Switched on Pop - Paul McCartney went back to Liverpool for something new to say

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Boys of Dungeon Lane, McCartney's collaboration with producer Andrew Watt, arrived when McCartney was 83 and and he came out swinging: the opening track greets listeners with a dissonant, unresolved guitar chord that sets the album's tone. Harmonic instability runs through the entire record: chromatic mediants, deceptive cadences, and persistent pedal tones prevent even the most nostalgic songs from settling into comfort. The album's lyrics focus on McCartney's pre-Beatles Liverpool youth, territory unfamiliar even to long-time fans. The songs pay deliberate sonic tribute to specific Beatles recordings: Mellotron strings echoing "Strawberry Fields Forever," a backwards laugh tape loop answering "Tomorrow Never Knows," a first-ever McCartney/Starr vocal duet so close in timbre the two voices are nearly indistinguishable. Songs discussed:Paul McCartney – "Mull of Kintyre"Paul McCartney – "As You Lie There"The Beatles – "Blackbird"The Beatles – "Helter Skelter"The Beatles – "You Never Give Me Your Money"Paul McCartney – "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey"Paul McCartney – "Band on the Run"Paul McCartney – "Live and Let Die"Paul McCartney – "Mountaintop"The Beatles – "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"The Beatles – "For No One"The Beatles – "Because"The Beatles – "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"The Beatles – "Octopus's Garden"Paul McCartney – "Down South"The Beatles – "Two of Us"Paul McCartney – "We Two"The Beatles – "Strawberry Fields Forever"Paul McCartney – "Never Know Those"The Beatles – "Tomorrow Never Knows"Paul McCartney – "Salesman Saint"John Lennon – "Working Class Hero"John Cougar Mellencamp – "Small Town"Paul McCartney – “Home to Us” (with Ringo Starr)Paul McCartney – "The Days We Left Behind"The Beatles – "When I'm Sixty Four" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada.

All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. 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, economy. and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-Fer-Frey at O-D-O-D-O-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-D-com. Who is the best band with the worst name? Best band with the worst name. Ario Speedwagon. Definitely one of the worst names. I don't know if I'm one of the best bands. Me first in the Gimmie-Gimmies. I'm just thinking of Bad names. I'm not even thinking of the quality of the art.

How about the band that I grew up with, most important band in my life, the band that my children are growing up with? Camper Van Beethoven. The Beatles. The Beatles. Wow. It is a really terrible name when you actually pause and think about it. It's like a bug and a bad pun simultaneously. Which is really our vibe. A good pun. I do love a good pun. It probably is from Buddy Holly and the Crickets. There was the crickets, the Beatles. But you know what I love about the Beatles is that they're always having fun. They're very cheeky. And that music is continuing. Welcome to Switch on Pop.

I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. That's interesting that you think the Beatles are always having fun because they're also one of the most famously fractious bands in history. In some ways, they are the first. band to break up and set the whole template for creative differences that many other acts would follow in the years to come. But sure, let's go with, you know, happy and carefree as the predominant association with the Beatles. Why not? Paul McCartney says that making music is called playing music for a reason. It's not working music. He plays music. And he's playing music still

today. At 83, he's come out with a new album, Boys of Dungeon Lane. I think it's really one of his best late career works. The man from Liverpool. That is That is classic Paul. It is. It's simple. It's beautiful. It's a melody.

that sounds like you've heard it before, even though it's the first time it's ever been written. Yeah. It feels in line with other works of his like, mole of Kintyre, perhaps. Mall of Kintyre. Oh, men from the sea. You're maybe even a more Paul completest than I am.

I would say his 80s works, I don't know as well. His 90s works, I don't know as well. But everything from 2000s, and on. I have listened to closely, and I really am enjoying this record. He wrote and produced a bunch of it with Andrew Watt, who I think is the happiest 35-year-old on the planet, because not only does he work with artists like Lady Gaga and Slita Gomez and Post Malone, but he seems to be the boomer whisperer. He worked with the late Ozzy Osborne. He's worked with Elton John, Iggy Pop. He's producing the new Stone's record in addition to making this Paul McCartney album. And I think they've made

something really fresh together, which by the way, is not easy to do. You know, there are not a lot of folks from the 60s early rock era who are still producing music. And if you are, you have this very difficult needle to thread. On the one hand, you've got to serve your entire legacy and all the fans and all their expectations of what's come before. And at the same way, you need to make something new. And you need to do all of that, I feel like in an age appropriate way. So I want to see how Paul McCartney is pulling that off on the Boys of Dungeon Lane because I feel like he has a heck of a lot to teach us about music even at 83.

