Switched on Pop - What Makes An Award Winning Song?

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

What if music awards were given out for only musical qualities? It may seem like celebrity and spectacle are more important than ever at the 61st Grammy Awards, but we believe many of this years winners earned their accolades with noteworthy music. Still, we thought the winners should be heralded by new, more musical categories. Find out how And The Awards Go To: Best Chord Progression: H.E.R. - "Hard Place" & "Focus" Best Throwback: Silk City & Dua Lipa ft. Diplo & Mark Ronson - "Electricity" Worst Metaphor: Lady Gaga ft. Bradley Cooper "Shallow" Best Conceptual Song: Childish Gambino - "This Is America" Best Bridge: Kacey Musgraves - "Rainbow" Also Featured The Weeknd - "Often" Khalid - "Location" Alison Limerick - "Where Love Lives" Cher - "Strong Enough" Elton John - "Mellow" Bonus Listen to Ezra Klein's discussion with Jill Lepore on America's two revolutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So, Nate, here's what I want to do today. So award shows. We just had the Grammys recently. And award shows are so heavily focused on showmanship,

celebrity, fashion, and spectacle. But rather than do a sort of Grammys recap show about how did it all go down, I thought it'd be much more interesting to ask what musically makes an award-winning song. We kind of forget these massive pop songs are winning because they're also music. And we get wrapped up in all that spectacle. So what I've done today is I've established some new categories.

Oh, okay. New award categories. Audacious. We're going to take some of the award winners and we're going to assign them some new... Yeah. Use some new hardware? Exactly. So we got Best throwback.

Best throwback. Best conceptual composition. Best conceptual composition. Best bridge. Best bridge. I really like bridge. And then we have a worse song. And then worst song. Okay. I love it.

I love it. So I believe that each of these winners is more than just a spectacle. And that in this year especially, there's some outstanding music. So let's just kick it off with a track from my favorite winner from this year. Okay. So this is Gabby Wilson, also known as her stylized as H.E.org.R. Dot. And she won for Best R&B performance

for her song, Best Part and Best R&B album. And this song Hard Place is one of my favorite tracks off of that album. She performed this at the Grammys, slinging a crystal clear fender guitar in a very sort of prince-like

fashion with a whole set of strings and gospel choir backing it all up. And it was just absolutely stunning. She's an amazing vocalist, multi-instrumentalist. And, I think that Hard Place, for me, wins best chord progression. This is a simple chord progression. I think it's the same chords all the way through three chords.

But what she's doing is just, it's so beautiful. The lyric is, I'm caught between your love and a hard place. And I think we get that sense of mullingale by her use of this technique, modal mixture. Right? Yeah. So this is the best chord progression winner. I love that. because of it, the way it mixes major and minor chords to reflect the melancholic message.

Yes, exactly. And it's just one of my absolute favorite ones. So what I wanted to do to sort of emphasize the power of this core progression was I took it, I played on guitar and... A crystal clear guitar? I wish. I'm not so lucky. Too bad.

And so here's the way that she plays it. Dig it. Beautiful, right? You feel that there's a little tear going down your eyes. immediately thinking of some... No, that's just a... That's just some dust. But imagine if she had taken the same thing

and hadn't done that modal mixture. I think it's instructive to look at what if that second chord rather than being minor was a major chord. Ah, okay. So I've taken the same thing and done it how maybe it could have been done.

Oh yeah, subtle. And we're just... The only difference there was in the second chord. Yeah. Minor the first time, major the second time. And, you know... Wait, let me hear the minor again. Okay.

Oh, wow. Big difference, yeah. And for me, when you put it into the major, the brightness ruins all of the melancholy. Not a best chord progression winner. This is a chord progression that you might have heard many times before. I mean, it's not totally original, but it's just deployed so well here. One of my favorite references that uses this same progression actually comes from a film. it's the theme of

Brokeback Mountain. Fascinating. Yeah, check this up. There's the minor, and it comes back around to the major. Huh. Yeah,

I hear it. And so, and I think Brokeback Mountain has a, obviously, is dealing with a similar issue of caught between your love and a hard place, right?

