Switched on Pop - Who killed the key change in pop music?

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

When trouble strikes in music town, there’s one guy who gets the call. That’s me, Joe Treble, forensic musicologist. This week, I've got one of the most shocking cases I've ever worked. Someone killed the key change in pop music, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to find the perpetrator. The key change used to be at large on the Billboard charts. From the 1950s to the 1990s, 20-30% of all number one hits featured one. In Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody," the key change hits right before the final chorus. The song’s harmonic center shifts up, raising the pitch of the song, challenging the vocalist to hit higher and higher notes, juicing the big finish with excitement and pep. But starting in the 1990s the key change virtually disappeared from the Hot 100. Now, hit songs start and end in the same key, and no one seems to have even noticed. Except for me. This investigation will bring me face to face with a rogue's gallery of suspects and sources: Chris Dalla Riva, music and data specialist; Brandon McFarland, alias 1-O.A.K., producer; Emily King, singer and songwriter. Each interrogation brings me closer to revealing the murderer, but will I be able to handle the terrible truth? Tune in as I tackle the hardest case of my career: the case of the missing key change! Songs Discussed Emily King - Georgia Sleepwalker, Medal, The Way that You Love Me YG, Kamaiyah, RJ, Mitch, Ty Dolla $ign - Do Yo Dance (feat. Kamaiyah, RJ, Mitch, Ty Dolla $ign) Beyoncé - Love On Top Bon Jovi - Livin' On A Prayer Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) Frank Sinatra - Strangers In The Night Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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much like Arizona, but tonight it was pouring in music down. Water dripped on to my office floor from a leak in the ceiling. Broken headphones lay strewn across the desk. Treble investigations had seen better days. Lately, I'd been eking out a living on a steady drip of petty crime. Vocal duos harmonizing behind their partners back, film composers looking for a quick score, junkies who smash and grab whole choruses in the dead of night. But someone has to do the dirty work, and that someone is me, Joe Treble, musical Dick.

It wasn't always this way. Once, I was the top forensic musicologist in town investigating high-profile cases, holding power accountable. It had been a caesura since I'd had a big break, but that was all about to change. The clock struck a perfect fourth. I was getting ready to call today when I felt the hairs on the back of my cochlea stand on end. Footsteps came to a halt outside my office door.

I detected desperation in every clomp. Under my desk, I loaded my trusty 45 RPM record player. The door creaked open. Who the hell are you? I'm Charlie Harding. I'm a podcast host. I was staring at a sorry specimen of a man. He was a mess, barely making sense.

And what was a podcast host doing in Music Town anyway? What's the problem here, Charlie? They're gone. Who? They're all dead. He was getting hysterical. I had to sloth. slap some sense into him. Get a hold of yourself, man. You're at Allegro and I need you on Dante, who is dead.

The key changes. The modulations. The key changes and the modulations. All right, all right. Pull yourself together. Take a seat. Let me pour you a cup of hot jazz. Now tell it to me from the beginning. It all started when I was listening. listening to the Hot 100 this week, I went through song after song, after song, after song, Miley Cyrus, The Weekend, Cizza, Taylor Swift, Pink Pantherus, Ice Spice, Drake. Not a single one of the Hot 100 hits on the chart had a key change. So you're saying key changes are missing from pop music. missing or they've been killed off.

This strange and profoundly unattractive podcast host had chilled me to my core. The key change, known alias, the modulation, has been beloved in Music Town as long as I can remember. But according to this Charlie Harding character, at some point in the last few decades, the key change went MIA from hit pop. music. That means pop song start in one key, stay there, and never leave. So if something has

happened to the key change, I knew I needed to find out the who, how, and why. So will you take my case? Will you find out who killed the key change? My rate is $100 a day plus accidental's, and I can start right away. I didn't like it, but I knew where I had to start my investigation. I left Charlie in my office to collect himself and made my way down to critics' alley, the seedyest part of Music Town. It reeked of hot takes and listicles. Strung out reporters muttered album ratings to themselves. YouTubers begged me to click their rankings of Harry Stiles' top ten lyrical references

to fruit. I rushed past them and found a nondescript office building. I ran down the hall to the one person who could help me. The sign outside his office said, music and data, but my confidential informant told me this guy would sing like Pavarotti. I threw open the door and stepped inside. I'm Joe Treble, and I need to ask you a few questions. First of all, who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Chris Dalairova, and I'm a musician, and I work on data analytics for a music streaming platform called Audio Mac. Okay, Chris, if that's your real name. Last year, you wrote an article called The Death of the Key Change. When did you first notice that something had happened to the key change in pop music? So I went on this multi-year journey where about four years ago I decided I was going to listen to every Billboard, Hot 100 number one hit. for no particular reason I was just trying to learn some stuff I was going to play along with all the songs started collecting data as I went but I just noticed when I got to like the middle of the 1990s that

certain harmonic devices or chord changes that I had seen for in virtual decades upon decades I would only listen to one song a day just weren't coming up anymore so I decided to try to quantify that so what was the method that you used to conduct this study the method was mostly my ears and my guitar and, of course, a little bit of Excel wizardry where I was tracking, you know, what key all the songs were in and a gazillion other pieces of data about these songs. I could aggregate all the data there and I could see that there was a precipitous decline in the key changes and not number one hits over the last few decades. Okay, so far your story checks out, but I need to ask you, when was the peak of the...