I want to start our listen at the very top. So those are the first notes of the first song, the very first thing that he and Andrew Watt wrote together. The song is called As You Lie There. And we begin in this place of a lot of tension. Yeah, strap in folks, because we're about to talk about the opening chord of this first track of Boys of Dungeon,

lane for the next 45 minutes. Yeah. It was, I almost drove my car off the road and I hit play on this album. And the very first thing you hear is this deeply dissonant arpeggiated chord played on the guitar. It is such a bold way to start this album when, you know, people have such high expectations and they're so curious what it's going to sound like. And the first sound is one of utter ambiguity.

and tension. Yeah. And it floored me. Just, I mean, I don't know how much you can say about three notes, but it was such a striking way to start this album. Well, it's not three notes. It's four notes. And I think we need to get it to our time to talk about it.

We're having this argument before recording. It's D, E, flat, B. I don't know where you're getting this phantom fourth note. Okay. So I have here in my hands the Martin D-28. That is the same guitar that Paul McCartney recorded Blackbird on. Except you have to turn it around, so you're playing it left-handed. True, I'm not a lefty.

In interviews, he's talked about how he likes to start songs with something a little unusual, something new to him. Often finding a chord that he doesn't even know what it is is a really inviting place to begin. So the first notes that he played for Andrew Watt was this on the guitar. Okay, yeah, okay, there are four notes there. Because you're saying that that last note is actually a pair of notes. Yes, it is a D, a C, an E flat, and a B. Dr. Sloan, professor of musicology with a jazz background,

what on earth is that tension? What is that dissonance? I mean, if we call the root note D, the tonic of the chord, then we're looking at a D-13 with a sharp 9 and a dominant 7. It's like a D-flat-9 add-13, right? It's a D-7-flat-9 out-13, yeah. Ooh, Paul, you're working us here. We go from that chord to a slightly more sonorous sound.

Still very tense, though. Very tense. and then a kind of pseudo-resolution, we are finally arriving to our home chord. The chord is G. But always in the bass is this D. Instead of feeling like home, right? Very up in the air.

It's almost like a memory that you can sort of see and touch. but you can never quite hold on to it. Yeah, absolutely. This chord serves as the creative inspiration for this song, and it puts us in this place of reflection, a reflective uncertainty. I used to walk past your house. Every night I'd look up at your window.

The light was on. I saw your silhouette on the blind. Do you think of me? Do I ever cross your mind? Do I ever cross your mind? Was there a minute there where you're like, is Sir Paul McCartney about to rap? Like, just right at that very first line, the way he delivers it, I used to walk past your house. I almost thought he was about to do like a slick Rick style freestyle.

And then it sort of becomes more of a spoken word that goes into a sung verse. But yeah, talking about surprising. Did not expect to hear Paul just sort of talking to us as the first thing, you know, we hear on this song. Yeah, it's not his default delivery, but it is one of his default subjects. It's so sweet. He is singing about a teenage crush, a girl named Jasmine, who used to live in Liverpool, him walking past and seeing her window and thinking, hey, you know, do you ever think about me? And he continues.

One time I can't forget The feeling that came over me I like to think that we could be Together forever So much happening in this pre-chorus First, the harmony progresses We get out of that sort of tense space We move into some new chords

That again, a little more resolved Conventional, yeah A little more conventional continuing to ponder this crush and this underlying question, are we going to be together forever? At which point, our nice, pretty harmony descends down into this deceptive cadence. Instead of going to our home key of G, he walks down to the dark E minor, which I think is quite foreboding.

I like to think that we could be together, forever. Forever, forever. Forever. So there's that dark E minor. Kind of suggests that, well, obviously this crush from long ago, it's not going to happen for Paul. This is like literally pre-Beatles teenager, thinking about his old crush.

And that distant memory is a unrequited love. And I think we really hear the way that that love is unfulfilled when we move into the chorus. Did not see that coming. It's so unexpected. This thing rocks. Paul McCartney rocks. And this is mostly Paul.

