Switched on Pop - Selena Gomez: Bad Liar, Psycho Songwriter
Episode Date: July 13, 2017Selena Gomez's "Bad Liar" stands out on the charts by doing things a little differently: it's a subtle, at times even awkward, summer surprise. Breaking down this pop morsel reveals it has teeth, thou...gh—and not just because it borrows a bass line from the Talking Heads' macabre "Psycho Killer." This is a fun one. Come along for the ride. Featuring: • Selena Gomez - Bad Liar • Julia Michaels - Issues • Selena Gomez - Same Old Love • Talking Heads - Psycho Killer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Welcome to Switch on Pop.
I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.
And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.
Charlie, there's much to discuss on the charts today, but there is one song in particular
that has inveigled its way into our hearts and minds.
That song is Selena Gomez.
as bad liar.
I love this song.
I'm not sure it's invagled me
because I'm not sure I know what that means,
but I'm going to trust you.
Check it out.
You know, Miriam Webster has an app.
You can look up every,
it'll pronounce it for you.
You can save all your words.
That's how, that's, I'm just,
that's a free,
but they're not a sponsor.
I'm just offering that up to the world.
It's a good way to build your vocabulary.
Part of my interest in this song
is that it lies outside of so much
of what we've become familiar with.
Like the stuff we talk about week in, week out on this show,
this song doesn't do a lot of that.
And I think that's what makes it stand out
in almost an inverse sort of way.
If maybe a month ago, we talked about
the sort of maximalist approach of fallout boy
and Charlie XX.
Yeah.
This song is one that grabs our attention
not by its loudness and richness
and fullness, but rather from sort of its subtlety and quietness and conversationality.
That might not be a word, actually, so.
One point for me.
I totally agree with you.
It's funny.
The song is, on one hand, it's incredibly catchy, but you're right.
It doesn't seem to do any of the things that we suggest make a great pop song
and what we've discussed and switch on pop in the past.
why I think it's so successful because in terms of the music that we've just been describing and the
message of the song, they work very well in tandem together. Lyrically, the song projects a sort of
innocence and immediacy and even awkwardness of falling for someone, of developing a crush on someone.
And musically, it does these subtle things to support that feeling. And as listeners, it puts us in that
feeling. So we are experiencing that feeling of falling, of getting a crush of not being able to
get someone out of your head. Okay, so cool. How does it do this? Let's start with the first verse,
because so much goes down here. Let's just press play and listen to the first verse of
Selena Gomez's bad liar. I was walking down the street the other day trying to distract myself,
but then I see your face. I wait.
That's someone else I'm trying to play a goy, trying to make it disappear.
But just like the battle of Troy, there's nothing to settle here.
So what stands out here, Charlie?
Because, again, we said from the beginning the song is a little different.
What, in terms of the lyrics here, what stands out for you?
Well, the first line is I was walking down the street the other day.
So that's kind of like almost like an old blues reference.
I was walking down the street the other day.
I know what you mean
That seems like kind of one of these
Almost stock phrases
That you can't trace to any one person or song
But it's just like in the ether
Part of the earth almost
But then she totally deflects it in the next lines
Right
Walking down the street the other day
Trying to distract myself
But then I see your face
Oh wait that's someone else
I was walking down the street the other day
Trying to distract myself
But then I see your face
Oh wait that's something
And just in that quatrain, we have so much going on that is different from so many pop songs
because it's very, it's sort of stream of consciousness.
Yeah.
It almost sound, I mean, obviously this is a carefully composed and performed song, but the feeling
that Selena Gomez gives us here is that like it's just all happening at, and we're just
hearing it straight from her mouth.
You know what I like about that?
It almost actually has the quality of literally walking down the street.
Just things are happening all around you.
You can't predict them.
And yes.
And it has that too, because.
it's awkward and it's funny.
Yeah.
Which is not something we hear in a lot of pop songs, which are supposed to be very
self-assured, very knowing, very in control, and often very serious.
