Switched on Pop - The Deep History of '7 Rings'

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

"7 Rings" is Ariana Grande's latest smash, a glittering banger that owes much to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1959 classic "My Favorite Things." 60 years later, Grande updates the track for a modern audience, making her the latest artist to repurpose this anthem from the "Sound of Music." When it comes to Ari's flow, however, questions of appropriation arise. Author Lauren Michele Jackson joins to break down who has the right to repurpose sonic history. Featuring: • Ariana Grande - 7 Rings • Julie Andrews - My Favorite Things • John Coltrane - My Favorite Things • The Doors - Light My Fire • Lauryn Hill - Black Rage • Migos - Bad and Boujee • Princess Nokia - Mine • Two Chainz - Spend It • Soulja Boy - Pretty Boy Swag Check out Lauren Michele Jackson's article, "To Whom Does '7 Rings' Owe its Sound?," hear more connections between Coltrane and the Doors in this NPR story, and discover the triplet Migos flow on Vox's Earworm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, today we unpack a song that is much discussed. Oh, yeah? But how closely are people listening? Oh, okay.

It's Ariana Grande's Seven Rings. Lots of controversy. Yes. And before we dig in, let's just press play. always Okay, so the way I'd like to proceed, Charles, is just as that clip we just listened to sort of has two discrete sections. The first part where she's quoting my favorite things and the second part, the verse, I guess, where she becomes a little more contemporary. I wanted, I got it.

Let's similarly kind of bifurcate our episode between those two sections. Sure. First half, I want to focus on that Rogers and Hammerstein reference. Yeah. And in the second half, we're going to unpack some of the contrast. especially around that verse section with the help of an author who just wrote a fantastic piece covering the song in Vulture, Lauren, Michelle Jackson. Beautiful. Okay. I have to say when I first heard this, I was immediately striking. It just grabbed me right away. Yeah, totally. And I think that has a lot to do with the surprise you get when you spin this song and immediately get this reference to a 1959 musical in 2019.

Absolutely. I did not expect it. Yeah, it's really fun. And that's where I want to start. Let's unpack that reference a little bit. And the first place we've got to start is, where does it come from? This is a song from the 1959 Rogers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music. I imagine most people are familiar with it. If not, go rent the movie version with Julie Andrews. not be disappointed.

So I think the best place to start is with Julie Andrews' version of the song. I'd never even if this would happen, but I'm so happy. Let's have a listen. Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, doorbells and sleigh-bells and schnitzel with noodles, wild geese that fly with a moon on their wings, these are a few of my favorite things. You know, I said it was surprising to hear this reference, but actually knowing what we do about Ariane de Grande, maybe we shouldn't have. We know that she is an inveterate theater geek.

Oh, is that right? So it was probably only a matter of time before some musical theater references seeped into her pop work. Isn't it so satisfying to hear this beautiful British, perfectly enunciated song taken into an entirely different context? Yeah. It's really, oh, it just gets all the pleasure centers and then plays with all your expectations. It's brilliant. Totally. And let's talk for a minute about what makes the original so effective. For one, we have an issue of meter here. That is like how the song is divided in terms of pulses. And this song has a meter of three, a triplet meter.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Charlie and I are waltzing in the studio right now. It's this lovely kind of lilting, just, I mean, it's hard to put these things into words, but it has a certain feeling that's very uplifting and carries you along. And it's also something that you don't hear very often

in contemporary pop music. It's extremely uncommon. Right? Contemporary pop music groups everything into four. One, two, three, four, two, two, three, four. You're rarely going to hear

that waltzing. One, two, three. I'm sure you're probably thinking about this. Maybe you're going to take me there, but it makes me think that probably the only place that I get a sense of three

is when rappers use a triplet flow over a grouping of four so you could get three on top of four but it happens just like temporarily. You're right, we are going to talk about that. So slow your roll, Charles. Don't steal my thunder here. Okay, where were we?

Yes. This song has this triplet feel which is very rare today and it does something really surprising and really effective. This is a song literally that's just a catalog of wonderful things. Yeah.

