Switched on Pop - Now I Sia, Now I Don't

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

One of the biggest voices in pop music has no face: Sia. She started her career as a ghostwriter for stars like Rihanna and Beyoncé. Recently she found pop star success with her hit "Chandelier." So with her new album, "This Is Acting," you'd expect to see her front and center. Instead, she hides her face from the media spotlight, covered by wigs, hats and other foreign objects. Lindsay Zoladz from NYMag joins us to discuss Sia's the musician and Sia the media spectacle. Featuring: Sia - Chandelier Rihanna - Diamonds Sia - Alive Sia - Reaper Rihanna - Work (ft. Drake) Sia - Bird Set Free Duke Ellington - Cotton Club Stomp Duke Ellington - East St. Louis Toodle-O Duke Ellington - Ko-Ko JC Burnett - Amazing Grace Charlie Johnson - The Boy In The Boat  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app.

Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. We're getting a lot of requests these days, and it honestly means a lot because recording a podcast in your closet at home can be a lonely affair, and we really love hearing from you all. And one artist keeps uphearing in your emails and tweets.

See ya. You probably know her from her hit song, Chandelier, and her recent album, This Is Acting. She's got an amazing story with a career blossoming after years of ghost writing for other artists. And with Nate O'Away on academic duties, I've invited one of the best music journalists in the business, Lindsay Zolads from New York Magazine, to help break down see his totally original career in music. So, Lindsay, you wrote a really creative album review for New York Mag that peels back the curtain of pop music production. through the really famous pop ghostwriter, Sia. Yes. And usually on Switch on Pop, we don't focus too much on the person.

But I feel like her story in many ways is very inseparable from her sound. Do you mind giving us just a little bit of a background on where she's coming from personally and in her music career? Sure. Sia, her full name is Sia Furler. And she was essentially trying to have this indie rock, indie pop career for the better part of a decade. I think her first record came out early, early 2000, so maybe like 2003, and not really the type of thing that was gunning for like top 40 radio play. Like it was, her sound was more eccentric than that. So she toured as essentially this indie pop musician and she just found life on the road to be really grueling.

And it... As it is. Yeah. Yeah. And it drove her to just drink a lot and use a lot of drugs. and I think it gave her this distaste for fame and for really being sort of the face of her music, so to speak. So she eventually hit Rock Bottom and got sober around, I think it was like 2010.

So she decided around the time she got sober that she was going to start writing songs for other people. And she is very sort of self-deprecatingly said that it was all about the money for her in the beginning. I think there is a New York Times Magazine profile where she said, like, this is the sofa that Rihanna built. So she's very upfront about that part of it and sort of the tongue-in-cheek selling out thing because she is coming from this indie world and this underground community. So I think that her first really big smash for someone else that everyone would know about is the Rihanna song, Diamonds. On YouTube, there's a lot of Sia performing diamonds,

and she's taken to doing it live sometimes now, which is pretty rare for her, because usually when she gives a song away, she'll give it away and won't perform it live anymore. What's interesting about that recording, too, is it sounds really close to the version that Rihanna ended up doing. Yeah. A lot of the inflections and even the ways in which she's singing

the certain words and her cadences are coming from this SIA demo, essentially. The next big thing that kind of happened is, you know, she was having a lot of success writing these songs for other people and she wrote songs for Britney Spears and... Kelly Clarkson's Invisible, Beyonce's Pretty Hertz, David Geddes, Titanium. And then she goes out and starts recording her own music with her first big hit, Chandelier. What do you think attracts people to her sound? I think she finds a way to mix this very modern sounding kind of like digital-oriented production with this really kind of voice that embraces imperfections and sounds very human.

I think there's a certain sort of rawness and a grain to her vocal. I think a signature of her music is to keep the grain and the cracks and the imperfections of the voice in the song. Right. We're definitely not used to hearing that very often in pop music, especially in the age of auto tune and just heavily digitized production. So I think that she strikes a really interesting balance between that and brings this kind of very raw humanity to the vocals. I want to talk a little bit about specifically Sia's style.