This is kind of uncomfortable and humorous.
And I think, again, in being the inverse of so much of what's out there kind of creates
its own niche for itself.
Oh, lovely.
Okay.
I like that.
And then we go on through the verse into the, uh,
the next set of lyrics and
Selena Gomez sings
trying to play it coy, trying to
make it disappear, but just like
the Battle of Troy, there's nothing
subtle here.
But just like the Battle of Troy,
there's nothing subtle here.
How about that Iliad reference?
Right.
And then we get another moment that's like,
wait, is this a top 20 pop song?
Or is this like a high school
English paper?
because why, like, that is not something you'd expect to hear.
The line itself is almost like a Trojan horse.
What is this doing here?
How did it end up?
What is it doing in this song?
It sneaks up on you.
That's right.
And then, you know, another thing about these lyrics, and we're still in the verse here.
We haven't even gotten past.
This song uses vocabulary that is so rare to encounter.
Towards the end of the verse, we have the line.
call me an amenity, which is just a...
I like that.
It's a surprising word to encounter in a pop song.
In my room, there's a king-size space bigger than it used to be.
If you want, you can rent that place.
Call me an amenity.
And it's kind of in the context of in my room there's a king-sized space, bigger than it used to be.
If you want, you can rent that place.
Call me an amenity.
Wow.
So that's like another kind of funny line.
Like, just take this room and I'll be a perk or sort of.
Like, that's a very convoluted metaphor, but it works for me.
She also rhymes used to be with amenity.
That's a really creative rhyme scheme.
Yeah, three syllable words, man.
You can use them in a pop song.
Speaking of which, we get to the pre-chorus, ooh, you're taking up a fraction of my mind.
Ooh, every time I watch you, Charlie.
Serpentine.
Oh.
Let's just pause for a moment to appreciate.
the melodious grandeur of the word serpentine.
Wow.
You know, I'm noticing now, we opened up with walking down the street the other day.
So first we get like this blues reference, right?
And then all of a sudden we're getting these almost mythological references of Troy, kings and snakes.
Whoa, that's true.
Yeah.
And again, I think this brings us back to the sort of awkwardness of this song in a way.
And I say that in a good way, not in a bad way, because again, that caption.
that captures the emotional terrain of like of developing a crush of falling for someone it is awkward
and it has like this mythological scale sometimes right just like it it takes over your entire being
oh absolutely and let me assure you charlie that every crush i developed and then acted on was
mythologically awkward as in awkward and mythical proportions so the music itself reinforces this
sort of awkwardness.
Really? Okay. Tell me about it.
Try and follow me here because I think it's a really subtle thing, but worth highlighting.
Because I think it gives this first verse a lot of its sort of nervous stream of consciousness
energy.
There's a kind of temporal dissonance between what the melody does and what the harmony does.
Oh.
Let's just focus on the harmony for a second.
And harmonically, this song is pretty,
simple it's actually just moving between two chords one lower chord the first chord we get
which is a flat and then you can hear when it it actually moves up everything is is
the same as in the baseline is doing the same exact thing but it just moves up about four notes
to d flat and then it moves back down and we can hear that change from this this one chord
A-flat up to this
4-chord D-flat and back down.
The melody, however, doesn't quite move at the same time
that the chords do.
The vocal melody actually moves a little bit earlier.
Like the bass line, the melody is basically just two different phrases.
We have the first phrase that goes,
da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
And then we have the second phrase that goes,
Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da and the first phrase is tied to that a flat major chord da da da that's part of that a flat tonality and then the second phrase
especially because that second note da da da da da da is d flat that's the root note of the chord yeah that's tied to that
that d flat chord so it makes sense that when the bass line is doing it's a flat thing the melody goes
And then when it goes up to D flat, the melody changes with it and goes,
da da da da da da da da da da da.
But that's not what happens.
What happens is that Selena Gomez sings the A flat melody.
