Switched on Pop - Paper Planes, Chandelier & What the #@%! is Timbre? (with Constance Grady)

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

We hand over the hosting duties to Constance Grady, book reviewer for Vox.com, to discuss our new book/baby - Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters, and go deep on two specific concepts we haven’t touched nearly enough on the show: timbre (with the help of Sia’s “Chandelier) and sampling (via M.I.A.’s iconic “Paper Planes). The book of course goes further, devoting a full chapter each to sixteen different concepts we’ve explored on the show (think harmony, modulation, syncopation, genre), and pairing those concepts with the pop tracks that really bring them to life.  There are so many people who helped us get this thing from concept to bound stack of papers that you can hold in your hands, but right now, right here, we want to shout out: our listeners. You all shape the show every week by suggesting incredible episode ideas and recommending songs for us to break down. You also inspired this book, when you asked us year in and year out for a definitive guide to the essential musical knowledge necessary to understand contemporary pop. We hope you like it, and know that your emails, tweets and analysis continue to delight and inspire us to no end. SONGS DISCUSSED Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe Sia - Chandelier M.I.A. - Paper Planes MORE Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters is available now! Find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound or buy directly from Oxford University Press. Book illustrations by the indomitable Iris Gottlieb: https://www.irisgottlieb.com/ 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. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm Constance Grady,

Vox.com's book critic, and I am here today with my guests Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan, the authors of the book, Switched on Pop, how popular music works and why it matters. Charlie and Nate, thank you for joining me. Thanks so much for having us. Wow. How fun to be a guest on our own show. It's great to be here. Well, today, it is my show. And I will go mad with power, is my plan. Please do. So tell me about your book switched on pop. What is it about? What we really wanted to do was give people the essential musical knowledge that you need to understand what's going on in the pop landscape

and be able to apply that to think about how does popular music work? Why does it matter? We want to give you that knowledge, but we want to do it like with our show through 16 really fun songs of the last 20 years, which we think are absolutely necessary listening. So many people who listened to the show would reach out and ask us, where can we find a book that does the kind of thing you do on our show? And we were always like, you can't. It doesn't exist.

This is our attempt to put into a single book the kind of basic language and vocabulary you need in terms of talking about music to really dig into your favorite songs. But we didn't want to do it as just like a boring reference book. It had to be not only what are these things, but also how do they help us understand how popular music works? And so rather than examining ancient songs like many of our textbooks did, we wanted to look at the music that's happening now. So we chose songs of the last 20 years that we think are absolute essential listening. And through them, we learn that vocabulary, but apply it to understand what's going on in this song. What does it tell us about ourselves?

What does it tell us about culture? So whether you are a musical neophyte, you know nothing about music, you're going to pick something up. But even if you have long studied music, I think you're going to find really interesting and surprising insights about how songs that you already know are operating on a level that you might not be thinking about. Yeah. From neophytes to nerds, this book runs the gamut. Let's talk a little bit about the titles. So this is also the title of your podcast or now my podcast. switched on pop.

In the intro you guys talk a little bit about your origin story, and you mentioned that for a long time you thought of yourself as like music snobs who maybe weren't super into pop. So what changed for you? Nate's still a snob in general, but not perhaps particularly a music snob anymore. Yeah, I could take that. I think the moment that shifted for us is thanks to an artist whom we refer to as Saint Jepson. That, of course, is Carly Ray Jepson. May she smile down on all of us?

Yes, yes, the beatific presence that watches over all of us. And we were listening to Call Me, Maybe, the Seminole 2012 track. The three minutes of it is just able to hook you in and just, like, rivet your attention. What is going on that this song is so powerful, that it rules the charts, that's so popular? What are the musical characteristics that go into it? Once we started burrowing deeper and deeper into the compositional logic of the song, I think by the end we emerged as like changed people. Two people who formerly me, a jazz like classical snob, Charlie more of a rock electronic music snob.

