Switched on Pop - Taylor, Adele & Silk Sonic’s broken hearts club (with Brittany Luse)

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

This week we are having a blast feeling really sad. Guest Brittany Luse, cohost of the acclaimed podcast For Colored Nerds, joins Nate and Charlie to dig into this fall's slate of breathtaking breakup albums from Adele, Kacey Musgraves, Summer Walker, and Mitski. Some have been calling this confluence of releases, "sad girl autumn," but the melancholy moment goes beyond gender, with even Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak's leaning into the lachrymose on their album An Evening With Silk Sonic. On top of all this, Taylor Swift has stormed the charts with her re-recording of her hit album Red and the ten-minute version of fan-favorite breakup song "All Too Well." We take the opportunity to mine this gold rush of emotions and diagnose every type of heartbreak on the radio dial. Songs discussed: Taylor Swift - All Too Well (Taylor's Version) Summer Walker - Throw it Away Silk Sonic - Put On a Smile Adele - Easy On Me Mitski - The Only Heartbreaker Kacey Musgraves - Justified More Listen to Brittany's podcast For Colored Nerds Watch Guy Winch's talk How To Fix a Broken Heart Weep along to our playlist of breakup albums Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from the first instant and he has aweller. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it today and let you move over for susentia. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

And we're incredibly happy to be joined by Brittany Luce, who is a writer and editor. and also the co-hosts of the acclaimed podcast for color nerds. Welcome, Brittany. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. And it's for a really fun episode because, well, sad episode?

I don't know. How should I frame it? This fall, there has been a confluence of mega breakup records from Casey Musgraves, Lana Del Rey, Summer Walker, Adele, Mitzky. I'd even throw Bruno Mars and Anderson-Pock's Supergroup Silk Sonic into the mix. And of course, Taylor Swift has stormed the press with her re-recording of her hit album Red and the 10-minute version of the fan favorite song all too well. Folks have been calling this confluence of releases Sad Girl Autumn.

Brittany, could you help out my internet illiterate colleague over here and help us explain this meme? Please. Sure, sure. So Sad Girl Autumn is like a play on the phrase popularized by Megan the Stallion, Hot Girl Summer. I think that obviously sad girl autumn is kind of encapsulating this like fresh round of breakup records and heartbreak records that have been released by so many major artists this fall. But I think it also like on a more emotional real world level kind of speaks to the disappointment of an unfulfilled hot girl summer. I think that like this past summer 2021 is what many people, at least in the United States, thought of as, you know, a great reopening. And I think for a variety of reasons, that just didn't pan out for everybody the way that they hoped.

And so I think that it's kind of interesting that there's like this musical like sad girl autumn that is kind of hitting upon like a real sad girl autumn that I think a lot of us are feeling in real life. I wish I had like a happier explanation for it. But I think that's just the truth. That's what I'm saying. I love this topic because the music is great. but yeah, the subject is super real. Dr. Guy Wynch, the author of How to Fix a Broken Heart, put it especially well in his widely viewed TED Talk.

Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain. Our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. And he has a European accent, so I automatically assume what he's saying is accurate. It's giving Freud. For real, though, Dr. Widge explains that heartbreak registers his actual physical pain and can even mimic withdrawal symptoms.

It sucks. But he does offer a way out. In his writing, he says it's especially important not to ruminate or idealize past lovers. If you want to fix a broken heart, the proven methods are one, to distract yourself. two, to reframe the past relationship, like see it for what it really was. And three, the most effective is negative reappraisal. Like, just reframe your past lover in a negative way. It actually helps.

And what I want to do together is maybe create our own very non-medical, totally subjective diagnoses of these works, not the singers, but the songs, to think about how are they expressing heartbreak and are they actually helping us move on? I am so down. I love this. Okay. So let's begin with Taylor Swift's All Too Well. It's the re-recording of her album Red, right?

She's trying to regain all of the master rights to all of her recordings, which were sold without her permission. It's her second re-recorded album. It's the crossover record that I think is what made me fall in love with Taylor. And the song All Too Well has created immense buzz because she has put out this 10-minute version of the song. I don't know about you all, but I'm hearing a lot of both rumination but also negative reappraisal. I'm curious for you, Brittany. How does this song register heartbreak for you? I am not the most knowledgeable Taylor Swift listener, but I had actually never heard this song before this week to prepare for this episode.