It's like there's, I'm wanting this thing, and yet it's not available to me in, that Wyoming or Montana of the time. Yeah, yeah, Wyoming, I think. Yeah, and so I think that she,

in the same way as using this core progression really beautifully, and so I thought, why not just throw them together? Surprisingly effective. It works. I love this song. I love this artist. And just because Her is so fantastic, I wanted to play one other song off of the album.

This is the song Focus. This was the first song I heard of Her. And when I heard this, I think I heard it playing in L.A. on KCRW or something. And I was like, that is a great song. People should listen to this. and I have to be honest, when I was watching the Grammys and her won, I was like, people know who her is? It sort of says that I probably live under a rock.

So this is focused. Whoa. Another just choruscating chord progression. Much more clever progression going on. But the thing that just totally takes me about focus and much more of. her less acoustic focused music and a lot of the stuff on the album is more sort of straight up R&B. This isn't just R&B. This is like trap style production done in an R&B style.

The aesthetics, the 808 kick drums, the high hat stutters, all of that feels like it's coming from trap, but she's just slowing it down and making it sensual and giving it its own character. It feels like something that has been adapted, and maybe we heard in folks like The Weekend on a song like often. And we get some of it as well on Khalid, and his song has a lot of that, the harp going on as well. Send me your location, let's focus on communicating because I just need the time and place to come through. It's like the sensitive side of trap. Isn't it? Yeah.

She takes, I think, sort of works with that similar aesthetic, but has given it its whole new language. Well, that arpeggiated piano we heard on Focus as well doesn't belong to any of those worlds. I don't know. That seems migrated from a totally separate musical universe. Which part is this? In Focus, that arpeggiated shimmering piano line. Let's listen to it. It's very classical.

Yeah. It almost sounds like a harp and a piano layer together. It's a digital instrument in the uncanny valley between the two, perhaps. It's a beautiful thing. So I want to award her with Best Port Progression on top of her, all of her other awards. So that brings us to our next award. And I'm very excited about this one. This is Best Throwback.

And we get to talk about an artist. who I have been wanting to go deeper into so many times, and we just haven't had the opportunity, it's Duolipa. Duolipa has an outstanding voice, an incredible performance, a great songwriting sensibility, and she won for both Best New Artist as well as Best Dance Record. She had an amazing performance with St. Vincent, where they matched mass seduction and one kiss.

It was awesome. That was great. More Prince references, I feel, in that St. Vincent's performance. Sorry, please continue. Yeah, no. And so we want to look at her song, Electricity with Silk City Diplow and Mark Ronson, which she won Best Dancer. Great. You know, this just proves that house music is just eternal. It keeps coming back, right? And for me, this wins best throwback because it is just so thoroughly in the house music tradition. Totally. And so what I wanted to do here is point to how this thing is, though, yes, a contemporary pop song, I think nails house music just so well.

Yeah. And so the song that came to mind for me is Where Love Lives, which is an Allison Limerick track from 1990 and mixed by sort of like the forefather of house music, Frankie Knuckles. Oh, cool. So let's take a listen to this. And I think you're going to hear, yeah, we got a little bit of similarity going on. There are a couple of essential elements here that we're hearing in both tracks. And we've got house piano. We've got four to the floor kick drums.

We have sub-bases and we have these amazing high-pitched synth strings. So let's just start from the top of those. We've got the house piano, I think, is just one of the essential sounds. As soon as you hear it, you're in that genre. So at the top of the track, we get the house piano. And that is that, again, a digital version of a piano that is somewhere between a piano and a recursive something with all these delays. Well,

Duolipa starts the same way. With that actually is a slightly more maybe honest acoustic piano, but it still has that hard attack. Totally. Next essential element is you've got to have a four to four kick drum, obviously.

Thud, thud, thud, thud. Yeah, same thing. A house track would be incomplete if it didn't have an amazing sub-base that just holds the groove together. You hear that really thick baseline in the bottom end, right? It's almost more felt than heard in some ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the bass is pushed even louder in the Duolipa track. No doubt. And then finally, it's just essential since, I don't know, since the track Strings of Life, you have to have some kind of string element, right? And so here's the strings in Where Love Lives, and the strings in Duolipa. So in both cases, it's that high-pitched, thin, synthesized violin section in the background. of each track.