And you would kind of expect it to be in a major key. Oh, yeah. But that's not what we get in the song. We get a minor key. And that's kind of funny because, you know, the associations we have with minor keys are you tend to be like a little darker,

a little more somber. Definitely moody. And here again, it's literally like puppies and packages tied up with string. Poodles, noodles, and schnoodles. It's just a little effect that I think makes this song really stick in our brain. There's a certain bitter sweetness

that we might not be totally aware of, but is part of what makes this song so unforgettable. So I think on its own, this is just an incredible piece, incredible composition. But what's also cool about is that Ariana Grande is not the first popular musician to rework this composition. Oh, I know this, because when I first heard the song, I texted you know, I was like, did you hear like the John Coltrane in Ariana Grande's song

and you're like, John Coltrane? Yeah, right. Julie Andrews? Yeah, that's very funny. It does say it says a lot about your specific. background that he wouldn't immediately go to the Von Traps with this one, to John Coltrane. And that's where I want to go next, too, because Coltrane covers this song a year later. A year later?

Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, 1960. So he basically remixed it. Yeah, sure, sure. And once again, before we get too deep into it, let's just play his 1960 recording of this song. Wow. Yeah.

This is such an influential recording in the history of. jazz on its own, both for the way it takes this popular song and totally changes the associations of it. He's shifting parts of the melody, landing in different parts of the bar. He's rising things, dropping things, making these rhythmic hits. It's the same, but it's totally reimagined. Another thing is that when you think of Coltrane up till this point, he's really known for playing the tenor saxophone, but here he's not. He's using another instrument, the soprano saxophone. He's Which had certainly been used in jazz before by artists like Sidney Boucher, for instance, but was pretty rare. I also love that he's imitating a soprano, someone who's a vocal soprano.

So he's using the higher-voiced saxophone. Absolutely. And after this recording, all of a sudden, everyone wants to play soprano saxophone. And to this day, it's now a staple of the music. Kenny G. is a soprano saxophone. So we can blame Coltrane to Kenny G. Oh, I'm not. I'm not coming.

here to hate to hate Kenny G. I'm sorry. It was the wrong choice of words. That's all Charlie. Connect. Yeah. No, Kenny, I love you. I love you.

Charlie, I can't explain. So this is recorded with his classic quartet featuring McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, the incredible Elvin Jones on drums. Another reason I think it's so influential is how they stretch the song out. This becomes a 14-minute improvisation.

And a lot of it is really just based around a single vamp. So that really opened up a lot of possibility for how to sort of deconstruct a pop song. Wow. Okay, so I've said the song has influence on jazz, but not only on jazz artists. This recording by Coltrane of my favorite things also, in an unexpected way, influences a big pop rock hit of the 1960s. It's The Doors Light My Fire. What? Let's spin that. I'll try to set the night on for you.

Totally. That's kind of a bait and switch because it's not the chorus so much. It's what happens next. Light My Fire is also quite a long song. It's got a lot of solos. Yeah. And when you listen closely to those solos,

you can see how the doors were really borrowing from Coltrane's recording. Like, let's take just a few seconds of the vamp from Coltrane's, 1960 recording. And compare it to kind of a random couple seconds from the vamp section of the doors. Now there's a bit of similarity, right? Yeah, so the vamp is when you take a chord or a couple of chords and you just repeat them on

loop so that other people can improvise over them, right? Precisely, right. And in this case, what's true of both of these songs is they're taking two chords that are one step apart and just going back and forth, back and forth, and using that as a springboard for these just kind of wild, almost Indian Raga inspired improvisations. Oh yeah. I hear that now. Again, you might not connect light my fire to John Galtrey's my favorite things, but the doors cite that as a direct influence. So 1967 now is light my fire. And now I want to skip way into the future to check out

kind of the next, I think, important reinterpretation of my favorite things. This is by an artist who were very familiar with, Lauren Hill. But this particular song was never released, so it may be less familiar to people. This is called Black Rage. That's powerful. Yeah, I know. I know.

I was introduced to this track a few years ago. I'd never heard it before, and it just stopped me in my tracks. Yeah. It's amazing how you can take something familiar and rework the lyrics, and it takes on a whole new meaning. Yeah, and it's performance. No, no, and I agree. And it's like she's doing something very smart here.

She's taking that original minor melody, and she's sort of leaning into it a little bit. Right. And creating these lyrics that more reflect the musical quality of minor and create this deeply disturbing, ironic dissonance between the original lyrics of puppies and brown paper packages to the very real violence and struggle of being black in the 21st century.

