Unexplainable - The idea of a song

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at ⁠Switched on Pop⁠ (along with the National's Aaron Dessner) break down how song intros can shape our perception and what we lose when they disappear. To watch this episode on video, find us on ⁠Netflix⁠! Guests: ⁠Charlie Harding⁠ and ⁠Nate Sloan⁠, hosts of ⁠Switched on Pop⁠; ⁠Aaron Dessner⁠, producer, songwriter, and member of ⁠the National⁠; ⁠Grace Spelman⁠, music writer For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Charlie Harding. Hello. Great to see it. Hey. Thanks for having me. So I'm recording from my home studio this time. Too bad we can't make it to see each other in person. Where are you recording from?

I'm in a secret location with a vinyl backdrop. drawing of my home studio. I love it. Wait, tell me about the backdrop. Well, at home, I have a ridiculous collection of guitars and synthesizers and things that, you know, entertain me and make music for the show for Switch on Pop. Right now, I am not there. So I had our great illustrator, Iris Gottlieb, make an illustration of my studio, and I printed it out on vinyl, and that just travels with me wherever I go.

It's fantastic. Maybe you should just use that instead. I love it. But you host another Vox Media. podcast, switched on pop. It's excellent. You guys also recently made your debut on Netflix. And you launched with this series on different parts of a song, but not a specific song. You were talking about the theoretical idea of a song. So you had an episode on intros, on verses, on choruses, on bridges. And the whole thing, it reminded me of something we do a lot

on unexplainable, which is tell us everything we know about something that's simultaneously both concrete and kind of ephemeral. Does that idea resonate with you at all? Yeah, I mean, my show is entirely about helping people listen more closely to music and understand how it operates at a deeper level. So that's exactly what we're trying to do with the series. Do you feel like the idea of a song is unexplainable? I have spent my entire career trying to understand the song. I'm almost 500 episodes into doing it. I don't think I've cracked the nut yet.

And so maybe the special series is like my attempt to understand that deeper, you know, architecture or skeleton, as we said, of the song. It's like there's the theory of a song, right, that's sort of abstract and impossible to get at. And then there's the song itself. Like, how do you, how do you think? think about talking about a song and like the idea of a song. You know, every song is like an individual person, right? Like we have our idiosyncratic stories, our histories, all of our cultures,

and that is what makes a story amazing. But also underneath all of us, like we share most of the same DNA. We have a skeleton. And underneath most songs is the skeleton of the verse, chorus, structure. And I figured that this would be a really fun excuse to talk to some of the biggest songwriters and producers and artists in the world. world to see what they think about each of these sections. I mean, for example, like intros, I'm kind of skeptical about intros. Like, they're really, sometimes overly long. They don't

always grab my attention. But we got to talk to Aaron Destner, for example, Aaron Destner of the National, who was written with Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams and so many others. And the way that he thinks about the introduction radically transformed how I thought about the role of the introduction of music. So we're going to share the first episode of your series. series today. So we're basically doing an intro for an episode on intros. That's very meta. Yeah. And for someone that famously hates intros, you got any feelings about this? What's the best way to intro and intro? My anxiety is very high at this moment. The best way to intro and intro is just to get right to it. To get to it. Okay. So let's let's end it. Let's get to the series.

Here's Switched on Pop. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Welcome to our Netflix debut. That is right. Switched on Pop is now on Netflix. That's right. And we're going to kick it off with a four-part series on the art of the song. We're going to be breaking down each section, the intro, the verse, the chorus, the bridge to figure out how each section works to move us emotionally.

So let's begin. Let's get it started in here. That's the unmistakable intro of the black-eyed peas. Let's Get It Started from their 2003 album, Elefunk. Somehow it's actually not the first song on the album. I think that's an oversight. Crazy. It begins with Fergie's dry vocal with that vocal fry and those bluesy bends.

Then we get this kick drum, eighth notes. Apple the app comes in, introduces a walking electric bass. We get this stacked building vocal harmonies telling us exactly what to do. Run, don't walk to the party. It's about to go off. And then there we are. We're off into the verse. It's a complete musical statement. And most importantly, this introduction is also foreshadowing the chorus, the most important part of the song, when Fergie sings, let's get it started. Because that, of course, is the hook.

Yeah, with us making our Netflix debut, I thought you might go with a track like, you know, Jay-Z. Allow me to reintroduce myself. But I think this Let's Get It Started intro, is entirely appropriate. This is such an iconic song, and yet I've never thought so hard about how this song starts before, but it actually, like, sets up the whole track in these subtle ways.