Yeah. On the other side of this experience, we were like, whoa, pop music has a lot of depth, a lot of beauty, a lot of artistry. It really was an ear-opening moment for us. Do you think it was just that song in particular? Or was there something in like the way we generally talk about pop that was shifting at that moment in time? Because that's sort of a little bit into the rise of pop-domism. It's a few years after that big essay in the New York Times magazine called The Rap Against Rockism, that sort of suggested that maybe music criticism had spent too much time lifting up rock music

as the most important genre there is and that it had ignored the artistic possibilities of pop. Did that play any role in your thinking, do you think, even subliminally? Yeah, absolutely. I think there were two big trends that were happening at the start of our show. One was a larger focus on popular culture within cultural criticism at large, but also the rise of explainer journalism. And I think that we were really sort of marrying those two with the show. With optimism, I think part of what we recognize in our former snobbery is it so often when we derive, a kind of music. Those arguments can be based off of known, unknown biases of gender, sexuality, race, class.

And when we listened closer to pop music, I think we saw the ways in which, especially women are written out of getting credit or even being seen as musicians, because so often, well, they're just the singers. And when we look at someone like Carly Wright-Jepson, we see a great amount of autonomy, expression, unique ways of showing us emotional cues, ways of expressing ourselves, giving ourselves allowances to be able to have an extended human experience. But really, for the two of us, I think the most important influence was just listening. And I think that that is what the whole point of the book is about.

When we call the show Switched on Pop and the book Switched on Pop, it's about really, truly being switched on to listening, to listening very deeply. I think that's where so much change has happened for our ears. for our listeners as well, that there's so much you can mind from the music. So tell us how the book will help us listen deeply and become switched on to pop. How will it help us make sense of pop? Yeah, each chapter is designed to have two overlapping goals. One is to reveal the sort of inner musical world of a well-known song from the past 20 years,

from artists ranging from Andre Benjamin to Zed. And each chapter in doing so also introduces the reader to a larger musical concept that they can then go and apply to any listening experience, whether it's in pop or any genre of music. So you'll learn about that particular song, but also like an underlying musical idea involving rhythm, harmony, syncopation, timbre, etc. Cool. So what are all of these building blocks that you're teaching us about in the book? So the book is sort of in three main sections. We can think of it as sort of the essential building blocks. Nate just mentioned a bunch of them. To understand music, you have to have a sense of rhythm.

We have to understand what is rhythm. How does it work? A perfect song for exploring rhythm is Outcast's Hey, Yah. We also look at melody through Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. Harmony is examined through funds. We are young. form, the actual structure of a song. We look at Rihanna's song, We Found Love, which completely disrupts our idea of what a normal pop song is and how it should be structured and is in that way instructive on trying to understand the standard verse, chorus, form. Of course, we have to know lyrics, and we look at Justin Timberlake's, what goes around, comes around. And often sort of left out of the list, or maybe the least understood in the sort of building blocks of music is timbre. The sort of texture.

and quality of sound. Later on in the book, in the second section, we get into some slightly more sophisticated topics, things like syncopation and so on. And then at the end of the book, we get into the weightier, more complex issues that apply to pop music. How ought we think about genre?

What are the ways which our harmony is being disrupted by the song Despacito and is changing the way that we think about the sort of standard expectations within a pop song? Despacito. Those are the three sections and how we lay it out. So going back to that most misunderstood building block

of timbers, am I saying that right? It's not like hi-ho timber, right? No, you're nailing it, tambour. Think of like a French, you know, like eating a baguette and smoking a cigarette. Tambour. All right, I'm going to go like full Nouvellevog on this. Tambre.

Okay. Wow, I feel like it. Yeah, yeah, we're killing it. Like a minute go to our movie. So what am I. favorite lines in the book comes when you're talking about tambrough and you say that we sense it as a physical object. What does that mean? This was one of the many discoveries we made in researching the book. Music cognition studies show that when you listen to a sound, your brain will light up the

areas that also express the feeling of the sound. If you hear a sound that is rough, if you hear a lawnmower or something. Not only will your ears tell you like, ooh, that's kind of a rough timbre. That's a rough tone. But your brain will also light up the sensation of feeling something rough on your skin. Like if you had like a wool sweater, like sandpaper on your skin or something, that would also be lighting up in your brain as you listen to that rough sound. So in a way, it's not too outrageous to say that you actually feel the different tones of music and sounds, like that as a physical sensation almost. So often, I think when we get the definition of timbre, it's like the color or the texture of sound. We actually have to use

other sensory metaphors to be able to understand this tone color, tone texture thing, but it actually maps to the brain. Isn't that fascinating? So when we say that someone has a silky voice, we're actually feeling the sort of texture of silk on our skin. Yes, wow, Constance, that's a great example. We're going to put that in the second edition of the book. Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited. Yeah, like coating yourself in silk when you listen to, I don't know, Luther Vandross. What are some examples of singers with distinctive timbers that you can give us?