She's a ghostwriter. She writes for all these other people. For a long time, wasn't really getting the credit. Now definitely gets the credit. But she at the same time has her own signature sound, which is this really hard line to walk, either in her process or in the actual sound or for music, are there things that you hear which sort of define the Sia sound? Yeah, I think the most concrete element of the Sia sound is this idea.

I think she's called them high concept songs, which is sort of a misnomer because they're somewhat low concept when you really break it down. But I think Diamonds is a perfect example of that. It's this one word. single image that she kind of teases out different associations from shine bright like a diamond and we're beautiful like diamonds in the sky it's it's kind of all centered the entire song is centered around this one image that has a really catchy title and is very easy to grasp um as a pop hook but it's self-contained and it's something concrete and this chandelier the ssia song i think works in a similar way that it's this single word, very evocative image that she plays around

with it. Also a luxury item. Yes, also a luxury item. Also very shiny and flashy. So that's another CSA signature. But yeah, just kind of these one word, sometimes their nouns, it's just this really punchy phrase that's easily relatable to literally anyone who's breathing. And you can get all these variations on that theme that propel the song forward.

So I definitely see that kind of tight concept, like single image that is then built out a little bit throughout the rest of the song. I think that's her signature. I like the non-specific metaphor that anybody can attach any sort of meaning to as an effective way of becoming a pop hit. It feels so non-intuitive. As a songwriter, I feel like I've always been told, write about a specific moment that someone can imagine, but instead it's just grabbing these abstract metaphors. I think that's fantastic.

Yeah, a successful pop song is going to connect with the largest amount of people. Right. So my friend and former colleague, Carrie Batten, wrote a piece about Sia for the New Yorker recently that I really enjoyed, and she made this point, Sia is not writing for herself so much as she's writing for this sort of collective pop conscious. Oh. That's her true talent is knowing exactly how universal to make these songs and these images.

You describe in her piece that she writes with this process called toplining. You say that Cia's process is all about tuning in the moment and trusting her first thought and chucking whatever is not working for her. So basically, she walks into the sound booth, she listens to the track and she just starts scatting and saying whatever. And the fact that what's coming out is the thing that everybody can relate to makes her kind of an oracle. of pop music. Yeah, I think that's an interesting way of looking at it, that she is kind of channeling not only the personas of these other pop stars that she's writing for, but she's channeling the desires and the thoughts of the listener because a pop hit has to connect with people to make its way up the charts. It has to really have this kind of all-inclusive theme. So I think

that's what she's really good at doing, is tapping in not so much to, you know, to, you know, the trends of the radio, but the underlying longings and desires and feelings that people look to pop songs for. So I do think that when she says, you know, for example, to a Rolling Stone interviewer that I quoted this exchange in the piece that she says, like, that song means nothing to me. I wrote it in 15 minutes, blah, blah, blah. I think there's something of crafting that anti-persona in an exchange like that. But I also think that, you know, the stuff that you write in 15 minutes or the really tossed off stuff that where you're just in that fugue state, that's the stuff that's really often coming from your subconscious and your experiences when

you're not thinking about it. To me, like, the tossed offness doesn't necessarily mean that it's not personal or autobiographical or deeply felt from her. I think if you look at it in a certain way, it can be just the opposite. But I think that's why she's such an interesting figure. It's really, it's not black or white with her. It's a lot more complex. The phrase she uses for the kind of theme of her song is victim to victory. So you're going from this verse where she's really down and out.