He plays almost everything on the album with a handful of musicians who also contribute. Andrew Watt, who produced, also plays electric guitar and synthesizer here and some keys. Ringo plays the tambourine only on this song. Really? Yes. We'll get more to Ringo shortly. But this is mostly Paul just rocking out. And he has really got it.

I think that this feeling of a love not fulfilled really pays off not just because of the distorted fuzzed out electric guitars, the heavy bass, the growling vocal. But wow, how does he do that still? But it's also, again, our harmony. Because I love that Paul refuses to stick to a single key. He loves to play with where we are. Yeah. We've gone from the key of G to the key of C. minor. Big change. And he does it using this really powerful chord. Remember at the end when he's kind of

realizing this crush is never going to happen. And we, instead of resolving to our G chord, we resolve down to the E minor. And the next chord, ooh, crunchy. There's a music theory term for that, going from the E minor to the C minor. It's the chromatic mediant. It is indeed. I love the chromatic mediate. The chromatic median has so much tension and only just enough to hold us together. Basically, these two chords share one note in common, right? You have in E minor, E, G, B. And in C minor, you have C, E flat, and G. And this common note of G is in both of them. And that's just enough to hold everything together in a song that is otherwise feeling like it's completely, falling apart. This chorus and that harmonic shift plus the drum fill into this distorted rock groove

and the lyric saying like, am I there inside your head? Do you ever cross your mind with this power and distortion? This whole thing I could have never expected, especially after all the delicacy of the first verse. And it's kind of maybe signaling like even though Paul is 83, He's still got an edge. He's the guy who, you know, by some metrics, invented hard rock with his song Helter Skelter in the mid-60s. He's always, even though he's like, oh, happy, you know, the cute one, he's also had that a little bit of darkness, a little bit of edge. And the fact that he's willing to go there on this song and take this like gentle memory and kind of make it a little darker is a referendum on what he's willing to do. as an artist at this point in his career.

He's also very funny. I'm telling you, this guy loves to have fun writing music. He told an audience at Abbey Road Studios when they were doing a listen to this album that, in fact, this girl Jasmine, who he had a crush on when he was a kid, did come by one day and knock on his door, but he was indisposed on the toilet. And she left. And so it never happened. And I really like the way that he has taken this moment of inspiration and turned it into

this fantasy that just is never going to come true. Everyone has that crush that didn't happen. And it can sit with you for many years. And I don't know how Paul's really feeling about it. But I love the idea of almost like a multi-decade long grudge. And I feel like he sings it in a way that is fitting to his voice. Like he has an older voice. It's huskier.

It's a little bit shakier. But it really works in this heavy, hard rock. kind of vibe. I also love this sound because it reminds me of things that I love about Paul McCartney. He has this way of writing songs that are often these sweets that unfold in many

movements with radically different parts. Makes me think of classic Beatles songs like, You never give me your money. Yeah. Or Paul songs like Uncle Albert. Or Paul songs like Uncle Albert. Admiral Halsey Band on the Run

Even the song Live and Let Die Paul's contribution to the James Bond universe shifts between G major and G minor He's always modulating and pushing the boundaries of music and finding new places of musical curiosity

that fits the form of the song You mentioned You never give me your money off Abby Road and I was thinking the same thing. Even that drum fill that takes us from the pre-chorus to the chorus felt like it was taken from that recording. But maybe that's just, you know, part of the experience of listening to a new Paul McCartney album.

You can't help, but compare it to everything he's done in the past. Right. I feel like the album itself wears that on its sleeve. Like it's a deeply nostalgic album. He's not, it's like you said at the beginning. He's not going to, he's not coming out here and being like, Okay, I'm entering my trap era or like, you know, my hyperpop era. He's like he's acknowledging where he is in life.

And he's like looking backwards and thinking about what he's done and what could have been. And every track on this album almost is sort of suffused with that retrospection. 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 O-DU It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. That MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Okay, so if he's getting retrospective, I feel like we should get retrospective. Let's find the Beatles references. There are a lot of tracks here where he is happy to look backwards and give us exactly everything we could possibly want as Beatles fans, Paul McCartney's fans.