Cool. So when you got those house piano stabs, the four to the four kick drum, a big sub bass, and that awesome synth flying high up above, that synth string flying high. Yeah. You've got a house track.

The other thing, though, that the song has is it has her voice. And her voice is totally unique right now, I find. It's really, it's a deep alto, very throaty, powerful. Totally.

You know who it reminds me of? Is it a singer with four? Letters in her name. It is indeed. And that singer is... Cher. Yes. This is a Cher strong enough from 1998,

and you're going to be like, oh, yeah, this is a... Yeah. Yeah. I don't need your sympathy. Piano voice. We're going to move forward. String. Yeah.

Oh, okay. And we're going to get the four-floor kick. same subby bass and hear probably a lot more of the disco reference as well yeah that was fun wait sorry what song is that that's strong enough that was great but but we were really actually supposed to be focusing on her voice

sure sure sure just has this like it's in the back it feels like it's in the back of her throat yeah it's like ah as opposed to like ah yeah well I'm sorry is that share is she in this room right now no it's very it has a presence a shape of a depth to it

you can like step inside that voice. It almost feels, you know, pitch a tent in that voice. It feels almost like a, like a classically trained tenor where it's like it's very, it's in the back, it's open, it's wide, it's not bright and forward. Right. Which is the product maybe counterintuitively of a lot of control and discipline. That's right. To get that open sound. Yeah, yeah.

Big hollow made for a cathedral. So we've got Duelipa winning best throwback. for just nailing the house sound, especially in a moment when groups like Disclosure playing the house, but hadn't really been having a particular moment in the top 40 for a little while, and then boom, this track comes out, and it just proves

just how indelible house style is. You make a strong case, Charles. We're going to come back in just a second, and we're going to go somewhere very controversial. I can't wait. The alternative Grammys, continue. We're going to talk about the worst

metaphor. It's the worst song. It's the worst metaphor. You probably are nowhere we're going to go. I have no idea. I am going to get totally burned for what I'm about to say. Okay. I'll catch you there in a second. See you then. 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? 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

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and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Oh boy. So I'm actually nervous about this. You're shaking. I am. The thing is, all right, here's the deal. Yeah.

I love Lady Gaga. Great. But I am a star as born skeptic. Okay. And I, though the song Shallow won best pop duo, and Best Song for Visual Media was nominated for many other things,

including an Academy Award, not just Grant. Right, right, right. I really don't like the song. But let me, I have to put up a little disclaimer. While watching this film, I think I was in tears. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The first time I heard this song was like,

that's a beautiful song. And as soon as I left the theater, and I thought about it. I was like, I like that song. I like that movie. Now, on the film side, I've really had issues with representations of her agency

within her career. I was upset about the sort of lack of intervention in her lover's alcoholism and abuse. And I also, you know, frankly, the underlying message really irked me, which was this idea of if you just have something to say, you can be a star. But I didn't think that Ali, the pop star, Lady Gaga's character, actually had something to say in her music. It felt kind of shallow. And yeah, what are you thinking? I'm just thinking that we're

going to be pilloried. Absolutely. I think that's totally fair. Maybe in her defense, let's give her some airtime, and we'll just give a little bit of chorus of shallow. It's a beautiful performance.

I mean, stunning voice. It's moving. I mean, you are grabbed right on. I mean, it's not just the audience cheering in the background that has you. It's very well done. And yet, the song is metaphorizing a swimming pool to talk about personal and social change. She's off the deep end.

She's going to dive in. She's far from the shallows now. And I feel like the movie, there's a scene where they're overlooking, they're at Chateau Marmon, Hollywood, overlooking this billboard of her, of Allie that's just been posted up. Right. sort of this kind of saccharine, I'm not sure, sort of saccharine relationship that her partner has and thinking like you've sort of sold out. I kind of feel like this song was written at the Chateau Marmont while going swimming in a swimming pool. The point of view of the swimming pool metaphor just doesn't do it for me.

Okay, tell me more. What's your issue here? I just don't think it's a very powerful metaphor for social change. You know, this is longer than I've ever thought about the meaning of the words in this song. Okay, so they're in the deep end, which symbolizes what sort of striking out, being brave, taking a risk. Sure, yeah, yeah. Versus the shallows are sort of safety and the predictable and the everyday or something. You would prefer an ocean, perhaps?