I was walking down the street the other day trying to distract myself.
And then on the line, await that's someone else.
So this is before the harmony has moved to D flat.
She moves to the D flat melody.
So she's kind of anticipating where the chords are going to go.
She sings it before the chords get there.
She sings it before the chords get there.
So she's like almost in a rush or she's moving faster than the harmony can allow.
It's like almost giving us a subtle signal that her brain is whirring so fast that it's going faster than even.
the harmony can keep up with.
That's brilliant because the chorus is,
I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying,
I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying not to think about you.
Oh, I'm trying.
And yet, every time that she's trying not to think about the other person,
she's, like, anticipating and rushing and getting,
and landing on that person whether or not she wants to.
She can't distract herself.
Yes, yes, it's like a literal, a literal depiction of a mind racing.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
And then you can hear the harmony.
He's like, oh, wait, we know where we're coming.
It's getting to deep light, chill out.
But she's already there.
Cool.
I love that.
I was walking down the street the other day, trying to distract myself.
But then I see a face.
Oh, wait, that's someone else.
I'm trying to.
And then I think there's one other sort of more macro element that makes us feel this sense of a sort of building crush,
despite her efforts, as you point out, that she's trying and trying to trying to keep it together.
She can't help it.
That's done in a subtle way that the song continually adds elements.
So we don't hear the same exact thing as the song progresses.
We hear these different musical elements being added in, new drum patterns, new percussion sounds, new sound effects.
And in the second verse, we have Selena Gomez singing in all these kind of different voices.
Yeah.
What can possibly happen next?
Can we focus on the love?
Pay my kids.
I don't know exactly how to interpret this, but part of me is like we're going inside her unconsciousness or something.
And we're exploring all these emotions she's feeling, which again, like, cannot be contained and are sort of awkward.
And we hear her voice start as her normal voice.
and then on the line
what could possibly happen next
she's her voice is doubled by this really
low voice
I don't know how to
what I make of it but it's definitely
awkward again to come back to that word
and then immediately after that she goes
can we focus on the love
and then her voice is this
distorted kind of distant sound
can we focus on love
It's out of focus.
Yes.
Oh, Charles.
Sorry, I just have to recover from that brilliant insight.
Yes.
And now in this verse, so what's happened is that we've built up from the first verse.
We've added more things.
This crush is growing to spite her best efforts to contain it.
And we're gaining access to more of her stream of consciousness,
almost her multiple personalities.
All of this, which is capped off.
by one of my favorite moments in the song, the little drum fill at the end of this second verse that takes us into the pre-chorus to refresh your memory. Here's what that sounds like.
What could possibly happen next? Can we focus on the love? Pay my kids across your chest.
Frily I'll be the broadshund. Ooh. Spicey. I saw yes. Just a little less than the half a measure drum fill. But you didn't hear it the first time and all the
sudden there it is sort of supporting the idea that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot tamp
down these emotions. I like how you get into these weird vocal transformations because you pointed
out at the very beginning that this song stands out on the charts partially for it being quiet,
more reserve, you know, her vocal sounds almost hushed, right? And then I think to make it just a little
bit poppy. It uses some of those sort of more electronic music production techniques to just grab
your ear and say, hey, I'm still in that realm of pop music. But she's using it not just to sound
alike, but rather to emphasize the quality that she's feeling within her song. It's really
creative. Yes. And this is a nice segue to my final thought here, which is we've talked about the
sort of uniqueness of this song.
And yet it might also bear a strong similarity to another track that we've covered recently.
What's that?
Which would be issues by Julia Michaels, which similarly begins with a very sparse texture.
And slowly builds and offers a very vulnerable kind of narrator.
And at this point, would it surprise you at all?
to hear that this song was co-written by none other than Julia Michaels and her stalwart writing partner, Justin Tranter.
Get out of here.
That's amazing.
I cannot.
She has become the zealig of the show recently.
Yeah.