Let's listen to the song Mountain Top and see if maybe you're hearing the same references that I'm hearing. Okay, I mean that harpsichord playing these repeat. heated chords. Yeah. That's giving me like being for the benefit of Mr. Kite. Is that right?

I feel like you're thinking something out. No. No, Nate, you're failing me. I was thinking more like kind of like the clavichord sound from for no one. Your day breaks, your mind aches. You find that all their words of kindness

linger on when she no longer needs you. Less the plunky chords, but the harpsichord. sound from Because. So we know that Paul loves to play with the sort of clavacord, harpsichord sound. It's on a number of his solo tracks. But if we get into the subject of the song Mountain Hop, it gets really into 1960s psychedelic nostalgia.

Take me to the mountain top. Show me how the water's drop down into the valley stream below. Neaturn I walk with you. Magic mushrooms sweeping through. So we've got some psychedelic magic mushrooms going through the mountaintop, obviously bringing up ideas of like Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Picture yourself in a boat on a river. Which is, of course, is a song that has an acronym, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, LSD.

It also makes me think about the vocal production on songs like Octopus's Garden. Those tremolo, shaky vocals. are kind of similar to the out of phase. Like, it sounds like Paul's sending his voice through a Leslie rotary speaker like you would send an organ through. Any time I'll walk with you. Magic mushrooms sweeping through. Seen to want to talk and say hello. So we're tripping.

Oh, yeah. And not just on substances. Also on road trips. Okay. Nice segue. Thank you. There's a song called Down South, which is this really lovely refined. about going hitchhiking with George when they were teenagers.

They would sometimes hop in cars, not knowing where they were going to stay, and go down to whales and just hang out and crash in random people's houses and play songs for them. Well, we were traveling on the Chester Road, Lorry driver picking up a load said, where you're heading boys, you need a ride. We said we're heading down south and we jumped inside. A really lovely song about friendship that almost feels like a follow-on to Paul's song of friendship with John, two of us. Yes. Got that same acoustic strumming guitar. Another lovely road-tripping song with your friend. And there's also a song that reminisces about his friendship with John Lennon as well.

It's the next song, We Too, which also feels like a title nod to two of us, but it has a different sound. Last night I dreamed of you and all that we could do can do. Really simple, plain spoken song, but a dream of his old friend. And it features sounds that are reminiscent of John's songs. It makes me think of the melitron. In Strawberry Fields, you hear those sort of sampled flutes on the melitron. And we too, they use the sampled strings on the melitron. We too doesn't just celebrate the friendship of John Lennon.

It also celebrates the way that they made music together. The whole thing was recorded on an old Studer 4 track, the way that the old Beatles songs were recorded. And you can even hear that technology at the end of the song when it all kind of devolves into this tape sound. Wow. Wow. That's the tape rewinding, I'm guessing. Yeah.

So you can go make the next overdub. That's so fun. Exactly. Some of those early tape experiments that they were able to do in the studio as they moved into their mid career as the Beatles, those sounds appear throughout this album. You can hear similar things like on the track Never Know. Those sound eerily similar to a tape loop on the song Tomorrow Never Know. Get it? Never know. Tomorrow never knows. Oh, of course.

What are those seagull sounds? Is it just a laugh? How did they make that? It's something backwards. It's a taped loop of Paul McCartney laughing backwards. No way. That's good. That's amazing. And it sounds like a seagull. There's yet another nod, I think, to a John Lennon solo song later on on this New Paul album on a song called Salesman Saint. So, So here's a salesman

My mother was a saint Working every God given minute And making off to pay the rent So here's a song about his hardworking blue-collar parents Growing up in Liverpool They didn't have much, but they made it work for Paul John Lennon has a beautiful song Working Class Hero

That is the same strumming pattern Also in a minor key, same subject. A working class hero is something to be. Working class hero is something to be. Something about that 3-4, triple feel, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Also makes it feel kind of old, kind of of of the era that his parents might have grown up in. Oh, that's right, because there was the great metric shift that happened in music, right?

Indeed, yes. You know, right around the 1920s, say. music move from being predominantly in triple meter to 4-4 quadruple meter. I think Paul's dad was also a musician. He was in the 20s. He played in like a music hall band, I think. That's right. Paul references that a lot in his music.