the key change in the history of popular music. So the Billboard Hot 100 runs, it started in August 1958, and it's still alive today. Of course, the chart is the same in name, but over the years it's changed a bit where now we, before it was about just sales, now it's about streams and so many other sources. But between 1958 and like, I don't know, the early 1990s, about 20 to 30, percent of number one hits had a key change pretty consistently. It's not like there was a single 20 to 30 percent. Yes, shocking. Shocking, I know. So, out of every 10 songs you listen to, three had a modulation. Precisely. When you study this era of popular music, what is the most

common type of key change that you encounter? So the most common. The most common, key change. I've heard refer to a bunch of different ways. I always call it the gear shift key change, where usually towards the end of the song, you're going up a half step, you're modulating a half step or a whole step. So if you're in the key

of F, you know, you're going F sharp. If you're in the key of A, you're going to A sharp. And this is when people think of a modulation or a key change, this is 100% whether you're trained musically or not what you're thinking of. And there are so many iconic ones like living on a prayer,

by Bon Jovi. I want to dance with somebody, Whitney Houston. There's a great one in Strangers in the Night by Frank Sinatra, because he pauses right before it happens, so it really strikes you. A warm embracing dance, oh, ever since that night. But if people are thinking of modulation in the popular sense, that this is the type, the exact type of modulation they are likely thinking of. There's old blue eyes giving a paradigmatic example of the gear shift key change.

So what happened, Chris? You talked about the 1990s being this pivotal moment in the story of the key change. What changed? How did it go from being so prevalent to so scarce on the pop charts? So like I said, 20 to 30% of Hot 100 number ones had some sort of key change. between 1958 and 1990 half of all the songs

with key changes the type of change was this gear shift key change so it was first of all it was just really overdone I mean it's become a cliche and that's part of the reason that I think it died

is people just got super tired of it it became people looked at it is really trite lazy it's like the lowest common denominator of okay we need to inject some energy during the last chorus let's just shift up the key let's modulate a half step or a whole step and call it a day.

And that's something I know you've seen. I've seen it all. A hundred thousand times. Yes, exactly. I know you've seen it all. You know, fads, trends. What these eyes have seen, what these ears have heard, you wouldn't believe. And I have heard a lot of these.

So that's the first thing is, you know, things come and go out of fashion. Probably I think the more powerful forces here are, A, in the 1990s, hip hop begins to make a major impact on the Billboard Hot 100. So there are many more number one hits that are hip hop songs. And this will be a bit of a generalization because hip hop songs do sometimes use beat switches where there are key changes. But by far and large, hip hop songs do not experiment harmonically in this way, in the same way like Cole Porter did, Rogers and Hammerstein. Or Bon Jovi. Or the New Jersey great, my home state, John Bon Jovi. So that's one thing is there's this new genre. There's this new genre that really is taking a completely different look at how we make popular music.

So it sounds like hip hop is one of the prime suspects in our case. Are there any other suspects I should be investigating in this mystery? Yes. More broadly, I think it is digital music recording that is to blame. And specifically the digital audio workstation, your logic pros, your pro tools, your fruity loop. of the world that have changed how people compose music, and it's changed how the music that they make ends up sounding. So we could dive into this suspect a bit more if you're as curious as I am. Yes, let's draw a criminal profile. Psychological evaluation. A modulation like the gear shift key change

is, in my mind, maybe the quintessential linear songwriting element. You're thinking of section A, and then you're moving across the timeline and you get to Section B. Whereas if you've ever written in a digital audio workstation, if you've ever recorded music in Logic Pro or Pro Tools, the layout is very vertical. It encourages loop-based writing. And what we see throughout the history of popular music is, as there is different technology,

artists are shaped by how that technology works, and it ends up changing the songs that we compose. And I think the modulations and specifically this gear shift modulation are not as intuitive when you're working within a digital audio workstation. So overuse, the rise of hip-hop proliferation of digital audio workstations. All of these things have contributed to the death of the key change. But Chris, I need to ask you, do you think the key change going missing is a bad thing for popular music? Not necessarily. Like I said, half of these key changes in number one hits between 1950 to 1990 are all of the exact same variety, this gearship variety. And this is a change that I know it drives me crazy. I've spoken to a lot of musicians. Like I said, it just comes across a super trite. So the death of that specific key change, to me, I pat hip hop and the digital audio workstation. You're dancing on its grave. Yes, exactly. Now, do I think there are other? changes that you could make that, you know, maybe it would be cool if artists started experimenting with

them again, of course. But, you know, most changes I find in popular music, it's neither good or bad. It's just different people experiment and create complexity in other ways that just aren't necessarily harmonic or of this variety, I should say. So in my opinion, not necessarily the worst thing, but from time to time, I think it is worthwhile to experiment with some of this stuff. Maybe I'm starting to miss the gear shift key change. Maybe that's what I'm saying. But I'm curious, Chris, are there artists who have found ways to infuse new life and color into this overused cliché? Of course, there are a couple examples that jump to mind.