The Black IPs know how to get things started. Yeah. And so does every form of music ever made. I mean, all genres, all styles of writing songs, every song has to have an introduction, has to greet you. Yes. What do you feel like the role of the intro is in a song?

Well, in the world of pop music, it's often to grab your attention. Yeah. It's to say like, hey, pay attention, listen to this, stop what you're doing because we have something great in store for you. An introduction has to be love at first sight because you have to keep on going. And here's the thing, though, Nate, I frankly hate introductions. What? Songwriter Charlie Harding hates introductions?

If you ask my songwriting students at Berkeley and at NYU how I feel about introductions, this is what they're going to tell you. Charlie needs the intro to be as short as this video. Cut the intro. Cut the intro. Cut the intro. I just constantly hear songs that are self-indulgent with long introductions that don't grab my attention. And I think that we should cut them.

I think that my opinion about this is probably formed by the fact that you and I really came of age in the 90s when we've done research showing that the average song length peaked in 1998, four minutes and 29 seconds. people were really taking their time back in the 90s. I mean, take, for example, Sean Colvin's Sunny came home. Mandolin. I love the mandolin. It's still going. We've got some drums. Some Morgan.

Some guitar lines. Some nice harmonic changes. But what time is it right now? I mean, we are currently at 30 seconds, 32 seconds, 34 seconds before we get a single line. And I gotta tell you, I love this song. It is a smash. And I actually don't think that's a terrible introduction.

I actually think it's quite compelling. Yeah. It's constantly changing. It's evolving. But it is long and it's not alone. I mean, the smashing pumpkins tonight, tonight. I don't even have time to get to the end. Here we are.

You know, 10 seconds in. Let's just fast forward. I don't know. 40 seconds. Wow. 44 seconds in, we finally get some vocals, but there's probably no one who's more of a culprit of long intros than the cranberries. Their song, zombie, 49 second long intro. Whoa.

The song linger even longer. We get some nice strings, some guitars. Let's fast forward a little bit to, I don't know, let's say 45 seconds into the song. We are like, yonts. Over 50 seconds in. And we finally get to the verse. Yeah. What is the old adage?

Don't bore us. Get to the chorus. Those introductions are like three hours in TikTok time. They're epic. So if Sean Colvin, Billy Corgan, or Doloresa O'Reardon were your songwriting students, you would say, get that out of my classroom. Get it down to a cool six seconds and try again. Yeah. Gotcha.

And I would be wrong. Because, to be fair, those are all smashes. They're great songs. Those intros definitely feel like they could be a long wind-up scene in a movie. Like, it feels almost more like scoring than the introduction to a song. But having grown up in this time with these long, extended intros, and, you know, since then I probably have developed a bad phone addiction. I just feel like I can't bear having these long introductions anymore. And I feel like music has sort of responded the same.

Like, I feel like the intro has fundamentally changed. So I guess I want to look at with you, like, does the introduction still matter? I'd like to think the introduction still matters, but, you know, part of getting older is accepting change and better understanding it. So, yeah, let's discover what's actually happening before we make any judgments. Okay, so I began my inquiry about the importance of the introduction by just thinking about, you know, do first impressions actually matter? I would prefer they wouldn't. I mean, I don't love to get dressed and, you know, do my hair upright in the morning. But it turns out that, you know, there's a lot of research on the power of the first impression.

Have you ever heard of the concept thin slicing? Only with regard to deli meat. Got to be real with you, Chuck. The idea of thin slicing is this research proposed by Nalini, Ambidey, and Robert Rosenthal back in 1992. They published in Psychological Bulletin. this study that basically says that people are able to infer a lot of information and actually make accurate judgments based off of very low amounts of exposure to an idea. So basically, you can meet someone quickly and you can infer some information about them that's quite accurate.

Now, this idea is popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, which I mentioned because this research is extended into the world of music. Researcher Carol Crumhansel at Cornell University published a 2010 paper called Plink, Thin Slices of Music. And this research says that we can instantly know a song from a first impression. Wow. That if you play just 300, maybe 400 milliseconds of a clip of music, that you can know that song. And I feel like if this research is true, then it means that intros really matter and I need to be paying way more attention to them. And I figured we could test this research.

on a PhD in musicology, someone who has made nearly 500 episodes of Switched-on Pop, Dr. Professor Nate Sloan. Oh, you're talking about me. Yeah. I've prepared a quiz for you, and it includes an important prize if you can get 10 out of 10 songs.