But then this triumphant chorus of like, I'm alive. I feel like that that is mirrored really beautiful. in sort of the sonic landscape of her sound. She's always sort of like in a really mid-tempo. Not really ever super-fast songs, but sort of like slow-billed anthemic stuff. On the victory side, oftentimes her verses start in these tonally simple soundscapes

where it's just drums, her voice is maybe a little bit of synthesizer. And then her thing is that during the chorus, she just always goes like full sonic spectrum, these huge synth strings and background ethereal noises that I can't even articulate what they are take over and that sort of overwhelming victory feel. You say that there's two ways of listening to this album, right? One as a series of pop songs by an artist named Sia,

but the other as a collection, you call it, of speculative pop fictions. And I thought it would be fun if we could together think about what it would be like to listen to her, single alive and break down, what would it be like if Rihanna were playing the song or Adele were playing the song? Because both Adele and Rihanna actually turned this track down, right? And I believe that Adele is a co-writer on the song, too. Like, I think she, it was in a session with Adele. So, yeah. So maybe we can embrace this idea of speculative fiction and actually go

into a world and think about what might this sound like if, what would it sound like if someone else sang and someone else performed it? How would you hear a lot of? How would you hear a lot of live differently if Adele were performing it. I do really like thinking about what Alive would sound like as an Adel song because, you know, I think Adele has had been recording her latest album 25 for a long time. Right, right. And I think there is sort of an alternative universe in which this could have been her comeback single instead of Hello.

There's this crazy parallel, hello and Alive are almost the exact same chord progression. which I think is really interesting, since Adele is co-authored on both of them. They're both in F minor. Well, Alive is an F-sharp minor, but basically the same thing, same vocal range, more or less. And they both start on an F minor,

they move through a couple chords, and then end on D major. The chord progression gives us this sort of feeling of shift in mood from a minor to a major feel with some funny rhythmic interplay with the chords. So here's hello, and then here's how Alive goes.

They're strikingly similar, right? Very interesting. So definitely Adele sort of pulling at a certain sound, clearly written for her vocal range, has that sort of minor feel, definitely sort of Adele. I was thinking of the other stuff that I would not expect to hear

in an Adele song is basically all of the big bass drum, kick drum stuff and all that trancy synth sound that we get a lot of in Sia. I feel like if Adele did this song, she would have just sort of like stripped it down even further. Like you get that,

low piano sound, the drums would be in the background, maybe some strings, but not a lot of that sort of EDM kind of sound. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, can we imagine what happens if Rihanna took this song? How would you hear it? If Rihanna were to do this, I can see her sort of teasing out the darkness and almost like the noirish feel to it a little bit more, even going back to a song like Disturbia that's sort of having fun with all of this like horror movie imagery and and things like that. Yeah, I'd like to imagine sort of Rihanna on her new album, Auntie, which is sort of a more pared down, more minimalist sound.

A lot of sort of 80s, drum machines, some subtle sense. Where Sia's going to go full anthem, Rihanna, I think, is going to rely more on the voice and then musically probably pull it back just a little bit. But I think actually that brings up a good point with Rihanna that I think that Rihanna's rejection of a couple of these songs that sound like they were written for her shows us that she's not really in that place artistically right now where she's trying to write a big radio smash because she knows that she can call Sia for that. So I think that we know now having heard Auntie that she was not going to record something like Alive because there's not really any big obvious radio hits. It makes a lot of sense to me that where Rihanna's at in 2016, she's not going to go for the Sia Powerball. She had to go for her art album. It makes sense.

So with Alive, clearly, Adele would do it differently. Rihanna might make a different take, or at least very deliberately chose not to put this on her new album because it doesn't fit her current style. Okay, I've got one more artist that I think that Sia might be secretly ghostwriting for. Do you know Philip Glass? I do. You know, the renowned minimalist composer, very well known for his film scores. Interesting theory. Tell me more. I love the song Bird Set Free, the opening track on This Is Acting.

And it starts off with this plotting minor piano line, which sounds just like a Philip Glass song. I'm just throwing it out there, like, maybe she's like going for the soundtrack thing. How long do you think she's been ghostwriting for Philip Glass? I hope it goes way back. How far back. Yeah. Decades. She's actually like the secret queen of new music minimalism. Yes. Anyways, just a theory.

I really like that theory. You had this line I really liked that you said, Cia's new album, This Is Acting is full of these sorts of shrugged off, unromantic, and decidedly utilitarian creation stories. And I think that that plays in multiple ways. You could be saying the lyrics are simple, but I think it actually says much more about she is creating creation stories of herself and other people who she's writing for because the title of this latest album, this is acting, is actually a reference to the fact that she's written all of these songs for other people and she's the one that is performing them. So it plays on multiple levels.