She is everywhere, everywhere you look, extraordinary.
Interesting.
And she's making a unique sound for herself because this doesn't sound like anything else on the charts other than maybe her other songs.
She's all far.
Yes, I'm a bad liar.
Charles, I've just laid out my thoughts on this.
What's the, what's an anti-banger?
I don't know what, what's this.
We'll come up with that.
Hush pop.
This hush-pop summer hit.
I'm desperately curious to hear your take on it.
Well, I like how you frame this as unlike much of what we're hearing in popular music.
And it's brilliance as the way that it does everything.
slightly differently or even extremely differently.
However, the song is based on, well, almost a cover.
It's sampling the talking heads, psycho killer, like their most famous song.
And yet, it stands completely apart from the cover, which is its source material.
This is the brilliance of the song, and we're going to figure this out how it does it in the second half.
Whoa, okay.
See you there.
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Nate, you know I love pop songs,
which are their own totally whole, unique, creative output.
And I think that Bad Liar, as we discussed in the first half,
really does frame itself
as its own kind of song.
And yet, it's based off
of a sample.
The first thing that we hear in the song
is the Talking Heads
Psycho-Killer bass line
that drives the entire song.
And yet, when I first heard
Bad Liar,
I had no idea that it was based on this sample.
And I think what makes this
track that much more brilliant
is that not only does it stand apart
from the charts, but it is kind of
of a cover, cover maybe is a stretch, definitely a sample. And yet, it completely distinguishes itself
from the original material in every single way. So what I want to do is show that psycho killer
and bad liar, despite having the same core baseline and rhythm throughout, are entirely different
songs. Cool. All right. I'm ready. 40 years later, we're getting to the talking head.
Yes. Okay. So, cycle killer, talking heads, one of their biggest tunes. It is in the key of a minor. And it is a weird and tragic sort of song. I don't quite know how to describe what it's about.
By your silence, I hope you're not suggesting that I have any better interpretation because I'm similarly mystified. Similarly, in love with it, but completely.
bewildered by its meaning.
Perhaps that's part of its brilliance.
It's got French phrases.
Strange vocal rhythms, fuffa fahs.
What do you call those?
Deck the Hall.
Yeah, exactly.
Duck the Halls.
Deck the Halls meets Son of Sam.
Oh, boy.
Yes, it is a strange song,
and it is basically the inverse.
of Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter, and Selena Gomez's Bad Liar.
So let's break down how it stands out.
Most obviously, from the start, Psycho Killer is in a minor.
Bad liar takes the same thing, tunes it down one step into a flat.
Yes, it does.
And plays the whole thing in a major tonality.
So we have completely flipped this thing on its head from this sort of dark Psycho Killer.
to a more introspective love song.
Brilliant choice.
They've also slowed down the track a little bit.
It's a few BPM slower.
But I think the thing that stands out most
is the difference in harmony.
Right.
The thing that really distinguishes Psycho Killer
is its chorus.
When it actually moves away from that main riff,
it moves through a different harmonic progression.
It goes from an F to a G,
back to that A minor.
And during that section, the bass actually picks up a different rhythm.
It has a very different feel.
And I think that if you were to be at a party and a remix of Psycho Killer were to go on,
everybody would start singing, not at the verse when they have that, just the bass,
but later on in the chorus.
Selena Gomez's track, Bad Liar, completely gets rid of that harmonic progression of the F to the G to the A minor,
that psycho killer cascassee part
oh yeah yeah totally
instead she turns this song into a blues
in fact totally appropriate we were talking earlier
about how the song opens up with
I was walking down the street the other day
which is a sort of typical blues line
I was walking down the street the other day
starting on the home key the one chord
and then moves up to the four chord
and it kind of just goes back and forth
so it's a shortened blues
but that is a very standard
blues progression.
And she's done the exact same thing, actually,
in her song, Same Old Love,
which we discussed in episode 25.