There's so many because it's one of the first things we were. respond to when we listen to music, like in the way that you could maybe just listen to, you know, half a second of, say, Whitney Houston or perhaps Andrea Bocelli, and be able to immediately identify them. The tone of someone's voice is one of the most intimate ways that we respond to music in the same way that when you pick up the phone and your loved one or a family member is on the other end, you immediately recognize that voice. Tambor is such a primal way of how we navigate the world. So certain singers really take advantage of that.

And the one that we really zoom in on in the book is Sia, the Australian Chantus, and we focus on her hit song, Chandelier. I mean, you could talk about this song in terms of the powerful lyrics, the musical accompaniment, the melodies and harmonies. But I think the sound of Sia's voice, the timbre of it is really the thing that primarily shapes our emotional experience of listening to chandelier. And I think an essential thing to recognize about timbre, Nate, that you're pointing out, is that it is something that we know before we intellectually know. It's subconsciously already there. To illustrate this, we can take the same melody that Sia is singing in chandelier, and we can play it on,

different instruments and there's no confusing one for the other. This might seem obvious, but I think it's important to hear. So you can play the melody from chandelier on a sine wave, what a tuning fork puts out, or on a flute, or you could be Sia. And each of those have very different qualities to them. Even though they're playing the exact same melody. Exactly. So timbre is actually what tells us what are we hearing. Is it the human voice? Is it another instrument? even if they're copying each other. So, see his voice in this little line as it goes up. You can hear it at the very beginning of just this word chandelier.

Or I guess it's more like chandelier. It becomes this four-syllable thing of beauty. As she goes up through the chandelier, it's like her voice goes from a more rougher tone, a more sort of passionate, extreme belting tone. And then as it goes higher and higher, it becomes sort of more clear. more crystalline and more like a bell.

So you can actually like feel her voice, just the sound of the voice, almost mimicking the general arc of the song, like trying to overcome, trying to get through something, trying to find a state of grace. Like her voice is actually enacting the central idea of the song just in the way she sings chandelier. And there's even moments where her voice cracks as if the chandelier is crashing down

and shattering apart. Like in the post chorus. Let's listen to that. You can focus here on the word dry when she sings, feel my tears as they dry. Yeah, let's listen to that one more time. That is insane.

How does she do that? It's dry. It's like there's a break in the middle of the word. But it's so dry. Yeah. Well, it's so emotive. It's one of these moments that you get in pop music where it's like,

Are you experiencing this authentic moment where Sia literally can't get this word out without her voice cracking? Or is she performing that sense of authenticity? I mean, either way, it's kind of irrelevant, but it's still masterful. There's actually a name for what she's doing right here, that little break in the middle of the word dry. The dry. I obviously can't do it. It's called a glottal flip. What is a glottal flip, Nate?

I don't know. It's something crazy with the larynx and the tongue. and I spent a long time trying to learn how to do this, but I can't, so I'm sorry, Charlie. I can't. You know who can, though? Adele. Finally, I can see you crystal clean.

Go ahead and sell me out, and I'll lay your ship, babe. When I listened to that clip the first time, I was like, did the song stutter? Like, it almost felt like the CDs skipped. I don't listen to CDs anymore, but it's actually her voice. There's like the, like it. Right on that line, go ahead. It's like, go ahead.