And it was interesting because I decided to listen to them in chronological order. I listened to the first version that she did back when she was much younger, I think like 22 or 21 or something. like that when Red originally came out. And then I listened to like the her new version, 10 minute version. I also watched the short film. Way to do your homework, Brittany. Oh, yeah. I did my homework. And the lyrics I think obviously speak to looking back. You know, she says, I remember it all too well. Like it's something that happened a long time ago. But the immediacy of the feelings still feels fresh, it sounds like, to Taylor. But what's interesting about the most recent recording Taylor's version, especially the 10 minute version,

is that the arrangement and the way in which she sings it, I love like the idea of her being in her 30s now and thinking about the relationship completely differently. There's sort of like the reappraisal that you need to do in the aftermath of a breakup. But like what she's doing with this most recent version is like a reappraisal of the feelings that she had at in her, back in her early 20s or in her late teens.

Because the whole thing is that she was dating like Jake Gyllenhaal, right? That's the that's the prevailing narrative. She was dating Jake Gyllenhaal who's far too old to be dating her at that point in time. And it was a mismatch. I think they probably, it sounds like from what I could see on the internet, they dated for like maybe six to eight weeks, which in her defense at that age, big deal. But it's, I don't know, I like listening to the newest version because it's imbued with so much more maturity. I think the lyrics are nice. The melody is pretty.

The performance is nice. but the newest version really blew me away with just all of the layers of emotional reflection that were baked in. Hearing your description of it, Brittany, makes me think about how much detail there is in these lyrics. That's one of the things that really strikes me, the specificity of the memory and the imagery. Like in the clip we just heard, you know, dancing in the refrigerator light, dancing in the glow of the refrigerator life. Like that kind of detail belies the fact that it was such a short relationship and communicate something, I think, intrinsic about heartbreak. That doesn't really matter, you know, how long you were with someone. Yeah.

That feeling of loss is going to be just as acute. Yeah. Nate, I also picked up on the imagery that Swift uses on the song. And it's something that when I first heard the record, the red scarf narrative for me was, such a kicker. It's a very sort of country style where we actually follow an entire story, but it's being done with an inanimate object, right? So at the beginning of the song, we hear about the red scarf. I walk to the door with you. The air was cold, but something about it felt like home.

somehow and I Left in my scarf there It's your sister's house And you still got it in your drawer Even now That could be a throwaway line Because then we go through the entire narrative The relationship and a lot of breakup

So many great metaphors The crumpled up piece of paper It's like she's a song that she wrote That she threw out Beautiful And yet we come back All the way around to the Red Scarfax that should have just been a passing detail

and in fact, it's the punchline to the whole song. And that's sort of the arc of the original song. But, Brittany, to your point, that there's a maturity in this version, we get a whole new section that isn't in the original, this outro, that in her short film

shifts time from the past into the present. And so we get to hear all of Taylor's current thoughts. All the angsty drums fade out. And I was never good at telling jokes, but the punchline goes, I'll get older, but sure lovers stay my age. The production even feels more contemporary. Yes. My skin and bones. I'm a soldier who's returning half her.

And then there's this extremely long fade out of choruses of Taylor Swift. Musically, I feel like we're getting that sense of having moved on in that it actually sounds more like her current records, folklore and Evermore, in the production. It's that tame acoustic sound with some synthetic things, voice-centered, very confident, very minimalist kind of production. One of the things that I felt with the additional lyrics and also the change in production with this new song, it also reminded to be a lot of her newer albums. it now seems very apparent that she is very hesitant to talk about her relationships and her music, or her central romantic relationship now with Joe Alwin, her boyfriend a few years. So she's kind of moved toward basically almost singing like these songs that are always about, like they're typically about like fictional situations or imagined situations or, you know.

Historic situations. Exactly. Or historic situations. They're not necessarily centered around her. What's interesting is that like, I think that when I've, listened to her earliest version, I didn't like that version because I felt like I was listening to a child talking about child problems. I was like, girl, I'm 34. I don't want to hear about this. It reminded me, I think, of a common critique of Taylor's Social Music for maybe people who haven't

listened to it as much. Maybe I didn't like the delivery of the song from 2012, but her singing it at the age she is now with a similar distance that you experience when listening to the songs from folklore Evermore when she's singing about these imagined situations, it gave me a similar thrill. So pulling back, how do we want to diagnose? What kind of heartbreak is this song representing? Can we label it something? I haven't experienced heartbreak in like seven years.