You can hear the similarity of moving from the home key
up to the four chord back down.
And I think, even though it doesn't go through
the whole 12-bar blues progression,
we can say that it has a blues feel,
I think, by the tonality of the bass
and the sort of just the overall structure.
Do you agree?
I agree. Okay. So we've moved from what is a sort of a rock song with a really tonally unique chorus to actually a much more simplified and older progression, just a very simple blues. That's how it stands out in the harmony. But I want to move and talk about the melody because it does everything that Psycho Killer does, but yet again, basically in the inverse. It stands out by doing everything opposite.
Right. Talking head song starts out with, I can't seem to face up to the facts. That's what David
Byrne is singing. And he is singing one note over and over and over. That note is the home note.
It's an A. Indeed. Sina Gomez starts out somewhat similarly. She is more or less focusing her
entire melody on one note. She says, I was walking down the street the other day. And she, she,
She plays some other notes around it, but primarily it's kind of hitting this one note over and over and over again.
It's not the home note.
It's the third of the chord.
It's a few notes higher than what David Burns sings.
You might say, well, this is completely, this doesn't matter.
This is just random chance.
I don't think it is.
because in the chorus, what happens, David Byrne walks up to that third note and focuses his melody around the third.
And what does Selena Gomez do?
She actually also goes up, but she goes all the way up to the root chord, focusing on that A.
And so she basically, where he has started on the home note in the verse, she uses the home note in the chorus.
The core of these melody is very simple.
It's really kind of one note over and over and over again,
but they flip which note they're using
in the different structures of the song.
That's pretty deep.
So they're really kind of melodically turning the song
sort of inside out.
Yeah, exactly.
Harmonically moving it from minor to major.
Yep.
I mean, I don't, this would,
I'm fine this to be a very compelling analysis so far.
I think the key for me would be like,
whether we knew,
how well
Gomez, Michaels, Tranter,
and company
knew this talking head song.
Like, if they're fans of the talking heads,
if we can trust that they would know this song
backwards and forwards.
Well, I don't have any sort of special insider knowledge,
but I think by the way that they are
composing this piece,
we'll see with further references
that these are actually,
I believe,
either intentional or like deep subcontinent.
choices. Do you have any insider knowledge? I feel I think I read somewhere in researching this that
they they were big talking heads buffs and that was part of the reason they came up with this
idea of using the psycho killer baseline. Oh, okay. Great. You read somewhere. That's a really
well fact check, Nate. Here we go. I can quote, oh, I can have a quote here. Okay, ready? Okay. Quote.
Selena and Julia are talking heads obsessed, end quote.
What's your source?
That's Justin Tranter in the pages of variety.
Okay, great.
Okay, they're great.
They're fans.
Well, that makes a ton of sense because on top of doing things in the inverse, they even,
they make intentional references, I think, to each other.
And we can hear this in the way in which their vocals soar up.
They make it sort of an interesting, similar choice.
however they do it again in different places
in Psycho Killer at the end of his chorus
he does this
oh
ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay
right
uh yeah wow way to commit
absolutely
maybe slightly more beautifully
in a higher key
selina in her song actually does
something similar
and she however does it in her pre-chorus
she doesn't do it at the end of the chorus
She does it earlier, and she does this rising motion when she sings, oh, you're taking up a fraction of my mind.
I'm not going to try to sing that one, because I'm going to really butcher it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you're saying that's kind of the melodic peak of the Gomez song is in the pre-chorus, whereas in the talking head song, it's in the chorus.
Right.
And again, these songs are both building off of what is basically.
fundamentally a one-note melody in the verse. And so there has to be at some moment, some rising
tension, and they both use this sort of shooting up the scale. They just do it in different places.