Beyonce's love on top in recent memory, she just keeps modulating, I believe up half steps and goes up so many times that it's truly unbelievable. Chris, thank you for your time. Thank you for having me. I love being part of this investigation, and I wish you well on the rest of your journey. Chris Dalariva gave me some interesting intel. Maybe the death of the key change was really a mercy killing. Modulations are more effective when they're few and far between. But then I remembered what else he had told me. He suspected hip-hop and digital audio workstations had had a hand in the disdemean. disappearance of the key change. That meant there was only one place to go. 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, 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. I threw my car into Prestissimo, and sped across town as the sun came up over Santa Monica Boulevard. I arrived at the Beat Factory and made my way to one of my most reliable sources. I found him hunched over a laptop and a MIDI controller. Treble? What are you doing here? Just a friendly chat. Wanted to hear a little bit about what you've been up to.

I'm a producer. I have worked with YG and Kailani, to name a few. And I also engineer a podcast like Switched on Pop. Podcasts. Sorry, a bug flew in my mouth. I love podcasts. Okay, One Oak, I'll give you the skinny. I'll tell you why I'm really here. I'm hunting a killer, the killer of the key change.

And I need to question you. I think we should start by listening to a song that you've produced. Okay, let's listen to YG Do Yo Dance, featuring Kamaya, RJ, Mitch, and Thai Dahlia. Well, that's a deliciously funky track, but I can't help but notice. There's no modulation. Why do you think it is that so few hip-hop songs contain a key change? Well, I wouldn't expect a rapper to have a key change,

and it doesn't really matter that there are beat machines and things taking over live music so much as the rappers aren't singing. And I think a modulation requires a singer to really make it work unless they were to rap harder or louder. There are a few examples of hip-hop songs with modulations that come to mind. Perhaps Travis Scott's Sicko Mode or one of my favorites, Kinkoonta by Kendrick Lamar. Key change coming up. There it is. He changed his voice in that moment. Let's see if he brings it back down. Did.

He modulated up and down. So perhaps a rare find in the hip-hop world. Now, I've also got a lead that digital audio workstations might play a role in the decimation of the key change in pop music. So, One Oak, when you produce music using a D-U. How does it change the way you approach the songwriting? It actually makes things like modulation super easy. Like just with a click of my mouse, I could grab all of the MIDI information, which is if I played a chord progression in my keyboard, it would show up as these little bars on my computer and I just highlight that and move it up. is really a no-brainer.

I'd imagine musicians would, you know, either have to write that music out or discuss it amongst the band what they're going to do, and I just have to click my mouse a few times. So you're saying you could bring the key change back to life with a click of a button, and yet you sit idly by while the key changes are massacred.

One Oak, why aren't you taking advantage of this technology? and modulating every song. Hey, don't put me in it. I think we just play with what the people want to hear. You know, we all don't have Kendrix in the studio to do their vocal wizardry. And I think, again, I go back to the modulation is centered around the vocalist.

You know, like without them, then the key change would probably be very confusing. I would love to hear more key changes. I would love to hear more vamps. I think that. That is something that I was excited about, you know, listening to music. But maybe we need to shift this focus to the singers and that asks them why, you know? What are they doing or not doing on that side?

I'm over here on the hip-hop side. Where are those singers doing? I don't know. One Oak had given me a new chief suspect. Maybe it wasn't the producers who killed the key change. I needed to speak to the singers too. Were they scared to take on the vocal pyrotechnics of a Whitney Houston? There was only one way to find out.

I jumped into my car and hit the ignition. I took a right on fourth and a left on diminished third. I headed to the industrial area of Music Town, where singer-songwriters work overtime to keep this town running. I had a tip to find the one they call the king. I found her on her break from panning for gold records in the melody mine. She was leaning against an upright piano, counting the cash from the load of uncut melodies

she just delivered to the line boss and humming a jaunty tune. I could see her hands were weathered from long days and nights, chiseling out raw tones from the oar of creation and forging them into verses and hooks. But were they the hands of a killer? that's what I had to find out. I hear they call you the king. I'm Joe Treble, musical Dick.

