as kind of like you would call that just a turnaround. You know, it's not necessarily a pre-hook, but it is a transitional moment.

And I love that it's just kind of being very, it's like in TV and film, when the actor looks at the camera. A lot of times people think that songwriting is just, blurting out your emotions. But songwriting is psychology. There's such a psychological aspect to songwriting and choosing certain words to evoke a certain emotion. It has to be very intentional or else you can accidentally write things that people can sing along to, absolutely.

But if you're going to be a songwriter, you want to figure out how did I do it? I like when a song acknowledges me and says, hey, I see you there. I see what's happening. One of my favorite bridges right now is from a track by Raven Lanay, that Taylor worked on called Saturday Night. It's got this great chorus followed by a killer bridge. Here's the bridge. I asked Taylor about this bridge, and for her, it was actually a question of trying to push

borders as an artist and maybe even push the borders of genre itself. Well, me in particular, I have this thing. I'm always in the studio, and I refer to a song as a gumbo. And, you know, I'm from the South, my mom, it's from New Orleans. Like, as a creator, which you're an artist, finding the middle ground between pushing the boundary and knowing when the audience is ready for the boundary to be pushed. With Raven in particular, I was very excited because of that space

of being like, okay, she's black, but not doing traditional R&B. And I really, really, really like that. And I think that there's space for it. And also new enough to where there's not quite a sound yet. There's not a sound where you know exactly what to expect from. her. That lyric in the hook, honestly, was just like, I still gagged to this day because it's just giving like, I know you missed me on a Saturday night, but I'm still leaving without you. That was just like, T, okay? So because we're being so sassy here, what are we going to give?

And Raven did a lot of that bridge work and just saying like, okay, we've said this, we've said this, we've said this. And now I'm missing the final wabang. This whole conversation with Taylor was so illuminating. You let the song and the artist dictate the form of the song, and you have to be open and flexible enough to respond to that. And as long as you're doing that, you know, the song will tell you what it needs. So any concerns that, you know, Sting might have about the bridge disappearing, I feel like we can assuage those.

The bridge isn't going anywhere. We've heard some game-changing bridges over the course of this episode. Ultimately, it's really a question of what does the song need and what does the artists need to convey? And actually, we can zoom out over the course of this whole four-part series, intro, verse, chorus, bridge. You know, form changes, and that's a good thing, because people are trying to express themselves through music. And as long as they're doing that, music is going to mold itself to be able to reflect their hopes, fears, and desires. I think Taylor actually puts this really well.

Like years ago, I would write. We need a verse. We need a pre-hook. We need a hook. And maybe that second time we hear the pre, we have extra harmonies. And maybe we give all of the harmonies in the second hook. And then we have this dramatic bridge. Done.

You know what it's going to be. But music has changed so much. And based off of how people are taking it in, you might not get them to even listen to the bridge, even if you do have one, based off of what's happening in the beginning. And so you just have to really pay attention to what does the song need? And it'll always lead you in the right way. Like we're literally, the music in the way we're creating it, we're in the Wild Wall, West right now. I find that to be very inspiring.

It's like anything goes as long as you're staying true to yourself and your message. And that feels appropriate for us as we try new things. and we have to respond to the message of the song. I'm feeling pretty complete right now, except for one issue. What is it? Well, we've talked about the intro, the verse, the chorus, and the bridge,

and, you know, pre-chorus, post-chorus that's made it in there too. Interlude does not get its own episode. No. But what about the outro? Wow, we do. What are you going to do? We feed out on me, right? It's a problem.

How do you wrap things up succinctly? I think I like my outro is like I like your intros, Charlie. Short, to the point, I don't want to waste anyone's time. Let's roll credits.