Here's how it's going to go. You've got a first attempt, 300 milliseconds of a song. Second attempt, 400 milliseconds of a song. If you don't get it, I'll just play you in the intro. You ready? I'm ready. Here's song one.

Any idea? Carly Ray Jepson. Call me maybe 2012. Yep. St. Jepson. The origin story of our podcast. She inspired us to make Switchdown Pop. All right.

One for one. Okay. That was encouraging. You have some good thin slicing abilities. Song two. That's, um, let's get it on by Marvin Gay. Nice. That's good.

That's good. Wow. All right. Song three. Oh, it's like an early 2000s. Is it Britney Spears? Is it toxic? Yeah, it is toxic. Wow. That's wild. Isn't that amazing? This is, I mean, plink, thin slicing. Let me take you back a little further in history. Okay. The Miles Davis, Freddie Freeloader. Dang, you're going to agree.

Wait, this is wild. Yeah, Witten Kelly on piano. You have earned that PhD. How about song five? That was 300 milliseconds. Here's 400 milliseconds. People in this study have higher ability to recall a song with a longer slice. 400 milliseconds usually gets a better outcome.

It's not Robbins call your girlfriend, but it is, it's something, like a synth dance track. Oh, wow. Nope. Off. Okay. Maybe I'll give you a pass on one of them. Let's see how you do on number six. The Beatles, all you need is love.

I've saved the hardest ones for last. Oh. Is it a Led Zeppelin song, one of their acoustic? So like over the hills and far away or something like that? I don't. Nope. Do you give your students two free passes and, you know, assignments? Maybe we'll give you two free passes.

I don't think you're going to get the next ones. Way to set me up for failure here. You didn't even hear it. Here it is. Again. Okay. It's a, it's like a turntable sound. Wait, give it to me one more time.

Okay. It's like a 90s track. It's, um, Groove is in the heart by delight. Wow. Some of the outcomes of this research does show that people are able to often accurately place decade and time frame, even if they can't get the song. That's Missy Elliott's Get Your Freak on, right?

That's Work It from 2002. Oh, work it, obviously. So you were within 10 years or so. Man, you're struggling. Something I'm learning about this is if you, you don't recognize it immediately, you're not going to come up with it. It's like instinctual. You know, you hear it and you know it or you don't.

And you guess and flail and embarrass yourself. Those are the only two options. All right. Number nine. Okay. I'm going to ask for it one more time, not that it will make a difference. What are you thinking? Despicito.

Ooh, interesting. This is a really hard. one. I still don't know what it is. If this world were mine. Oh, wow. If this world was mine, I take your dreams and make him most of it. That's, that's a 0.1% of listeners. If you, if you're listening or watching this and you correctly identified Luther by Kendrick Lamar and Siza, like, let us know because

that, you might be a savant. Well, and I was really messing with you there because, you know, begins with this just lovely nylon acoustic string guitar, which basically hardly occurs through the rest of the track. And then it moves on to a classic sample. So I was trying to throw you off multiple ways. I think I succeeded. I have one more for you. Here's number 10. I think you have no chance. I don't know if you're going to get this song within the first like 10 seconds. Nothing. It's Mariah Carey. Yes. But what track is it? Ready? Are you, are you trolling me right now? No, but the prize was to maintain your musical dignity, and you have not succeeded. But I'm asking you because we did this with a 90s music quiz like years ago,

and I didn't know Mariah Carey's fantasy, so I feel like you're throwing it back in my face, and I thought you were my friend. It turns out, first impressions matter. I think that's what I'm learning from this research. You were able to capture many of those, and I tried to deceive you on a number of them. Well, I have another takeaway. In addition to, you know, you either know it or you don't, it's like songs that you know really well are easy to identify. Songs that you've heard a million times, right?

Those are the ones that you can just instinctually get. Songs that you might be familiar with, but aren't like, you know, buried deep in your synaptical pathways. It's harder to get. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-Doo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer.

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Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. It turns out you can reset your expectations about songs though, Nate. You know, at the beginning of the show, I played you, Let's Get It Started by the Black Eyed Peas. If you were alive back in the 2000s, you would know that it was originally released in 2003 as Let's Get R Word, which at the time was slaying for getting wasted. The song even included a bridge about an epileptic seizure. Disability rights advocates were rightly appalled at this song.

But somehow the song is given a second chance to introduce itself to the world. The Black IPs rewrite it for the 2004 NBA playoffs. And it's a hit. So you're telling me that Big Ben Wallace and the 2004 Detroit Pistons are responsible for saving the reputations and careers of the Black Eyed Peas. That's right. I mean, I'm willing to admit that there have been good interesting. in the past. So many classic tracks.