Yeah. And I think the flip side of that, which I also talk about at the end of the piece, is that to go back to her anti-persona, I think that Sia has crafted this persona where she's sort of the anti-pop star and she doesn't. want to show her face and what have you. But at the same time, she's still going to award shows and just playing with a wig over her face or like playing with her back to the audience. If she was a truly, there are really reclusive musicians out there who would just not go to the award show at all or not play on SNL with or without a mask. So I think that, I think there's sort of a misconception about her that she's completely shunning the fame game. I think she's just trying to play it in a slightly different way and a slightly subversive way, but she's not opting out of it entirely. You said in your piece that some of her songs like Reaper and

Chandelier are strongly autobiographical, or at least seems so. Well, I think it's tricky because I read them as autobiographical only in the sense that we read pop music as autobiographical coming from the person who's singing it. It's almost like theuteur theory in film or something that we know a film is made by a whole team of people. Like, it's not just the director making a movie of, like, a Stanley Kubrick movie is not just made by hitting doing all of the things on the film set. It's a collaboration of many different people.

Seven minutes of credits at the end. Yeah. And so I think in a way, a pop song is kind of like that too and that there's a whole team behind it, but it's almost easier to compute the information by thinking of it as the personal expression of this one singular artist. The actual

story of the creation of a pop song is a lot more interesting than that. And I do think that Sia kind of plays around with that. So to use Reaper, for an example, which is an album or a song from the new album, she says that she wrote that for Rihanna

and that she sort of wrote that in character as Rihanna's person. And you can sort of tell that when you listen to it. There's almost sort of like a reggae kind of dance hall beat to it. And there's dark lyrics that you could about death and redemption and rebirth that like you can see Rihanna toying around with that imagery. And it's not that far off from something like diamonds. If you know anything about Sia's life and sort of the persona that she has created for herself as this sort of anti-Persona. just hearing a song like that where she's talking about having been so close to death and coming back from the edge and saying to the grim reaper, no, go away, not today.

You know, when you hear Cia's story about just sort of hitting rock bottom and you want to take that, I think, as the story of this autobiographical thing. But yeah, what I was arguing in the piece is that it is something more complex and I think slightly less romantic than that. I think that Sia's fame in the way we understand it as this sort of person stepping out from the shadows and having her own successful pop career, I'm not sure that that could happen in the same way any other moment in pop history except for right now. Yeah. Because there's something like very specifically 2010s or whatever we're calling this decade about.

Yeah. In that, I think we're in this pop moment where we're really starting to, appreciate the people behind the curtain, it used to be that you keep that person behind the curtain, especially in pop music. It was all about the illusion of the star being solely responsible for the finished product. I love diving into this duality of pop star songwriter and ideas of ownership around composition with you. It's been really super fun. You have an awesome article which people can check out on New York Mags website, and this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much. This is so fun.

Thanks for having me too. 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. 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 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. In our last couple episodes, Nate and I have got into our Chrysler Time Machine traveling car. kind of like, you know, the DeLorean, and gone back into the 1930s, gone out into the jazz clubs, uptown into Harlem, and heard some really fascinating stuff. And tonight, we're going to go out on the town again and explore some new and very creative music.

Hey, Nate, you're ready to go? Ready, set go, Charlie. All right, where are you taking me? Well, tonight we are headed back to the Cotton Club, where last time we caught Cab Callaway. Let's see if our engine will start. All right, good to go. Going uptown. Let's head up to 142nd and Lennox Avenue.