Congratulations. It hurts. Yeah, I remember it's sucking really bad. But I haven't experienced romantic heartbreak, I should say, in like, in like, going on seven years. But I still sometimes get like a pang of memory or remembrance of like a heartbreak that I felt when I was much younger. And I don't know.

Maybe I'll have a new life experience and I don't know, like a memory of a conversation I had from seven or eight years ago comes back. And it stings fresh in a weird way. It's like a walk down like a really thorny memory lane that I think even if you have an experience heartbreak recently, it's the kind I think. Anybody, even if you're in a happy relationship now, anybody can call back to it. It's like heartbreak in the rear view. Oh, I love that.

Heartbreak in the rear view. Hindsight heartbreak. Hindsight heartbreak, actually. Hindsight heartbreak. I like it. All right. So we got hindsight heartbreak. Moving on to our next song.

We've got Summer Walkers throw it away. Summer Walker is a R&B singer who just tied Taylor Swift for, a billboard record of having 18 songs on the Hot 100 at the same time from her album still over it. Let's listen to the song Throw It Away. What people can't see right now is that Nate is doing his stank face. Nate, what are you feeling? When I listen to this song, I'm aware that the lyrics are communicating a certain degree of grief and resignation. But there is something about this beat and the instrumentation that I cannot help just like rocking my whole body. This is so true.

I mean, we'll have to diagnose it together, but this is clearly going to represent a different breed of heartbreak this song. Absolutely. I mean, we've got electric pianos, 808 drums, big thick bass. This sounds more like baby making music than it does like heartbreak music. It's kind of confusing. Brittany, how did it register for you? It is totally confusing.

I felt like this song, like especially the lyrics, they felt so much like she's singing to her lover, but she's also kind of, I think, saying it just as much for herself, if that makes sense. You know, like when you break up with somebody and you know you want to go back, like what the guy was saying, you feel it in your spirit. Like, it's basically like withdrawal symptoms. And you kind of have to sometimes have a, well, sometimes we like give in, right? Sometimes I think we give in.

But in especially egregious situations, or at least when we have our witsombs. about ourselves. You kind of want to have a just a combo with yourself and be like, don't do it. This person does not care about you. This person does not want you. I feel like what we're hearing in the song is like it's groovy, but she's also like basically don't forget. Like I'm saying to you, how are you going to throw this away? I'm mad. She says like she'd been taking on all this baggage. Like this person had her thinking that she was average. It sounds like this is a person who is either just coming to the realization that like the love she thought was going to be fine is just not going to work or also a person who is turning that question on her lover but also like kind of

saying for herself like we're not going to go back through that door that sounds a lot like negative reappraisal. Did I get that right Charlie? Yes. But it's happening at a moment of confusion I think as Brittany put it. It's like this is the moment of realization to a certain degree. And I think we can hear that reflected in the music because the music is romantic. This is very sexy R&B music. It's like the music is still in the relationship, but the lyric is moving on. And I really like that tension. So perfectly put. Okay. So what kind of heartbreak song is this for us?

It's kind of on the fence to me. It's kind of like on the fence heartbreak. Like maybe emotionally, summer's done. Basically, maybe we're going to go back for seconds or thirds. But emotionally, she's out the door. Because like you said, the lyrics are saying one thing, but the music is in a different place. Right. Very different place in time. So we've had hindsight heartbreak. Now we have on the fence heartbreak. Halfway Heartbreak.

Halfway Heartbreak. Look, I love it. Nate's always going to find some alliteration for us. Yes. Our next song takes a very different spin on Heartbreak. It's coming from Silk Sonic, right? The Super Group of Bruno Mars and Anderson Park. They have a dedicated vintage 70s soul sound.

Nine months ago, they released Leave the Door Open, which we broke down extensively on the show when it was released. Their record, an evening with Silk Sonic introduced by Funk Hero Bootsie Collins, leads us through all kinds of parts of romance, including heartbreak on their song, Put on a Smile. Oh boy. Bruno Mars needs to do some serious reframing, I think. Say more, Nate.

Please. Forgive me if I'm misquoting Dr. Wynch, but I remember that being the first of his heartbreak cures, right? Reframing the relationship. Did I get that right? Yeah. This guy's ruminating. Yeah. Here's a heartbreak song where the climactic lyric is the only thing worth smiling for is you. Like, this dude needs to reframe his priorities a little bit. And I mean, at the same time, I can't help but be swept away by the vulnerability and the emotion here. I find it very relatable. Oh, I'm actually glad you bring up the vulnerability and the emotion here. I mean, I think that like something that you hear in the style of music is like calling back to like a lot of those like 60s and 70s R&B groups. Specifically, this song made me think of two songs by The Miracles, which is a motown group fronted by Smokey Robinson, who I adore, tracks of my tears and tears of a clown.