I think the ocean is a much more beautiful metaphor. What about a lake? Would you go to the lake? I would take a lake. Would you take a river? I would take a river. Pond. Ponds have ponds come.

Estuary. I would even go for a swamp. Lagoon? Sure. I got more by you. You got another one? No other bodies of water. Man, that's it.

We've named them all. Okay, that's all the bodies of water. It just isn't my favorite body of water. That's it. I can't argue with that. I think it's great song, great performance, worst metaphor. You know what I would nominate this song for?

Yeah. Best song to do at karaoke. Oh. It is really fun. Great duet. Great to just let loose on those shal-lalas. Do you want to give us a little sneak peek? I would.

Got a little laryngitis. Yeah. I'm too bad. Really unfortunate. Too bad. I want to go now to Best Conceptual Composition. Cool. This is one of the most powerful songs of last year.

Much discussed. It's very hard to, I think, add anything to it. This is Childish Gambinos. This is America, which won Best Record, Song, and Music Video. probably was first recognized for its extremely powerful music video and its representations of black identity and police brutality, mass incarceration, all, you know, basically a barrage of references about American race relations. Totally. And what I wanted to do was take a look at how does the music mirror what's happening imagistically? So the first thing we should do is obviously hear a little bit of This is America.

Don't catch you slipping on. Look what I'm whipping up. This is America. Don't get you slipping on. I was listening to this. I had actually just recently listened to this Ezra Klein podcast where he was talking with Jillipur. One of the great American historians, writers, intellectuals, Harvard professor and

Yerker writer and just one of the most brilliant people. And in their conversation, they are going into the duality of American national identity. So here's Ezra, I'll break. that down. Okay. What seems to me to be happening is that a lot of the American story that was being worked through in history was about the story of how did America become so great? How did we become the world's only global superpower? How did this country started out of nothing? How did it become so fantastic? And a lot of the more recent work is there seems to be more attention to the kind of sins upon which America was built and the threads of our history that were not that great and the things that we

struggle. There seems to be an effort to create an almost parallel narrative. So here with This Is America, I actually think we're getting both of these narratives, this American exceptionalism and this American atrocity, because This Is America has two very different sides to it. We didn't play yet the introductory material and the sort of the A side to the song. So let's take a listen to what I think is representing sort of this American exceptionalism identity within This is America. Now, I think for a lot of listeners, when the song eventually ships back into what we heard originally, the start up to the darker side of it, the A-side might seem like a foil for what is

really This is America. But I think that this is non-ironic to me. I'm hearing that within this, there is the land of opportunity where a immigrant black man can make a living. And he, of course, is indexing that with bringing in gospel choir and West African guitars, which are connecting to the history of American slavery. So there's a lot happening on the American exceptionalism side. And I think one point that's really important to point out

would be someone who's doing a backing vocal on this, right? So 21 Savage, who as of today, I think, is maybe no longer being detained by ICE, but was a backing vocalist on this track. And the producer, Levick Gardson, who accepted the award for this song did shout out, hey, you know, he ought to be here. This is a sort of deeply disturbing and unfortunate manifestation of both sides of this song,

someone who's from another country, but who's making his living here and is detained on sort of false pretenses of visa issues, but is actually physically detained and put behind bars. So when I'm hearing on this first half of this track is already bleeding into the darker side of the American narrative, but this is upbeat when we're listening to the music of it. It's major key. It has joyous gospel singers. It has this really sort of also upbeat guitar. And all of it for me paints that idea of American exceptionalism.

So then we move... Sounds like there's a colimba in there too. Oh, yeah, right, right. And also pointing to a different narrative saying so much of that identity comes from, of course, the immigrants that bring that through, and especially those who were brought here, not by their own choice. So let's move then into the other side of the... that, which is the American atrocity, that is the second half that sort of be part of, This is America.

This is America. Don't get you slipping now. Don't get you slipping now. So here we have underneath it, this minor, dark wobble base that is going back and forth. And it almost has like a jaws-like effect. Like something is chasing you. You know, don't get caught slipping up. This is America.