When she borrows the lyric of tied up with strings, I mean, that is a completely... You could not have gone to the... It's the darkest place that that lyric could go, but because of the contrasts of our association to that song of happiness, is that much more emotionally potent. Like the imagery is so upsetting and powerful.

Yeah. So, you know, once again, this 1959 original has kind of gone in so many ways. It's a testament to one of the most exciting things about pop music is the way it reimagines and reinterprets artifacts of the past. And that brings us to Ariana Grande. How is she taking this classic theme and reworking it? Let's spin it again, all right? Just that first section. She's using bottles of bubbles.

She's using all of her favorite things. And she even uses all of my favorite things. Of course, the song has a different title, Seven Rings, which rhymes with Favorite Things. Of course, it gets even better after this, because then she immediately, updates it, right? We get the, there's not much musical material happening. There's these little bell tones and it's just my favorite things and then all of a sudden we get this 808 just do, oh, you're just doing the John Coltrane thing and making it something new.

I love that. Yeah, not only is she updating, the lyrics for 2019, which if my math is correct, puts us 60 years after 1959. Not only that, she's also taking these lyrics and transforming them, like, in the sense that the original is all about finding beauty in these very humble things, right? Very, like, simple everyday things. This is, yeah, this is like, you know, Tiffany rings and expensive tattoos. And this is a little more indulgent here. It's extremely indulgent. I mean, I hope that it's comical because conspicuous consumption is otherwise somewhat problematic.

So, finally, I think part of the reason this reworking here is so effective is because this brings us back to what you were talking about earlier. Like, we don't hear that triplet feel a lot in modern music. Yeah, that thing. With the exception of a certain current of hip-hop music, the history of this flow is so much better explained than we ever could by the brilliant video series Earworm produced by Vox Media and Estelle Caldwell. We'll throw up a link to that on our show notes. But suffice to say that we can really hear this triplet flow in the work of groups like Migos on a song like Bad and Bougie.

I swear these niggas is under me. The hatein the devil keep jumping me. Backro's on me. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 4. Exactly. So, we don't have a triplet meter, but we have these triplet divisions, and that's something that does connect us to my favorite things. So it's very clever in that respect. Just like my favorite things is 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 3.

three, but it's not hard to just time shift those both so they get to the same place. And then all of a sudden, you really have transplanted Julie Andrews into a modern hip hop context. Which we're going to get into this controversy because I think there's a lot of conversation to be had about Ariana moving into more of a hip hop sound. And yet the material almost invites it. If you want to update favorite things, the thing which is in a three time, which is uncommon and contemporary popular music, well, it would make sense to put it within a hip hop context where you actually will hear those kinds of sounds. And that's exactly what she does. So great. Let's take a quick break and come back and dig into the politics of that sound a little

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We're going to delve a little deeper into the controversy, not surrounding the My Favorite Things reference, but surrounding the section that immediately follows it. And in order to discuss this, we've enlisted the help of a very special, guest, would you mind introducing yourself? Hi, I'm Lauren Michelle Jackson. I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.

And also an amazing writer who has written just really, I felt like, the most complete take on this issue for Vulture. You really have deconstructed the history and all of the issues within this track. And so that's what we want to dive into. Oh, wow. Well, thank you. It's a really fascinating line of inquiry. about this song, I think.

This song came out, captivated people, and simultaneously, I mean, basically the moment it came out, there was a backlash. Do you mind just giving us a summary of what went on? So I knew the song was dropping, and then I actually had a lot to do that day. So I came to the internet somewhat belatedly, and I just see all these ongoing conversations. Princess Nokia dropped a tweet saying that Ariana Grande had kind of stolen. the hook for the song. Soldier Boy popped in and said that actually, no, it sounds like my song.