The idea that like they're like you're putting, you're trying to put on a brave face. but literally inside you feel like dying, which is something that comes up in this song. I guess like different than the Summer Walker song. Like the style of music and the lyrics are perfectly in step to me with this. Like obviously it has a little bit of that upbeat showmanship angle that feels kind of old school in a James Brown way. So it's not like necessarily a song that you would cry to,

but it does have that sort of old school vulnerability, that old school polish. And those really dramatic old school lyrics, which I think, you know, many people have said is often missing from the male R&B singers of today. There's a lot of focus on maybe relationships, but more in the vein of like sex and getting the woman to submit to you. But like this is pretty much like, I need you to live. And like, I love that. That, if you want to get my attention,

I need you to live, that's working for me. Yeah. Musically, one of the things that I'm hearing that they're doing is it almost feels like you're getting some condolences from a friend because they're telling us to put on a smile. And there's a way in which the harmonies

after each time they say put on a smile, they look like an actual physical smile. they ascend like a smile. Whoa, Chuck. Right? It's like he's trying to fight back those tears, but there's this call and response where the backup singers are like,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Put on a smile. And then put on a smile. Like, it's actually curving upwards as they sing those lyrics. That's pretty hip, Charles. That is. And it's only better that it moves

into a very 70s kind of musical move. it modulates up a step almost as if to elevate your mood. We're smiling now, right? It's like, it's kind of what Guy Wynch was saying about the emotional confusion that we feel in heartbreak, that somehow it almost feels like the music is smiling just a little bit. It's like it's cheering us up even when it's stuck in the past. It's feeling both emotions at the same time. You know, now that you bring up the music and I listen to that last clip a little bit harder,

I noticed the bass and just how much the bass is doing in this song and how much energy it kind of gives it. Like you said, like we were all smiling, listening to it. I think that some of that is coming from the energetic instrumentation. Very much so. Okay, so now that we're all smiling through heartbreak, how are we going to diagnose this one? What do we call on this kind of heartbreak? I don't know, Nate, I want to go with you because, like, you're alliteration right now is two and no. Don't fail us now.

Don't fail us. Smiling through tears, heartbreak. Wow. Okay, not the response I was hoping for it. Let me get, you want an alliteration. Okay, okay, I can, I can deliver. It's a, uh, you're about to make this out running dictionary. It's a hung up, hung up on you, heartbreak. All right. There we go. You did it. That's it. That's it. Dawn. We're going to run out of each words pretty soon. With that, let's take a short break. When we come back, we're going to listen to my favorite picks. of heartbreak anthems. See you on the other side. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay.

Ready? Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us.

New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. We have been tasting a sample platter of heartbreak in the first. half of the episode digging into a little bit of hindsight heartbreak on Taylor Swift's all too well, some halfway heartbreak on summer walkers throw it away, and some hung up on you heartbreak in Silksonics put on a smile. Charlie, what's next? What other flavors of heartbreak are we going to try? Well, I want to actually kind of flip the script here because Mitzky, indie songwriter, who's known for combining indie songwriter sounds with a pop sensibility. has this new record called the only heartbreaker that takes on heartbreak from a different angle.

Brittany, when you heard this Mitzki song, The Only Heartbreaker, what was your response? I just loved it. It gave me everything that I want for Mitzky, which is like speaking directly to my loneliness. And it's kind of interesting because her voice has kind of like an echoy vibe on a lot of the song. Like she's the only heartbreaker. I'm like, girl, yeah, you are in a room by yourself with no furniture. and no carpet. And then on the other hand, also too, self-flagellating lyrics. And that's why I come to Mitski for. Loneliness and self-flagellating lyrics. My girl's back and I'm so happy.