This time, though, when we walk upstairs into the Cotton Club, we are met by one of the greatest orchestras in all the land, the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our famous Cotton Club. It's great to see so many friends here tonight and joining themselves in spite of the cover charge. And if you can spare a minute from your Merry Macon,

I'd like to have the pleasure of introducing the greatest living master of jungle music, The rip-roaring harmony hound, none other than Duke Ellington. Take your bow, Duky. First number tonight's going to play a brand new little tune entitled The Cotton Club Stomp. Let her go. There's the Duke himself sitting at the piano in an immaculate white suit spurting a fine pencil-thin mustache,

12 musicians, saxophones, trombones, bass, guitar, banjo, Sonny Greer sitting behind his enormous. drum set consisting of timpani's, wood blocks, wind chimes, and always a carefully painted image on the front of his oversized bass drum. What's on that bass drum? Let's see. It's either going to be an image of two lovers kissing underneath the palm tree, or it'll be a giant image of Duke Ellington's face. That's great, because I love the idea of Duke starting his own personal. brand kind of like his own Donda. Yeah, exactly.

And Ellington might be playing one of his signature compositions from this era, East St. Louis Tudelo. This is super different than what we've been listening to in the past, that sort of hot, jazz, upbeat, dancey sound. I feel like this is sort of slow, kind of dissonant, these sultry and kind of challenging horn lines. Yeah, this is a sound that was very much associated. with Ellington during this time. Like you said, it's a very unique sound. It's marked by all these qualities you just described, whaling, saxophones, these dark static minor harmonies,

especially these kind of weird harmonic motions and always the presence of what we might call a talking trumpet. What does that mean? Well, this is a technique that was very popular in jazz in the first, say, three decades of the 20th century, this was a technique that you got by a number of ways, putting some object in front of the bell of the trumpet or trombone, whether it was a bowler hat, whether it was a mute,

or whether it was literally the rubber end of a toilet plunger. By manipulating these objects in front of the bell of the horn, you can create really astonishing sounds. And if you're a master, as the Ellington musicians were, you can almost make your instrument sound like a human voice talking. Nice, Charlie, your mouth trombone is on point. It's just like that. Just about perfect. So what do we call this music?

Well, at the time, it had a very exciting and a very dubious name, which was The Jungle Stubes. Oh, the jungle style. Okay. Yeah. Kind of reminds me of the last time we spoke about this idea of primitivism in jazz music, this idea that it just flows naturally from the soul, that there's no sort of composition or sophistication to it. You know, this jungle name very much plays into that.

Marketers heard Ellington playing this kind of music in the late 1920s, with these TomTom rhythms, with these, wild kind of trumpet lines and thought, hey, I bet we could sell even more records if we started calling this jungle music. And, well, they were right. Ellington actually for a while called his band, not the Duke Ellington Orchestra, but the Duke Ellington Jungle Band. Oh, man, I love the music, but I'm not sure if I love the description, but I guess it sold them more records. Yeah, it's unfortunate. It's a description that very much plays into the exotification of hard. during this time, something that we were talking about, you know, in our last few conversations as well.

But in my research, I'm interested in kind of recovering the other side of this music, going beyond the jungle, and trying to see where this style actually came from. Okay. Take me there. Well, I think if we focus in on the sound of this talking trumpet, we can see a very different origin because I don't think Duke Ellington consciously said, let's try and evoke the sound of the African jungle and will become, you know, celebrities. I think this was a more natural evolution, you know. In his trumpet and trombone players, he found I have these musicians who have really mastered this talking trumpet language, which was very much at that time associated with the South, associated with the blues, and associated with gospel preaching. Maybe in order to understand the talking trumpet a little better,

We have to leave the Cotton Club and all these jungle associations. And head to another Harlem club where we can get a more authentic idea of what this talking trumpet sounds like live. All right. So we'll get out of this place. We'll find a hotter spot. Where are we going? I think in order to satisfy our curiosity, we need to head to one of the biggest Harlem clubs at this time, Smalls Paradise. All right. Back in the Chrysler, driving down. private small. Yes. Cool.

Adding about 10 blocks south, and we get to Smallest Paradise. Unlike the Con Club where we walk upstairs, Smalls Paradise, we go down into the basement. And immediately we noticed a big difference here. This is not a segregated club like the Con Club. This is an integrated club. So you're taking me to this spot where we have a more inclusive audience

to get a different cue into the sound of this talking trumpet, I'm guessing. Yeah, that's exactly right. Somewhere where we can escape these jungles. connotations. Okay. And get to maybe a more direct meaning of this sound. So what are we hearing? Well, we're hearing the Charlie Johnson Orchestra.