And, you know, a bunch of people were kind of just in general talking about the way the songs flow sounded really, you know, kind of reminiscent of trap vibes, of kind of the way rat flows have been going over the past couple years. And altogether, just very much unlike what you would have. expect a white pop artist to be doing with her sound. There's sort of two questions that come up for me, which is, first, to the allegations of has she stolen this song? I think we need to address, are these things so substantially alike that there's an issue

of actual sort of musical theft? But there's a larger issue at hand, obviously, that you speak to as well. Are there issues of cultural appropriation that Ariana is not properly citing, referencing, and using with permission? So maybe we could handle those one by one. Yeah. So full disclosure, I'm not a lawyer or a legal scholar in any shape or form whatsoever. But I think the question of the legality, it seems to be straightforward in the sense that it has been really difficult in the past to kind of copyright or trademark a rhythm and a vibe, so to speak, which is what a lot of people are kind of pointing to as far as this sounding like.

otherwise rap songs and just like rap in general. Right. And so the case with blurred lines and the Marvin Gay sample could turn out to be a kind of landmark moment as far as being able to trademark somebody replicating a distinctive rhythm. But other than that, you know, it's generally been, you know, if it's a melody, if it's, you know, these recognizable lyrics, such as the Rogers and Hammerstein's, melody, which is actually credited in the song. Other than that, it's kind of been a little bit fast and loose.

And so I don't think in this case there's really a kind of legal issue here. I want to do something that actually doesn't get to happen in a court of law. Now, Nate, you've actually done some consulting around professional musicologists, copyright, consulting. And my understanding is that a court that's deliberating on whether or not one song, borrows from another song, the jury is not always allowed to hear the music? Like Lauren, I'm not a legal scholar either, but I do know, yes, in the Marvin Gaye case that's come up, yeah, they were not actually allowed to play any recordings from either Marvin Gay's original, got to give it up, or the blurred lines recording that was the potential copyright.

Rather, they had to look at sheet music reductions of those pieces and have to. have a musicologist come in and explain basic music concepts using a piano. So you have to imagine a jury of, you know, presumably non-music professionals trying to wrap their heads around these discussions. And then you get kind of an idea of who's actually deciding these musical verdicts. I'm excited. I think we get to do something that wouldn't otherwise be done. I want to play the music, right? And actually sort of what are people hearing? Because at, Frankly, the response on Twitter is not coming from a court either. It's coming from people who are like,

yo, I'm hearing this other thing that's happening. This is my song or other people saying, hey, this sounds like someone else's song. So I thought what we should do is let's just play the seven rings flow for a second. And then we can jump into the other tracks as well. To the tape. Okay, so musicologist, what are you hearing? I hear a very catchy rhythmic flow.

Lauren, what's your take? I hear of distinctive A-Flow, if you know, A-Flow and hip-hop and rap music, that, like, that little background, almost like an ad-lib, who, who, who, who, who. Nice. You must have some credits to your name. Yeah, get Lauren on a track, like, staff. There's a couple other songs that people are referencing. Nate, you've pulled up these clips. Which ones do you want to?

Yeah, let's start, in no particular order, start with two chains. All right around around no gimme. It's a similar. It's a small. I spend. In my I spend. In my I spend. All right.

Charlie. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty similar. It's the same rhythm. It's a similar rhythm. It's a similar rhythm. Yeah. Okay.

So let's just get them all out, right? Okay. So onwards. Princess Nokia is next. It's mine. I put it. It's mine. I put it.

It's mine. I put it. Similar again. Okay. And finally, soldier boy. This right here is my sway.

All the girls are on me. Damn. Oh, man. Yeah. Same rhythm, ish. So can we abstract that into just a pattern?

It's like, dot, dot, dot, dot, da da, something like that. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing.

With variations, yeah. There's like also got da da da, da, da. Close enough. Yeah, so right.

So some interesting. Okay. It's hard. This is hard stuff, man. Lauren? It's hard. I mean, they do sound very,

very similar. And particularly with the Princess Nokia selection, it's like you have also the kind of lyrical content of, you know, she's talking about buying her own hair. And then Ariana's also talking about buying her own hair. And, a culture of folks who have traditionally kind of purchased and styled their hair and has a rich

kind of lexicon around that. And then, you know, the other person is not part of such a culture. So that does kind of add another layer to the issue. Right. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's that's deep. I never, I didn't consider that. Well, I think we'll get into maybe in the sort of second half of our discussion, but just talking about the rhythm and it can there be intellectual property around a flow. is a question that is at hand in people's discussion of is something being stolen,

especially when we're not looking at the Prince Nokia case, but just sort of more abstractly, if we look at the Soldier Boy song, I'm sure there's probably some, we could find some lyrical connections, but they seem to be very different tracks. Nonetheless, lovers of popular music say,