Yeah, you're literally like clicking your tongue off kind of the top of the roof of your mouth to like stop the air and then let it go again It's much more complicated than that and I can't actually do it But it results in this kind of breaking effect sort of you're at the end of your rope you're fraying but you're still keeping it together So I feel like the point that you're making overall here is that not only is timbre the thing which we use to recognize What we're listening to but it's those textures are things that any talented singer or performer you utilizes and shifts and changes in order to create a mode of expression and bring the song to life. Yeah, I guess that is my point, Charlie. Thank you for expressing it so eloquently. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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So in the book, you guys talk a little bit about how things like that glottal flip used to be really heavily politicized and different forms of timbre would be considered, you know, respectable and proper for certain classes of people to do and others would not be. How did we politicize something as basic and simple as just the tone of a voice? The way that the voice has been policed over the years is really interesting because in the 18th century there was actually a term called Chevro Tommant, which was like the bleeding of a female goat. And they were like, you don't want to sound like that. Like the female voice should sound pure and flawless and shouldn't have any, you know, inconsistencies, any roughness. And that was very connected to a larger ideal of like femininity and having to. to ascribe to a certain set of feminine norm. So the voice was just a part of that. So on one hand, it's really exciting to hear modern pop singers, especially the female singers, sort of like

creating new modes of vocal expression that in turn can express new ideals of what it means to be feminine in the 21st century. But there's also a complication of that in the case of Sia because there's another element to the timbre, to the tone of her voice. She is adopting a certain kind of Caribbean accent at places in this recording. And that's something we have to acknowledge too, because that is an essential part of her vocal tone. And it's one that we might want to question whether she has the right to deploy as a white Australian-American woman. Certainly, we would have to consider the sort of larger context of her music and collaborations in order to do that, but it should definitely be included in the conversation as well.

So when you want to bring a sound or a timbre into a mix and you don't already have it, you have to turn to another technique that you guys lay out in your book of sampling. So how does that work? I think many of us know that sampling is taking a piece of a sound recording and reappropriating it in another place. But we hear sampling as an essential piece of composition. It's a way of not just quoting, but taking and working with a timbre that is inaccessible in any other form. In order to make that reference, you need that sound so that you can place it into another story. That sound is more than just the original sound recording.

It has meaning within it that is obligatory to whatever the statement of the new sound recording is going to be. So do you ever run up into legal issues with that? like if you want to take a sound recording that someone else has written and bring it into your own original recording, do you have to like pay them or get their permission? How does it work? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this has been complicated throughout history. I think it's worth going back to the 1980s and 1990s when the predominant form of sort of old school hip hop is making music through often sampling hundreds of different tracks onto a song. You could take a piece like fear of a black planet by Public Enemy, an album which I think they said had over 150 samples on it.

Just a few years later, the major case, Biz Marquis, Grand Upright Music, versus Warner Brothers Records happens. Biz Marquis samples a song called Alone Again by Gilbert O'Sullivan. It's a 70s track. Biz Marquis puts it in his own song, also called Alone Again. And he uses a large piece of music, like a lot of the song. I'm alone again, naturally. Alone again, naturally.

And he loses the case. In this sort of pivotal moment that's also happening during the 90s culture wars, and there's this moment in the case where the judge actually says that sampling is a euphemism that was developed by the music industry to mask what is obviously thievery. And just a few years later, another pivotal case, Bridgeport Music versus Dimension Films takes on NWA for sampling actually just two seconds of a funkadelic song. It then becomes common practice that if you're going to sample anything, you actually, you can not look at you have to sample and get permission for a whole song, which certainly makes a lot of sense. But even if you grab the smallest sound recording, you need to get permission. This fundamentally shifts the way in which hip hop is made.

It was estimated that Public Enemy would have actually had to have paid $5 million in royalties in order to get their sample clearances for their album, Fear of Black Planet. So sampling is complicated in music, where in other art forms there is sort of more leniency towards fair use. Generally, in a song, you have to go out and get permission not only from the songwriter, but also from the whoever owns the actual sound recording as well. So if it's so complicated and difficult to do sampling well, why is it so important in music? Why do people keep going through the trouble of doing it? This is the part about sampling that we really don't explore deeply enough, which is that sampling is not fundamentally necessarily stealing. It can be, certainly.

There are definitely ways in which people play dries and steal. But I think most frequently the way that it's used is as a way of creating a timbre that you couldn't otherwise make. you want to make a reference and a commentary on something. And the only way to do that is to bring that sound into the recording and reimagine it and put it into a new context in order to create a new story. This is common through and through all other art forms. I think we call this like intertextuality.