He does. There's one more nostalgic song we should call out here. It's the first ever Paul and Ringo duet. What? Paul calls up Ringo. He says, well, you do this track with me. It's kind of like them doing John Cougar Malen Camp's small town. but about Liverpool.

It's the two of them singing together, and Paul's like, hey, well, you do this song with me, Ringo records only the chorus. He's like, no, no, no, I want you to sing the verse. Paul had sung a guide verse, and so they had both of their vocals, and they could go back and forth and back and forth,

so it's the first ever duet between the two of them. It's a sweet little ditty. Not hearing a lot of Ringo in there. No, that's Ringo every other line. Paul even says on an interview with Zane Lowe that his voice in Ringo's has become increasingly similar, and so it's hard to tell that this next line is indeed Ringo Starr. Yep. Okay.

I totally hear it now. Wow. With a little bit of autotune. That's wild. Fair about it. Oh my gosh. I'm feeling a little emotional now listening to this and thinking of the passage of time and the connection that these two musicians have had over the years.

It's powerful. I don't know if the song is my favorite on the album. it's a little cheesy, but Paul writes great cheesy songs. I can't help it be swayed by the story that's being conveyed within it. Wow. It's meaningful. Okay, so there's a lot of nostalgia here for sure. I mean, we haven't mentioned the album title yet, but my understanding is this is like a reference to Paul's childhood as well.

This was a street in Liverpool that he and his friends, maybe, you know, some of the Beatles among them would hang out. And you sense he's sort of excavating his past throughout this album, his childhood. Yeah, the song where the album gets its title, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, that's a lyric from the song, The Days We Left Behind. And it is both a song about the past.

And I think it's also, in many ways, about the present. It's about the reflection on the past and how we feel now about looking back. Looking back at white and black, remind us on. of my past, smoky bars and cheap guitars, but nothing built to last. That's really pretty, really sweet.

The voice a little bit shaky, he's showing his age, but it's age appropriate. It's like he's looking back and it's really almost tearful. Like you can hear him, you're crying here. He sings about looking back at white and black. These are black and white photographs, but he switched them around together. the rhyme. Right. We'll give it to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was really in many ways the motivation for this album was looking back at these old photographs that he found of his youth, pre-Beatles time and all these stories that came up. And he starts this song, not dissimilarly, from the way that

he began the first song we listened to as you lie there, which means it's guitar time, one more time. He has such a distinctive way of playing guitar. You can hear that he's self-taught his strumming, his picking. It doesn't sound like anyone else. Oh, absolutely. So, he opens with this very pretty C major little arpeggio. And then this kind of dissonant, dominant chord to a pseudo-resolution. To, yeah, wow. Right? Like, there's a lot of dissonance. There's that same idea of like the same note is hanging out down in the bass,

creating a feeling of instability, stuckness at the same time. Same idea as we heard on the opening track as I lie there. Yeah. There's a cool continuation. And it feels like Paul is still exploring. Like you said, I keep thinking about what you said at the beginning about how he said that he wants to like discover new things, you know, new people. patterns, new chords, things that surprise him.

Yeah. And I feel like I can hear that on some of these tracks, which is really cool for someone who could easily just not do that, you know, could just mail it in. And everyone would be like, totally. Great, you know, but he's not doing that. He's still searching for new sounds. That's, I don't know, that's really unique. One of the places he finds it is on that road when he was a kid that he would visit frequently.

Boys of Dungeon Lane Along the messy shore Some will feel the pain But so were manned for more Okay, so this all seems very thoughtful And sweet and reflective. However, the song is inspired by the moment When he was a kid and he got mugged

On Dungeon Lane by two older tough kids in his neighborhood. Yes. Oh my God. Two guys come up to one, dungeon lane, near where he grows up. And they're like, give us your watch. So he gives him the watch. And then he tells Zay and Lo at an interview. He's like, well, I actually knew who these guys were.

So I called the place and got my watch back. Paul is so good at taking a place or an idea or a character and giving it life. And so even though that's the point of inspiration, that's not what I hear in the chorus. I feel like this is just a beautiful I feel like this is just such a beautiful reflection and what it is to think back to one's youth but we can't relive those moments we can't regret them, we can't take them back, they are what happened

We met at Fourthland Road and rode a secret code to never be spoken We met at Fourthland Road, wrote a secret code that can never be spoken. That's where he grew up as a kid on Fourthland Road, where John would frequently come over, they would write songs together. And so we're in this just really lovely place of what it means to be, you know, the most important person in the history of rock music still making rock music, arguably. And to me, he's proving that he can still rock, undoubtedly. Yes.