hey, this thing sounds like that other thing. And I think that there is cultural weight in the way that people hear a thing, and I don't want to deny that at all. At the same time, from a musical perspective, and it seems that from a legal perspective, as things are today, I don't know if they will change. It seems that copywriting of rhythm is an extremely challenging thing to do, let alone a rhythm

which at its base does seem fairly fundamental. Like I could imagine how many drummers have played this same rhythm. It's a challenging question about whether or not you can really have a sonic marker and signature surrounding a rhythm which can only be broken up in so many different ways. The same argument could probably be made for melody as well, but culturally as a whole for the last 100 years of popular music, this hasn't been something that someone could sort of claim ownership over. I'm curious, Lauren, how are you hearing it?

Well, I think I'd say an additional kind of question to add to that would be, do we even want rhythm to be, you know, do we want it to be added to this category of, like, litigious sound, right? Right. On one hand, I think there is kind of like a cultural stake being made here, a cultural, claim being made here, you know, that people want to be able to, and musicians and rappers want to be able to kind of own in a real sense the things that they're creating. But I do, it does, I don't know, I get so scared. I feel like once you do get into the realm of these rhythms are

so similar, or not just similar, but familiar, and that, you know, that's something to go to court over. I just don't see that ending well for, the very group of people who, you know, are the most concerned about their music being lifted and taken to the realm of pop and then whitewashed and done, you know, all the things that everybody's so worried about. I know I need to do a lot more thinking on this than a subject that I'm deeply interested in is sort of legal ownership of sound is a very complex topic. And I think that on one hand, we could definitely say that rhythm as a fundamental musical element has not had the same sort of legal bearing as melody, and that could represent shifting

changes in what simply popular music is comprised of, moving from Julie Andrews, which is heavily melodically driven to music that she's borrowing from from Trapp, which is more rhythmically driven. Now, these things are there in both. So one could say that, you know, these are not on equal planes in the way that the law thinks about different musical styles, and that there's inequity in that. I, on the other hand, take probably a slightly more liberal approach to ownership of core fundamental musical concepts around melody and rhythm and sometimes think that certain melodic phrases should probably have less intellectual property around them because of their fundamental nature. I probably need to go a lot more deeper into this. We probably could

dedicate an entire episode to it. Nonetheless, I think we can point out that what we're hearing here seems, what I'm hearing is something which is a pretty base fundamental rhythm, which is probably occurred in all sorts of places, but has nonetheless been popularized by certain artists who really do feel some claim to it. And fans also hear it as, hey, I know that song that's important to me. And I don't mean to deny that whatsoever. But I think your piece, as you were saying earlier, raises some much more important points that it's not the issue of, is the rhythm the same? The thing that we were first drawn to, but the question of issues of appropriation. So moving from the legal discussion of rhythm to, as you say, the moral and ethical implications

of Ariana Grande co-opting the specific sound, you talk about how, you know, in some ways appropriation is kind of inescapable. It reminds me of a quote from the author Ralph Ellison. He says, in American culture, everyone plays the appropriation game. But you make an important distinction maybe between different kinds

or different qualities of appropriation. How do we go about sort of assessing what's, for lack of a better word, good? Appropriation and bad appropriation. That's a really tough. The court of public opinion tends to determine whether or not appropriation is okay or not okay. So there's a while there when, you know, a lot of quote-unquote indie artists were covering rap songs. And that was like a really cool thing to do.

And it was a kind of interesting genre experimentation. And then on the other hand, you have Miley Cyrus on stage at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, which was kind of like unilaterally determined to be like, that was bad appropriation. And so I think the question is never really, you know, is it good or is it bad? I think the thing that ruffles people's feathers is, you know, was this done in a respectful way? which is also kind of another messy question. But in the case of pop artists, I think it's quite easy, at the very least, to go back and look at their catalog and see how their sound has evolved. And so even an artist like Ariana Grande, who is relatively recent to the game, her first album came out in 2013, there's still a history there and there's still credits there.