Why don't you go ahead and tell me your real name and who you are. Well, Mr. Trouble, my name is Emily King. Maybe my real name. And I am. I am everything that you said I am. I like to write songs. I like to clean. And I'm really good at vacuuming.

Word on the street. is you've got a new album out. What's it called and what's it all about? Well, I'm glad people are talking in the street about my album. It's called Special Occasion. And it's about finding the joy in life. It's not always obvious. Let's listen to a bit of your single metal.

Boom. This song has no business being so funky. I notice there's no key change in metal. I was hoping you wouldn't notice that because it goes against everything that you're trying to find. But yes, there is no key change in metal. And I got to say, most songs do not call for key changes. You can't force the key change. You can, but it could be bad, I think, if it's forced.

Less than 5% of hit songs from the last 20 years have a key change. I'm going to ask you, point blank. Did you have anything to do with the disappearance of the key change? Only if people heard my song Georgia and thought, I never want to do anything like that. Your song Georgia modulates from the key of G major to the key of A flat major, a semitone above. How does a key change affect your vocal performance in a song? Well, I'm glad I started at the key. I started that because, you know, you got to be able to get there.

And certainly it's one of those things that you do feel like you're jumping off a cliff. And even still when I sing and it shows, I think, here we go. You know, I'm like, oh, and we're taking it off and better get there. So it's a nice little challenge. It's a nice little way to kick your own butt. In your song, Sleepwalker, there's another kind of key change. A more rare and uncommon key change. A key change between the verse and the chorus.

That's right. Oh, my God. Yeah. There's this path when I'm writing a song, And I think a lot of people feel this way. You almost want to surprise yourself to keep it interesting. And sometimes that requires a key change and sometimes it doesn't. I think if the key change is predictable, then it's not as fun.

But if it's a little bit of a surprise, it really makes for a more exciting lift, you know, somewhere that you didn't expect to go. So that's probably what I was trying to do with that song. Now, I'm not so sure you're the perpetrator of this heinous crime. Because when I was listening to your new album special occasion, I did hear a key change. And that was in the song, The Way That You Love Me. Yes. How dare you make me feel so many emotions.

Sorry. Can I just say this was the most painful key change of my whole life. Why was that? Well, my creative collaborator, Jeremy Most and myself, he worked on this record with me. We've done all our records together, but we could not agree on this key change. I have actually several voice memos titled, Arguing with Jeremy over key change. just so I would have evidence of who was right at the end and who was wrong. I mean, it was absolutely painful.

We couldn't decide on the passing cords. We couldn't decide what key it was going into. This was the most challenging key change of my whole life. And we eventually, we had to put it down. We put it down and enlisted help. We enlisted the help. of a wonderful producer, a musician named Sam Cohen. And I had booked a session on my birthday on July 10th

because I said, I'm gifting myself a key change for my birthday. Okay? Because this has got to be resolved. And I'm not going to let this song go down in flames. A key change for your birthday. Now I know what to get you next year. I was so damn grateful for that. key change better than any cake, any ice cream cake. And that says a lot because I love ice cream

cake. Emily, I'm convinced that you didn't kill the key change. But I have to ask you before we go, if you didn't kill the key change, who did? I'm going to disagree with you and say that it lives on, but it shouldn't always be around. It's like the friend you want to hang out with sometimes. It makes you feel bit sometimes, but if they're around too much, it's just too much of a good thing. Emily, thank you for your time. I'll let you get back to your shift at the melody mine. Thank you. Mr. Treble was a pleasure meeting you. Good luck. The case continues. My interview with Emily King complete, I'd reached the end of my investigation. I drove back to my office. Charlie Harding was pacing back and forth in the hallway.

What are you still doing here? I tried to go, but I got stuck in this ostinado outside your office door. Well, I'm glad you're here. I've cracked the case, but I don't think you're going to like it. No one killed the key change. It's still alive and well. Emily King has one on her new album, and it's achingly beautiful. Modulations are even being used in hip-hop.

They might not be prevalent on the Hot 100 because digital audio workstations make producers more focused on the interplay of different loops rather than the harmonic arc of a song. But if you ask me, I think the key change ran away because it was being used and abused by pop songwriters

looking for an easy way to juice up their hits with extra emotion and vocal virtuosity. That's terrible. So if you want to find it, it's out there. You just have to listen. All right, trouble. You did it again. I guess we can say that this case is resolved?

Wait a minute. Was that a music pun? That's my gig, Harding. Stay off my turf. Sorry. But the next time there's trouble in Music Town, you know who to call. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung. engineered by Brandon McFarland,

and executive produced by Nishad Kurwa. Illustrations are by Iris Gottlieb and community management by Abby Barr. We're a production of Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switched on Pop and tell us your favorite key changes in pop history. Next week, we're talking Eurovision. And until then, thanks for listening. Get out of here, Harding.

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