There's something so inventive and surprising about the idea of preparing yourself to avoid heart by being the one who breaks the heart. And yet in that idea, there's also, it communicates so much experience of heartbreak because you're like I've learned from the past and something about the the deeply 80s accompaniment of this song with its driving program drums and its lush synthesizer landscape makes me feel like this is someone who is determined to flip the script There's determination in there. I also hear a lot of angst. As much as there's the confidence

of I'm going to be the heartbreaker, it feels like the song is almost 5 BPM too fast. You're almost trying to catch up to the beat. And when she's singing, I'll be the only heartbreaker, there's these counter melodies, which are kind of dissonant and lack that confidence that she has in her voice. So I feel like it's another example

where there's this interplay between the lyric and the music where they're actually not resonating with each other. One of them is being untruthful to the other. And that feels like what's going on in the situation of heartbreak. You know, also, it kind of makes me think about, like, being the only heartbreaker, like, being the person to assume the blame, being the person to, to, like, just take all the heat for why something didn't work out. It kind of reminds me of, like, what it feels like when you're in a really, like, a very one-sided relationship.

where you have to be the person to metabolize everything. And that lyric really reminds me a lot of another heartbreak song that I love. Extraordinary Machine by Fiona Apple. Be kind to me or treat me mean. I'll make the most of it. I'm an extraordinary machine. I'll be the only heartbreaker, like either because you can't handle it or because you don't care anymore or you're too weak.

And maybe I'm weak too, but you're weaker. I think there's a lack of confidence there that could be speaking to feeling as if you're the only person in a relationship who still cares. Yeah. I don't know if we need to get poetic on this one. What do we call it, though? Preemptive heartbreak. That's a good one.

Ooh. Yeah. I don't know how many. Someone else has to say, I don't know how many more of these I have in me. Look, you're doing good. I'm not going to mess with perfection. No, I'll happily eat up all the heartbreak in the room, you know. Just, I'll be that, I'll be that assimilator, you know, that metabolizer.

So bring it on. You know, there really are so many different flavors of heartbracels. break. It's actually one of the most popular kind of song, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Advertising Research. Breakup songs are the most successful in pop music of all the themes that we can deal with. Romance, boisterous, how cool am I kind of songs. Breakup songs really resonate. Someone who I think has written one of the best breakup albums in a long long while is Casey Musgraves. She put together an album about her divorce titled Star Crossed, which is such a good

little line. And on her song, Justified, she refuses to conform to conservative marital expectations as much as she does the Nashville sound. This feels like a new approach to heartbreak than we've encountered so far because of the defiance, there is a confidence here that I feel like has been missing from some of the other heartbreak entries we've explored so far. I think about that line, healing doesn't happen in a straight line. That is a great lyric.

It could also just as easily be like a quote card on an Instagram therapy page. You know what I mean? So it's kind of like, I like the fact that she's already on some sort of path toward nursing her wounds. You can hear it in the music and how it beat. it is, but you also hear it approached in the lyricism. Like one of the things that's cool is it kind of switches back and forth between like, you know, you should have treated me right or I should have treated you right. It happens in she does one of each chorus.

It kind of is the clear-eyed view long after a breakup where you kind of look back and you're like, there's some things I could have done better. There's a lot of things you could have done better as well. And I'm more than just a little justified in it taking some time for me to process all of this. I mean, I don't want to take your job, Nate. But I feel like this is kind of like emblematic of healing heartbreak. Totally.

I think you're right, Brittany, because it feels like she knows the therapeutic process. She's saying it's okay if I cry and then immediately laugh. Like all the emotions are happening at once and that is justified as well. Like the actual process of healing is totally justified. And to Nate, your point, the confidence and control that we hear. in Casey is something I love about her music so much, even though she's thought of as sort of a country slash pop crossover. There's something about her music, which is so minimalist and focuses so closely on her voice. It's brave.

to be able to just drop everything out more or less and be like, here I am, let me say my piece, I'm going through the healing, that's what it is. And that's guitar, it's not even like a strummed acoustic guitar, it's like a really staccato plucked guitar which makes there even more space for her voice to just kind of sit there in the gaping maw that is the aftermath of this failed relationship

and you're just like, wow, she is walking that tightrope with every word. I agree, man. That's really, that's very dramatic and cool. It is really dramatic. And it's even more dramatic. And I think to me it's made even more dramatic by the fact that like she has a very pretty voice, but it's quite thin. There's not a lot of heft to it.

So to pull out all of the instrumentation from underneath or most of it from underneath her voice and not try to swell her voice out to fill the space. It makes what she's saying then, like the confessional feel of it even more present. All right. We got healing heartbreak. Heal and heartbreak. There it is. So for our final heartbreak track today, we've got to listen to the new release by Adele.