He goes on to talk about police brutality and gun violence and the commodification of black culture. And so this is all of the dark side of American identity. And so I listened to both these sides. I'm like, wow, that's really brilliant. He's got both of these different narratives. And I think they're a little bit in competition with each other. Back to the Ezra Klein part about these two different identities is one more important than the other. Well, Jill Lepore actually comes in and corrects Ezra and sort of catches us up to what the real history is.

You draw the distinction between sort of an American account. exceptionalism, American triumphalism narrative of American history, and a kind of American atrocity, genocide, slaughter, enslavement story. Those, I entirely agree with you, you could sort a lot of American historical writing into one of those two categories. Where I'm going to disagree with your characterization is that you see that as a change that we used to tell a triumphalist story and now we tell a story of atrocity, that there's been a change over time, when in fact what you see when you read the history of American history is that those two narratives are always competing with one another. So you have triumphalistic accounts in the 19th century, say something like George Bankroft, who was

a secretary of war and also an American historian, writes the first mammoth history of the United States. It's a story of manifest destiny. But you also have Frederick Douglass, who I think needs to be understood, among many other things, as a great American historian, reading essentially the story of slavery, writing the history of slavery. Or you have in the early decades of the 20th century, W.B. Du Bois, the great American historian who writes about the failure of reconstruction and offers an entire, starts a whole kind of counter argument against the kind of lost cause of the Confederacy interpretation of American history. So there always been these dueling accounts. But I think people who are doing the sophisticated work are actually trying to break out of that false division,

right, and I think Du Bois and Douglas were in this tradition as well, and see both sides of that, and see that they are actually flip sides of the same coin of a single coin. So just like these great writers that she mentions, I think that Childish Gambino is in this project of not saying, this is America is one or the other, but is actually the two of them. And we get that thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There you go. Yeah. in the final outro of the song when the two combined.

So this is America as both the gospel choir, and it is also that dark jaws-like wobble bass that's always behind you trying to catch up and take you out. Damn, Charles. Two quick thoughts. Yeah. One is that it's interesting, your reading makes me reconsider some of the sort of vocal interjections in the background

of both of these sections, you know, these sort of scribes. cries and screams and laughter. And it's like, it makes me think of how you can't always tell whether those are cries of joy or cries of pain. Right. Maybe that's intentional. The way you know, sometimes you hear something, a cry on the street, and you're like,

oh, I can't tell if someone's laughing or, like, fighting. And the other thing is, you know, this idea that I think in some, when certain events happen in the United States, people say, like, oh, this isn't, you know, that's not American, you know, or that is, this is the most American thing. I think what Gambino is kind of pointing out in this track is like, it's all America. Yeah. This is America.

Everything. Yeah. It's not, there is no golden ideal of exceptionalism or atrocity. It's all the above. Right. I had, and the thing is, I just hadn't, I'd listened to the song so many times, I'd watched the video. And I think because of the video's potent graphic image of the violence of America. Sure.

I had sort of seen it really embracing that message. And it wasn't until sort of not watching the video and just listen. that I was thinking, well, what are these two things doing? And they are in conversation with each other. They are, they collapse into one. And that's the hardest thing in many ways to, to tackle. It's heavy. Indeed.

So, Charlottish Gambino, best conceptual composition. Woo! Give it up. Final award, I want to give on a bright note, which is the best bridge. I love, I love a good bridge. And I also love this artist. I'm so glad we get to talk about her again. Let's roll a clip and see if you know the song.

Do you know this one? It's Casey Musgraves. This is Casey Musgraves. Casey Musgraves has been a recurring artist on the show. We've talked about her in our very first episode we ever produced. We did another one on her, I think, on our 18th episode and our 86th episode, I believe. She's coming through the show many a time. This is the chorus of her song, Rainbow.

She won best album for her album Golden Hour. And it's a songwriter's album. The lyrics are stunning. The composition and arrangement is just beautiful. This is the last song on the album. It's the closer. It is just her in a solo acoustic piano. She performed this at the Grammys,

and I had another tear in my eye listening to this song. It's an inspirational letter to anyone who's going through a hard time. As if they're stuck in a storm. but she says, don't worry, there's a rainbow over your head, too. Just look up. It also has this throwback quality to me. I imagine it's a songwriter's album. And here we have this harmonic progression.