I mean, I think about like the Who are so good at intros. Yeah. Hold on a second. I'm just going to go microwave a burrito. You won't be fooled again by another long intro. I understand. While you're microwaving your burrito, I'm going to play you Leonard Skinner's free bird. I mean, you're basically strapped in for a nine minute long song now, right?

Totally. You got to refill your lighter during that intro, perhaps. These are both the epically long variety. How about the kind that gets you dancing from Beat 1? It's a long break in superstition. I love this, Charlie, it's making me think of one of my favorite stories from like the annals of pop history, which is when the temptations were recording Papa was a Roland Stone, which has an absurdly long intro. Yes. The producer of the track, Norman Whitfield, didn't tell the lead singer.

Dennis Edwards when he was going to come in and Dennis Edwards was just in the recording studio just getting pissed being like what this is the intro is still going on there's strings there's like like what and Norman Whitfield intentionally did that because he wanted

Dennis Edwards to sound a little mad when he started singing that song to like you know it's a song about an absentee father and he wanted to have like an edge in his voice and Dennis Edwards finally comes in after I don't know like two three minutes and goes, it was the third of September.

It was the third of September. And he is, he sounds pissed and it's because he actually is because of that long intro. I love that story. It tells us that yes, the intro can be purposeful. There were so many great classic ones. I mean, Nate, can I play you one more? As long as I don't have to guess it, yes. How dare you?

Yep. How dare, dude. That's Rick Astley is never going to give you up. You just got Rick rolled. I mean, but to do, it's a great. intro. I'm, I'm speechless. Yeah, it is, it is a good intro. It is a good intro. I just feel like intros maybe haven't been as good lately. I don't know. I'm trying to get into my head of like, why is my primary advice like kill the intro? Maybe it's that, you know, our sort of nostalgia

loop obsessed culture has made it so that intros are less original. I found this really long playlist recently called pairs of songs with eerily similar beginnings created by someone with some of the best ears in music. I'm Grace Bellman. I am a music writer and professional playlist maker. So for the past 12 years, Grace has been collecting songs that sound alike in their introduction, Sonic Twins, if you will. And it started with a new song that sounded like an old song. I had heard Back to Black by Amy Winehouse and Baby Love by the Supremes. I had noticed that they started very similarly. Once she heard this first pairing, she started hearing them everywhere.

And they weren't just new and old songs. They were also songs that were sometimes made in the same era. Then I noticed there was a kink song and a Beach Boys song, King's Sweet Lady Genevieve and Beach Boys God Only Knows. Those started the same. Whoa. Same key and everything. Yep.

Grace has some sharp ears. This playlist is full of songs where they start with the same chord, the first few notes. They're almost always in the exact same key. And what's interesting is that for Grace, that this playlist ended up being less about things sounding the same and often more about finding really unlikely connections between songs of very different types. I have some favorites. I have like D'Angelo and Eric Satie one. There's this Eric Satie piece that I would play called Jetteau on the piano.

What? She says it sounds like D'Angelo's Back to the Future Part One from Black Messiah. That is a deep pull. So ultimately what Grace finds from this playlist hunting that she's been doing for over a decade is that intros have a lot of information to tell you that they're worth paying attention to. I mean, like everybody, especially now, my attention span is short, but it always has to have been even before the introduction of smartphones into my life. And I really, and I find myself being judgy on the first three seconds. Like, this is what your first impression is. Like, what you, you, the artist, have decided that the first impression of me will be.

and I know you thought really, really hard about it. And I know that for a lot of artists, it's like they want you to keep your attention. And so I think there are some artists who I'm sure, like you had said before, like really take their time in luxury over like six minutes of guitar or whatever. But I just think even that itself is informative. Oh, you're the type of artist that thinks that I now think that that's important. Because if you've decided to keep that in there, even though I might be bored by it, what does that say about the rest of the song? Is this a song where I'm going to have to do close listening where, like, you know,

is it the way I listen to like minimalist music where it's kind of the same thing over and over for a while. And I really appreciate the small changes. So if you have a kind of boring intro, then I might go, oh, okay, I might have to like listen to really closely to what you're doing and listen for a change. But at the end of the day, my favorite intros are the ones that catch my attention. And the ones that just try to like be as flashy as possible. I love what Grace is saying here. It's like whether it's long, whether it's short, whether it's, you know, eye popping or whether it's calm.