Her album 30 is an album release like no other in contemporary times. It is getting an absurd amount of coverage, a special with. Oprah, a takeover of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. And, you know, with a voice like that, maybe it's deserved. Let's take a listen to her song, Love is a Game. The song starts out in a sort of big bandy, ballad-y, classic pop style. All your expectations of my love are impossible. And she picks it up when we get into the chorus.

Love is a game for... Hardened heartbreak is what I'm getting from this one. Because that chorus, love is a game. I mean, that's not something we've heard from any of these songs before. That in some ways it's like the most embittered response. I think we've encountered any of these heartbreak songs. Like love isn't really. Love is game.

Love is self-inflicted pain. It's pretty dark. But there's also this, this is another one. It's like the lyrics are doing one thing, but maybe the music is doing something else because even as she's talking about self-inflicted pain, it's like the music is swelling and lifting and her voice is doing these gorgeous melismatic runs.

So I don't know. I'm going to need some help in packing this, I guess. There seems to be a lot going on here. I hear you need. I'm also confused because the way in which the strings quiver as she's singing about her heartbreak and yet they're also ascending. We're getting very contradictory information. I think I think what you said about the tension is so important.

The tension between like the instrumentation, how the music sounds and what she's saying, and how dark the lyrics are, they hit me differently. I feel like she's singing from a place of knowing, be mused, resignation. Right. I feel like what she's saying is like, if I never love again, I'll live. Like, it'll be fine. And maybe I want to go on to do that again. I think I got like the sense toward the end of the song.

Like maybe she was ad-libbing. I don't know. That like there was a little bit of like a sliver of hopeful optimism. But I felt like she was singing from a place of strength and knowing that love doesn't need to define her, as opposed to singing from a place of terror that she might not ever find love again or that the entire thing is just a complete joke that she's going to feel is missing from her life, you know, forevermore. That's from obviously her live one night only performance. Yeah. So good. You don't get showmanship like that too much these days.

And there we go. I love that. I think Brittany nailed it. Now it's all kind of coming into focus for me. It's like I know love is a foolish game. I know it'll hurt me. But I also know that I'm going to try again because that's all we can, and any of us can probably do, is to continue to search for love. Even if the baseline, which is constantly descending, is bringing us down, all those strings and orchestration are going to bring us back up. And the whole process is worth going through all over again. And of course, she's happily in a relationship again. So there's the Zinger. What do we call it? Well, we called it hardened heartbreak to start. But now I'm questioning how accurate that descriptor is.

Harden heartbreak with an asterix at the end, maybe. Yeah, maybe with an, did you say heartbreak? No, you said hindsight heartbreak was the very first one. This feels like hindsight heartbreak like the redone. or something, director's cut. Taylor's version. I don't know.

It feels like a completion of a cycle. It's so appropriate that this is the one that we talked about last because it really does feel like a completion of the cycle. You've basically completely reset the heartbreak cycle and you have, you know on some level that you're going to give it another shot, even though you can still feel some of the stinging. Oh, I love that. Rescending the heartbreak cycle.

You know, when I step back and think about all these songs we've listened to, and that truism that you mentioned Charlie like this is one of the most sung about topics in popular music and I would say that goes back even much further to like you know in ancient Egypt in the 13th century BC you can literally find papyrus with heartbreak songs on it you know like this is and yet what this listening exercise makes me realize

is that there's also kind of an infinite number of ways to break a heart. And really every heartbreak song is going to be unique in some way. As you put it, Nate, there's infinite ways to break a heart. There are infinite songs about heartbreak and they can help us be seen in them. The categories we've created are just the absolute beginning. And we definitely want to hear all of your heartbreak favorites. Please send them to us. I want to say thank you to Brittany, Luce, for joining us to talk about heartbreak.

It's been absolute joy. Seriously. Thank you so much for having me. Social and Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and me, Charlie Harding. We're edited by Julian McFarland, social media by Abby Bar, illustrations by Iris Gottlie, our executive producers on Ashok Karwa and Honor Rosen. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. I want to say a big thanks to Brue Luce. It was so much fun to have her on the show.

Check out her show for Colored Nerds. It's just relaunch. You can check it out in our show notes. I also want to say thanks to Dr. Elena Dickin and Terran Wiren for their support on this episode. You can get you more episodes of Switched On Pop anywhere at your podcast. At Switchdown Pop.com, you can find us on social media at Switchedon Pop on Twitter and Instagram. And come back next week when we dive into the re-release of the Beatles documentary, get back about the recording of the Let It Be sessions.

It's going to be a really fascinating conversation. And until then, thanks for listening.