The chords are doing things that I don't hear as often in other pop songs. It feels actually much more reminiscent of an older style, sort of a 70s piano style. It really, for me, evokes Elton John. I'm buying. Yeah. So that's Elton John's mellow. So much of what Elton John's piano progressions do is they move

through these chords where you actually have descending bass lines that sort of weave in between these chord progressions that you never quite know where they're going to go. They just keep moving forward and sort of falling onto themselves and then eventually resolving around

and unexpected in beautiful ways. And I think that this song does the same thing. I had awarded KC4 Best Bridge, and yet I played you the chorus. It's this quality of what we call voice leading, right? Where within the chords,

you have sort of melodies that move nicely together. And here we're going to hear some beautiful voice leading in the bridge, sort of a la Elton John. Oh, tie of the bow, take off your coat,

Take a look around Lovely. That moment when she sings Everything's all right now. Is so strong. There's a lot of reasons why. The first thing is that the chord progression that we're hearing has this descending minor sound

until, and that's sort of the storm. And then she says, everything's all right now. And the thing takes this major lift. Yeah. Check this out one more time. Okay. Minor going down, and then we ascend right here. And we don't only ascend.

We actually, part of what she's doing is using this really beautiful voice leading. There is this inverted chord that she uses, rather than landing on the root note of the chord, which is going to sound like this. That is my cat walking on the keyboard No joke Let's try that again But instead she plays it like this And let me play it in context for you

So this is how she plays it The storm The clouds open up and are suspended But had she played it Not with that nice little voice leading Inversion we would get it like this Storm and it's a little too strong.

Let me just zoom in on that really quickly. So here's how... Those two chords right next to each other. This is the original version. Here's the bad version. It's too bright and happy. No, no, no. It's too clear or something.

There's an ambiguity to the first inverted chord progression that gives you a sense of buoyancy and anticipation, yeah. And it's the only moment in the song where the chords were like kind of totally stop. And they emphasize it with this long reverb and she sort of, her voice rings out. I mean, that's, no, you're right. I mean, that's what a good bridge is supposed to do.

It's the section that tends to occur, say roughly in the like three quarters of the way through a song. And it's a contrasting section that usually never reappears again anywhere else in the song. So it's sort of there to generate a little more a moment of contrast before the payoff of the final chorus. He knows good about this one. What's that? Spoiler. It's twice? It's the pre-chorus.

This section has already occurred. So it's a pre-chorus repurposed as a bridge. Yeah, it's the exact same chords. What's so powerful about it is that she, not only just re-contextualized it into a bridge, the final two chords that she ends on are entirely new. So you're getting something where you're like, oh, I know where this is going. I've heard this thing before, but she takes the arrangement down. It's all just up in the higher register of the piano instead of all the other.

the deeper notes. And so you're like, okay, I didn't know where this is going. And then, ha. Because the sky is finally opened. The rain and wind stop blowing.

But you're stuck out in the same one. Just that tiny little moment for me is the rainbow over someone's head. It's one of those things we're like, you know, talking about a rainbow and a song can be extremely cliche. Sure. But when you do it and you pair it with the music so well, I'm teary-eyed about it. It really captures me.

I'm totally sold. And I'm always looking for an excuse to listen to Casey Musgrave. So that was lovely. These, to me, in a lot of ways, are much more compelling awards than the actual Grammy Awards. And it makes me wonder if Grammy voters should be forced to similarly provide a sort of rationale for every choice they. make the way you've done in what I find to be a very convincing way. That would be, I think, an interesting experiment. Yeah, I like that. That's interesting. Switch on Pop is produced by me, Charlie.

And me, Nate. Our engineering is by Brandon McFarlane. Design by Luke Harris, community management by Sarah Terry. You can find more episodes of the show on the Apple podcast app, Spotify, any other place, really. Including our website. Our website, switchdownpop.com. We'd love to talk with you. Under rocks and trees.

Where I live, under rocks and trees, clearly. We'd love to chat with you, so find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switchdown Pop. Again, your recommendations form the show. So please shout out anything. You're totally welcome to jab at me for my really, probably unearned and entirely subjective review of Lady Gaga's Shallow. I'm sorry. I think that's it. I think I have to end an apology.

We'll be back again in two weeks. Until then, thanks for listening.