And so besides just kind of looking at the issue of maybe who was credited or uncredited in the ghost of Seven Rings, you can actually look at, you know, who was on her previous albums going back to her first album where you have babyface, you know, playing a role as a producer or executive producer of that album. But there's an issue of is the borrowing happening in a respectful nature? Is it being acknowledged? But really underlying this, I'm hearing a question of what is our. Ariana's relationship to that music? And is there a relationship or is it a sudden marketing spin to go into another genre to commodify someone else's culture for financial benefit? These are very different sort of approaches. And what I'm hearing from what you're saying and from your article is that there's a lineage of relationship to this music over her entire catalog. Absolutely. And, you know, she said very early on, she looks up to artists like Whitney Houston and Brandy and Mariah Carey and, you know, has not been shy about a kind of R&B inflection in a lot of her work.

Funny enough, this is kind of not the first time, the kind of question of appropriation has, I guess, chased her. I mean, I remember early on when she kind of broke into the scene, there were a lot of these comparisons to Maria Carey that, again, you know, kind of got people, you know, got their happiness. wrinkles rates because it did seem like, okay, you know, you're a new pop star and, you know, Mariah Carey is a legend, you know, why do we have to play this game? But I think, you know, that kind of conversation fell away, especially as she has broken off and come into her own sound. Dangerous Woman was like an amazing album. I love that album. Beautiful album. She has this great talent for doing some of the, you know, divaisms that I would associate with R&B, which I would subsequently associate with a kind of soul.

and a post-soul inflection, but also has this, you know, unique kind of fluid quality. You know, people make fun of the fact that you don't often understand what she's saying or nancyating and stuff like that. But I think her voice has this really great kind of gathering and kind of ability to gather together multiple genres, including multiple traditionally black genres and do it in a way that is unique and musical and receipts. respectful. And so, you know, I never want to be like, yes, this is great appropriation. No, this is bad appropriation. But I, there's levels to it. I think there's registers to it, so to speak. Yeah. It teaches me to always not sort of like, here, you get a pass. Oh, no, you get a ticket. You have to look at the historical relationships of music, artists. And it's overwhelmingly complex because we live in a post-colonial world. and issues of appropriation are through and through every part of culture. And what I really appreciate about your perspective and your article is how you really open and add to the conversation by looking at her musical history and her musical techniques rather than perhaps maybe just the quick take. But also the quick take introduces the conversation.

So I feel like part of the issue at hand isn't just the music itself, but the dialogue that it generates afterwards. And so I'm really grateful for the way that you've been able to have a sort of expansive way of looking at these issues and really thank you for doing so. Oh, thanks. That means a lot. I find these things really, really fascinating. And I just think the way American culture lives and circulates and all the racial questions I find are really, really interesting. And the more we can kind of dip into the nuances of the thing, I think the better conversations we can start to have. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

And we will definitely be watching for your writing, really admire all that you contribute to this song. And yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you. So before we go, Charlie, just one takeaway I had from that conversation is, yeah, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look in it, discussing these issues is work. It requires research and time and thought. These aren't, like you said, you can have the quick take. but as Lauren said, in order to really understand it, you've got to get into the nuance of each individual case

and really make your own moral ethical judgment, I think. But here's one other thing I was there. I do appreciate when these things come up because I love finding new music. And now I have this wonderful Princess Nokia song, which is really cool and really creative and has sort of like introduced me to this artist who I hadn't known before.

So I think that's one thing we can always do in these situations is celebrate those artists, regardless if they have any legal recourse. We can go out and listen to them and support them. Right. Absolutely. I dig that. It's wonderful. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding, and my co-host, Nate Sloan. Our design is by Luke Harris.

Our community manager is Sarah Terry. Thank you to Warren Michelle Jackson for talking with us about Seven Rings. Check out her piece on Vulture. To whom does Ariana Grande's Seven Rings? Oh, it's sound. It's a great piece. And I want to extend a special thanks and deep gratitude to Bill Lance, who for the last two plus years has been mixing engineering and making Switched on Pop just sound great. This is going to be our last episode together. And we are so thankful for all of your contributions. Thank you, Bill. You can find more episodes of Switched On Pop at Switchedon Pop. At Switchedon Pop.com. We love talking to you on social media at Switched On Pop on both Twitter and Instagram, where we will. take your suggestions and turn them into shows. We're going to be back in just another week, just one week away. We're going to have another episode.

And until then, thanks for listening.