And as we listen to a song like The Boy in the Boat, which incidentally has a very dirty meaning that I'll let you use modern tools like Google to uncover on your own. Okay. We hear the same kind of talking trumpet that we... were hearing in the Ellington Orchestra. You can hear Charlie Johnson in the background saying, yeah, man, preach that thing. Low down. Oh.

So this is like as close as you can get to physical evidence on wax of the real meaning of the talking trumpet in 1920s Harlem. It was not the jungle. It was the blues. It was gospel. It was preaching. It was the South. It was what they called gut bucket. That trumpet is literally speaking.

And it's speaking its history. Exactly. And it's a deep history. You know, just as when we were listening to Cab Callaway, hearing him do the Heidi, Heidi Ho, call in response, this talking trumpet is probably another very old African technique. Going back to music that was purely drumming in West Africa,

where they would find ways to make the drumming. itself sound like a voice. Rather than this marketed idea of the jungle, it's actually pulling from something real. Yeah, exactly. Something from the trenches of everyday life in Harlem, so to speak. So there seems to be quite a large gap between the way that this music is marketed to us and what we're actually hearing. Yeah, I think that's right. You know, this jungle moniker really distorts the development and meaning of the sound that Ellington and others were cultivating at the time. I think it's important to revisit these songs and try and uncover what the true context of something like a talking trumpet was, not the context that a marketer would lead you to believe it was.

It just feels like a great reminder that when genre is sold to us, it limits the way that we hear things. And I feel like that continues to happen in modern music. The boundaries of traditional genre really don't necessarily mean much. You have to dig into how things are made and how they're produce and open up your ears to listen. So I love going back into this music and think about how it makes me think today about the way that EDM and R&B are marketed, which may or may not be in relationship to their actual history. Yeah, I think that's right. There's definitely a power to the names we give music and investigating, you know, how warranted those names really are can be really productive.

It's a beautiful thing. It's always so much fun going out and listening to music with you. I always learn something. Thanks for being my wingman as ever, Charlie. We've got one more expedition planned for us. We're going to head back to the Cotton Club to check out the songwriting of Harold Arlen, a young Jewish composer writing torch songs like Stor. me weather for the Cotton Club, and just five years later, we'll be composing one of the most beloved

scores in American musical theater history, the Wizard of Oz. So we can take the Yellow Brick Road to get to the club next time. Indeed. And I assume that by our fourth episode, going out together, listening to Jazz from the 30s and 40s, that you'll be done with your dissertation, right? Oh, yeah, because in order to get a doctorate, you need four 10-minute podcast episodes. Everyone knows that. Oh, great.

It's so easy. I'm going to go get my doctorate. Yeah. Of course, it needs to be stressed. This is the most useless kind of doctor there is on earth. No heart surgery. Yeah, no one is ever on a plane saying, is there a doctor present? A doctor of historical musicology. I might be that person screaming that out in the airplane, but probably nobody else. Nate, so much fun. Cannot wait to hop back in our time traveling car and listen to some more music next time with you. Always. See you. This episode of Switched-on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding, and of course my good friend Nate Sloan.

Today's show featured New York Mag's pop writer Lindsay Zolads. She's one of my favorite music journalists and has some great reviews of recent albums by Rihanna and Kanye over at NYMag.com. You can also find her on Twitter at Lindsay Zolads. That's Lindsay with an S-A-Y and Zol-A-D-Z. Our logo design was done by Luke Harris. check out his work at Luke Harris.com, and you can find more episodes of Switched-on Pop wherever you get your podcasts

and on our website, Switched-on Pop.com. And if you're really feeling ambitious, you can get in touch with us on Twitter at Switched-on Pop. We'll be back in two weeks with even more pop music, and until then, thanks for listening.