And so for me, I feel as though if I were a deep talking heads fan, I listened to this song a lot,
and I was thinking, how could I both reference it and adapt it? I would want to have that, ooh,
I, I, yeah, yeah, I kind of feel, but I wouldn't want to put it in the same place because it would be too
on the nose. So I think that's why they probably did something like this in building the melody up
into the pre-chorus. So we've established that they differentiate themselves by putting the song
on a different key, different BPM, different harmonies, different melodies. I think the most important
way that Bad Liar is entirely its own track is in its rhythmic variation. Okay, take me. I want to hear
what you have to say, please. Okay, so the Talking Heads version is a,
downbeat rock song.
The bass establishes it.
Oh, yeah.
Later on, the kick drum comes in, and it's all just downbeat.
Then the guitar follows, just chunking on, right, on those down beats, right?
Right, this makes sense.
Talking has its roots in punk music in its early incarnations, right?
And so they are just playing a chugging along downbeat track.
Totally.
Boom, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.
Yep, I hear that.
It's a headbanger.
Totally, yeah.
Bad liar is a hip swire, because it is all about syncopation.
Though the song uses that bass to establish a dot, da, da, downbeat,
immediately the song opens up with syncopation, notes that are not on the downbeats.
And we can hear this in the clap.
Yeah.
Oh, wow, which comes in at the very first.
line we have that totally offbeat clap interesting we also hear it the very beginning in her vocals
when she says i was walking down the street the other day the words down street and other which are
emphasized are all on offbeats i was walking down the street the other day trying to distract myself
but then i see your face yes i'm sorry i had to just do that mentally in my head and confirm
that what you say is true and that's absolutely right.
If the pulse is here,
bum, bum, bum, bum,
walking down the street the other day.
Yeah, none of those line up.
That's really interesting.
A simpler way of writing, it could have been,
I was walking down the street the other day.
But instead, I was walking down the street the other day.
Right, yeah, yeah.
It's a very cool way of singing.
And what this is effectively doing
is every rhythmic element in the story,
song is basically filling a different placement in in the meter, right? So if you look at,
if you were to look at where every hit is landing, they are, they are filling different spaces.
And it just makes you want to move. Yeah. You know what it makes me want to do,
honestly? What's that? It's walk down the street. Yeah. Swann your hips. This is like,
this is Ondante, man. This is walking music. This is like, don't, don't, dumb. It's not, I wouldn't say
Psycho Killer is, but, um,
Psycho Killer makes you want to like stomp down the street. This makes you want to sway down
this street. Yeah, it's like you, yeah, you can't, or I, I, I, I, I, say, or I would
maybe do a little kind of like bounce move or something, but yeah, totally. A saunter, if you
will. Yeah. Well, and in the first half, you were talking about how this song just builds by adding
new elements. As those new elements come in, they enter with increasing syncopation. Uh, so about a
minute into the song when we get to the chorus, we get a kick drum. And that kick drum, again,
is filling a bunch of different spaces that nothing else is really filling, emphasizing a new
rhythm, which is not that downbeat held by the bass. So basically, all of our expectations
that were set up by the Talking Heads sample, which is a four on the floor, rock your
head all in the downbeat.
All of those expectations
set up from the very start are
thrown out the window as the song
progresses and we get more rhythmic
variation and all of these
strange elements that want
us to saunter, not to
head bang. I think it's
just really brilliant variation
on a song and makes
bad liar its own
thing very separate from the original
material. Right. Yeah.
I love that. It's
it's sort of grown from the same seed as psycho killer in the sense that they both emerge from
this baseline but from there from that seed they go in such different directions while bad liar
continues to make these elaborate references to its original source material that's really cool
and i think we can actually identify the seed of an idea of bringing more sycopation into the song
by looking back at talking heads
in Psycho Killer,
the famous moment in which
David Burns sings
Fuffa Fafafha,
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
What musical idea is happening there?
We have vocalese
as in not singing actual lyrics but just
Yes.
You know sounds.
Dund dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun
Uh, um, it's kind of a bluesy line in itself.
Do do do do do do do do do.
And yet I sense you're looking for something else.
Tell me, tell me what you, what you isolate there.