And he can look back on this era and see it from the present moment. Something I appreciate about everything we've heard is they're not tampering with his voice too much. No. There's a little bit of processing, maybe a little bit of autotune, but you really hear the age in his voice. They're not trying to cover it up, which frankly, some other of his peers have done. You know, you can find recordings. I won't name names, but some releases where you're like, is this that singer? Like, it sounds so processed.

You know this is part from the very first word of this album. It's like, oh, there he is in all of his elder statesman glory. I think that's a cool choice. Well, that's why I said at the beginning that I think that if you're making new work as a legacy artist, it's really important to actually be who you are, speak from the place of wisdom that you have. And in this case, yes, he's looking back. Some of it musically, nodding to the great past solo hits of his own, Beatles songs for sure, but lyrically, kind of the earliest phase of life, places that we don't necessarily know and didn't grow up with.

And he's doing it in a way that is honest, sincere, reflective. Truly, I hope that I'm feeling that grateful and amazing about my life at that phase. I definitely imagine when I'm 64 I'll be listening to when I'm 64 Yeah And maybe I'll come back when I'm 83 And listen to this record And see how I'm feeling

I can't remember if I've proclaimed this on the pod before But I do have a theory about Who our analogs are in the Beatles No And I think it's very fitting that you took the lead on producing this episode Because I think of you as the Paul Oh, oh, I'm so honored

You're the Paul You're kind of You're kind of the leader you have the vision, you have the scope, you're a hard worker. Sometimes very corny. Not my, not my words. I love that about Paul. Paul's real.

He's sentimental. And I'm John. Obviously not with any of the talent, to be clear, but more I identify, you know, John has two songs about how much he loves to sleep and how lazy he is. I really identify with that. You know, his habits, I, let's just say. I, you know, I vibe with. It's like, it's a little bit ego and id, you know, like I feel like that's our, that's our,

the chemistry they had worked because they, they complement each other in some ways. And I, if I may be so bold, I like to think our chemistry is, is kind of similar. So, yeah, Paul and John, Charlie and Nate, but I really need to restate this without any of the talent, any of the skill. There is one thing that we have better than Lenin McCartney, though. What could that be? The show has lived longer than the Beatles did as a. band. That's true. And we do kind of have a Lenin-McCartney-style arrangement where even, you know,

if you do more work than I do on a show, we both get credit for it, which I'm very grateful for. Anyway, I think it's an interesting model because that's part of the thing that's so fascinating about the Beatles is like all their unique personalities and how they found ways to gel together. And sometimes not, which is a bridge we'll have to cross at some point. Let's never go solo. Switched on Pops is produced by Rihanna Cruz. Is Rihanna Ringo? Rihanna, oh, man. Rianna's, no, Rianna's like George Martin, for sure.

Wow. Kind of like, you know, moving all the knobs and levers and coming and being like, are you sure you want to do that? Okay, if Rianna's are George Martin, that makes Brandon McFarlane, our engineer, are Jeff Emrick, the engineer of the Beatles. Yes. Lissa's up, our editor. Lissa's got a bit of George.

I feel like Lissa is patiently waiting for us to figure out our shit like George and the Let It Be documentary. So maybe a little bit bright up scene as well. Keep keeping the whole thing together, the manager. I don't know how much longer I can sustain this narrative. We've got also on video, Nick Rips, illustrations, Iris Gottlieb, the music, Zach Thaniari and Jossi Adams of Arc Iris, who are definitely our Billy Preston's. Oh, good deep cut. I like it.

Making us much more musically savvy than we are. No Ringo. No Ringo. We don't need a Ringo equivalent. He's just Ringo. Remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network, a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. I guess all of that is our Apple Records. You can subscribe to New York, NYMag.com.

Our Beatles fan club is social media. At Switched on Pop. Follow us there. Get on our substack. And we'll be back next week with a brand new episode. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Are you one of those media strategy people

clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music.

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