And so we think about in the book the idea that sampling as a fundamental sort of subcategory of the palette of timbers that are available for a songwriter or composer producer. Yeah, and so in the book, you have this great quote from William Hudson, who is a producer in clipping. And he says, sampling puts you in a very specific place that evokes and metaphorizes memory. What does that mean? What do you take that to mean? You know, I think different sounds have a certain patina of like when and where they were recorded that sometimes is not, you know, replicable to take the example of SIA. You know, her voice is something we recognize.

So if you sample, Cia's voice, that's going to create a powerful emotional response in a listener. And as you move further and further back in time, you can really start to like perceive that distance as well. When you hear something that was recorded in the 1930s, it's going to have a different kind of texture to it, a certain scratchiness, a certain distance. That's going to be part of your emotional experience when you reincorporate that into a 2030s. 21st century track, it will emotionally affect you in whatever sort of particular, you know, associations you have with that recording, with that time, with that distance. And it's something that you can't get with just melody or harmony. So often it is, you know, if somebody else were to sing that same SIA,

if you just want to take her cracking vocal for that tiny little second, it is going to bring out some sort of quality. If somebody else did it, you lose that quality. In the book you're focusing in on MIAA's song paper planes in this chapter, how is she using sampling? What does she do with it? This is a song which is much written about, and it should be because it's a really important song. It's a song that Nate and I actually first experienced together in concert. We were watching MIA, I think back in college, and she was on stage with a bullhorn shouting third-world democracy into this giant dark auditorium.

but with like flashing lights and sounds of gunshots going off. It was unbelievable theater. Yeah. And what brought that theater to life were the sounds that she used in her composition. So often when we think about paper planes, we talk about MIA's identity, where she comes from. We talk about certainly, of course, the lyrics. And the song really sort of both valorizes and parodies the imagined idea of the criminal immigrant, right? She says, all I want to do is bang, bang, bang, bang, and take your money with a nice little cash register moment in there.

Fundamentally in this song, in order to bring about that quality of that imagine criminal immigrant, this sort of ploy character that she's setting up, she uses samples for the hook. The song would be nothing without its gunshots. Critics of the song have especially sort of conservative criticisms of the song say, well, this is encouraging criminal behavior. which is utterly missing the point because you have to look at her lyrics, but more importantly, listen to the sounds that she's using and it tells entirely different story. So what is the story she's telling? So we've set up that the song has this sort of ploy character, this imagined immigrant criminal character. But if you go to the song's source material, it's sample. It becomes significantly more obvious that she's setting up a straw man character.

Check it out. Here is the opening of paper planes. And here is the reference. This is actually coming from the song Straight to Hell by The Clash. No, Straight to Hell by The Clash is a song in which Joe Strummer puts on a character as well. He plays the English bigot deriding immigrants coming into Britain in the 1980s. There ain't no need to go straight. He says, go straight to hell. He's playing this terrible bigot character. And so she takes that idea and flips it on its head.

And she plays the idea of the immigrant in her song. She even references the sample in her lyrics. We're already going to hell pumping that gas. What is the immigrant really likely doing in America? Working hard labor jobs, delivering UPS trucks and pumping gas. And she says, we're already going to hell. doing that work. And so once we know the sampled material, all of a sudden, the story of the song comes to life. It is this brilliant reversal of the original material, and it takes that material

and transforms it to create an entirely new story. This isn't the only case. She samples two other great moments, which I think are worth pointing out. So here we have sort of what we call a loop is what we have in the straight to hell, just taking a thing and repeating it over and over. But she has another kind of reference here as well, another kind of sample, a lyrical quotation. Actually, the chorus comes from an entirely different song. This is Rex in effect, Rumpshaker. All I want to do. And then she replaces Zoom, Zoom, Zoom and Shake Your Rump with Boom, Boom, Boom, and Take Your Money.

It's vulgar. It's violent, but she, an empowered sort of more feminist message. I'm going to take that thing. You're telling me to shake this. Well, I'm actually going to take power. Finally, of course, we have those samples of the gunshunds. shots. That's a little sample fragment that happens. And those actually come from the game Street Fighter, according to Diplow who produced the track. And those gunshots, of course,

as a timbre, bring the whole thing to life, making it have that sense of urgency and angst and violence. But it's being sampled from a video game. And once we know that, all of a sudden, it kind of pulls the whole thing apart. And we realize the whole thing is this brilliant parody. And there's one more wrinkle to this discussion of sampling in paper playing. a big reveal, a big surprise that in order to get, you'll have to read the book. How about that? A little cliffhanger there. Love that.