Do you hear rhythmic displacement?
Yes, I do because it goes, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa,
wait.
The emphasis of the fa's changes.
Oh, right.
So, yes.
So it starts on, the first one is on the second beat of the measure.
and then it's on the
the first beat of the second measure.
Exactly. So he emphasizes
fa f f f f f fah
in the first time it lands on the second beat
the second time it lands on the first beat.
You call that rhythmic displacement, right?
Mm-hmm.
Well, let's go to the chorus of Bad Liar.
What do you hear here here?
Oh, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying.
I'm trying, I'm trying. I'm trying.
I hear rhythmic displacement.
Oh, look at that.
Yes.
Look at that.
Trying.
So I'm trying is how many syllables?
That would be three syllables.
That's three syllables.
But she's singing in groups of four, right?
Right.
Yes.
Oh, interesting.
And so what ends up happening is where she emphasizes try changes every time she sings it
because she's singing basically eighth notes here, but she's singing groups of three over eight.
And so what ends up happening mathematically is that when she sings try, it changes where it lands on each beat.
The first time, it's on the downbeat.
The second time, it's on the offbeat of two.
And on the third time, it's on the four.
So try keeps moving.
That's super cool.
Wow.
Yeah.
And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about in the first half of a sort of like a,
certain disorder or something in the music or like things not lining up correctly. Totally. And that
mirroring her sort of mental state of like nervous excitement. Exactly. If she's really trying to
not pay attention to this crush, she's not doing a very good job of it because every time that
she tries, her trying falls on these different beats and it feels like she's fumbling.
Dig it. I dig it deeply, man. That's good stuff. Isn't that really cool songwriting to both borrow the
idea of rhythmic displacement from the chorus, the fa-fah-faz of Psycho-Killer, to bring it into the chorus
of Bad Liar. And yet, the reference perfectly matches the mental state, the whole idea of the song
of Bad Liar. You know, at this point, I want to offer another little bit of my research for
this song, because I wonder if you're curious what David Byrne himself thought of Bad Liar.
Oh, I so badly want to know. Well, I have the tweet right in front of it.
me get ready for this incredible comment from david burn quote i really like the song dot dot dot and her performance
too end quote well he's not ever known to be a very enthusiastic person i mean i think that's about
all you can ask for if you that's the i think that's the equivalent of getting like an oscar that's like
David Byrne is much admired by, I think, I believe the two of us. I think his book,
How Music Works is like switched on pop times a thousand, really brilliant sort of philosopher
about music. So I think that's a definitely really kind review. Indeed. So wow, Charlie,
there's probably more to say about bad liar, but we've already extracted a staggering
amount out of this little pop song. Still, if there's more, there's more.
more you hear in Selena Gomez's later. Please tweet us, write us. Let us know what you think about
her latest. And I think she has new music coming soon. So I'll have to be on the lookout for that as well.
Yeah, just what a cool tune. I'm too, I'm curious about all the way our listeners hear it being both
its own thing and a really creative interpretation of the reference. I'd love to hear what people
have to think. So where can they find us again? That would be at Switched on Pop for
the Twitter. Switched on Pop for the Facebook. You can email us at contact at switchdownpop.com.
And that's about it. Cool. You know, I also wonder now, like, I want to write a song using this
baseline, too, and do something completely different with it. Ooh, okay, I'll challenge you to that.
I want to hear it. All right. All right. We'll see if I could squeeze that in the next couple
Maybe after a little vacation as we were, I guess we jumped the gun last time around.
We thought we were taking this week off.
We were wrong.
Here we are.
We made a show.
And we are going to take a little bit of a break.
And we're going to be back in about a month.
That's right.
Until then, hit us up at all of the above.
And before we go, many thanks to our stalwart editor, Bill Lance, our killer designer.
Luke Harris.
All of our podcast friends
at the Panoply Network
in which we are a part.
And thanks for listening.
For listening.