That's a technique that we see, as you said, Charlie, all the time in other genres and other media. So I'm a book critic, and if I want to talk about a book that's quoting heavily from a lot of other older books, then I have a whole vocabulary ready that I can use to talk about it, right? I can look up all kinds of criticism that's already been written. about intertextuality and can just go forth with that and kind of riff off of it. Talk to me a little bit about the project you guys are involved in of building a similar kind of vocabulary for talking about pop. There's a famous quote that has been misattributed to a number of figures including like Elvis

Costello and Frank Zappa and Lori Anderson. It's talking about music is like dancing about architecture, which is meant, I think, to say that, oh, don't bother analyzing or dissecting music. Let it speak for itself. You can't really interpret something that's so ineffable. And, you know, I think there's a level of truth to that. Art speaks to us in ways that can't ever be fully explained. But on the other hand, there is so much that goes into a song. There's composition. There's theory. There's culture. There's history. As we've been talking about every single sample in a song might lead you down a rabbit hole of meaning that will change the way you think about a track. The accents and the timbrel choices of a singer

may change how you interpret a song. I think analyzing music, thinking deeply about musical choices and musical logic just make songs come alive in new and surprising ways and may give them an even deeper meaning in your own world. And I think lastly, can help you appreciate music that might be sort of further afield from what you usually listen to it. That was, as we started this conversation, that was like the big appeal of doing this project for us was to force ourselves to listen to a music that we didn't necessarily think was for us. And in doing so, that really opened our eyes and ears to so much of the world around us. So I think the experience of like listening closely to music can be really profound.

Yeah, I want to add to that. I've never thought about it this way, Nate, but it's that having an expanded vocabulary, not even being a musician, like you don't have to be a musician to have a vocabulary about music. And I think that's part of what we really try to emphasize. Having that vocabulary means when you hear something which is unknown to you, you can start to translate from the things that you do know. If you believe in this idea of,

I just want it to affect me viscerally and right exactly as it is and I want to have the honest, pure reaction, I actually think that that is another way of saying, I actually don't want to know what the thing is. I'm stuck in my ways. I like the things I like. And I think that one of the best ways of getting beyond what we know is opening up our vocabulary,

serving as a way to access things, to understand other languages of music that aren't available. Because once you know rhythm, you can hear music that is in other rhythms, and you're like, wow, that's not the rhythm that I know, but I know that it's rhythm that I'm focusing in on. All right, so the book is switched on pop. When is it out?

Where can people find it? Book is out on December 13th. Switched on pop, how popular music works, and why it matters. You can find it anywhere you get your books. You can go to Indybound, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, your local bookstore, anywhere you can find books. And if you're a fan, please leave us a review. It means so much.

Well, thank you both so much for joining me today on my very own personal Vox Media podcast, Switched on Pop. We're honored to be here. It's really a thrill for us. We're longtime listeners, first-time callers. That is such an honor to me. I might be giving it up after this week, though, to give it back to these two authors who are on book tour right now. Oh, that's a shame, but I'm sure they'll be. struggle to fill your shoes.

I don't know. I think those two kids might have a future in this crazy business. I don't know. Thank you, Constance. Switched on Pop is hosted sometimes by me, Charlie Harding. And why, Nate's line. We're edited and engineered by Brandon McFarland.

Our producers are Bridget Armstrong and Megan Lubin. Ashok Keroua and Liz Nelson are our executive producers. We're a proud member of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can listen to Switch on Pop anywhere you get podcasts. Apple podcast app, Spotify, yada, yada, yada, yada. We're there.

Reach out to us on Twitter at Switch on Pop and go check out our book. It's really fun. It's filled with amazing illustrations by the incredible Iris Gottlieb. It's jargon free. It's a wild ride. I'm literally holding the first copy in my hand right now that we've ever seen, and it's pretty exciting. It smells good. It's got a nice, yeah, nice feel to it, glossy.

So, yeah, thanks for listening. and reading.