Yeah. The first thing you hear in a track is essentially announcing to a listener like, this is who I am. This is my sound. This is my artistry. These are my musical values. And going back to our, you know, thin, slice. thing. It's like you can get that from maybe just a couple hundred milliseconds of sound. You learned so much about an artist, which is a way I've never really thought about music before,

honestly. In an episode I switched on pop long ago, we theorized this idea of the pop overture where artists would put a secret chorus melody into the beginning of their song just so that it's familiar by the time you hear it again. I think one of the first ones we identified was closer by the chain smokers featuring Halsey. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da we ain't never getting old yeah okay

right so what do you call that a subliminal chorus? Right exactly. So people are basically like all right let's get the chorus first but we're going to have to have an intro what are we going to do about it. And yet since that sort of like

2010's EDM era where we're hearing a lot of those pop overtures more and more the intro has just been chopped off. Take, for example, Sabrina Carpenter and her song, Taste. Oh, I leave quite an impression. Five feet. She leaves such a strong impression. She doesn't even need a first impression.

There is no intro. Boom, right into the song. Benson Boone does the same thing on Sorry I'm Here for Someone Else. I'm sorry I'm here for someone else. but it's good to see your face. Unless you count that as an intro, but I don't think that's enough.

I wouldn't say. Another recent hit does the same thing, Stella Lefty's Boston. On a train back to Boston and we're jumping the gun and I'm telling you, baby, this is a part I'd run, but I like it when you're nice,

like it when you're nice. No intro. Maybe part of the reason we used to have intros was for radio DJs to be able to transition between songs. I'm just making this up as we go. That's a good reason. Like, is there an explanation, perhaps that's technological?

When you're able to, you know, pull up a song at will on a streaming device, you don't necessarily need to have that padding of the intro. I'd have to think of more about this, but I'm not ready to say it's just a case of like, oh, people don't have attention spans anymore. You know, the technology is certainly a reason. You know, we listened to a number of intros earlier on that were over 30. 30 seconds long, a song on streaming platforms usually does not count as a full stream unless someone has listened to at least 30 seconds of it. And so if you haven't given someone some

interesting material early on, you know, they might hit skip and go to the next song, which is incredibly easy now. I mean, you used to have to get up, you know, change records. That was kind of a pain. And so, yeah, people will have much more flexible listening habits, perhaps. I'm sure there's some music fans who are distressed that the introduction might be a lost art. But I feel pretty confident saying that it's not going anywhere. And in fact, I can back this up because I went and spoke to one of the busiest music producers in the game right now. Someone who's worked with Taylor Swift, Noah Khan, Gracie Abrams, and has made music for decades with his band, The National. It's Aaron Dessner. And Aaron is such a fun person to talk to about this topic because not only

has he worked on like some massive hits of the last few years, but he's really thoughtful and very generous about how he approaches making a song. So I feel like he's the perfect person for us to hear from about how and why introductions still matter in the world of music. And the very first song I asked him about, it might be the biggest track he's worked on. It's Cardigan by Taylor Swift. And it has a very unique intro. Here's what Aaron had to say about this introduction. That one's interesting. It's actually what you hear when that song starts.

You hear the air conditioning in the backstage of an arena in Germany where the national was playing where I wrote it because it was really cold. It was like a hockey arena in Germany or something, an awful, awful situation. But then that's me patting my leg, you know, like playing drums on my leg, which I often do,

which I kind of learned, I learned over time that if you record yourself like playing surfaces or your body and record it with an iPhone, it just sounds cool. I wrote the music first and Taylor wrote to it. I think she said that when she heard that sound of the, what is me, like, playing my, my thigh, essentially, that it reminded her of someone

walking, like, on cobblestones in high heels, like, unevenly. And that gave her an image in her mind, which sort of, like, led her into the narrative that she wrote, you know? That's wild. Okay. I was like, mm, choruses are the most important thing. It's the thing you write first, and in fact the entire song concept came from like Aaron Dessner just going on his I know. It's wild to think that one of the biggest songs of Taylor Swift's album, folklore, starts with air conditioning from a backstage room in a German stadium and then Aaron Dessner just slapping his thighs. That's wild. Wow. Okay. He has a lot to teach us. Speaking of introductions, I also had this theory that another Taylor Swift song might be inspired by one of Aaron Destiner's tracks for the National.

There's a national song called The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness that has a really striking opening. Those angelic voices, they're a little reminiscent of the Taylor Swift song from Torture Poets Department. that Aaron Destiner produced called So Long London. Those breathy cathedral vocals. Yeah, I hear it. So I asked Aaron, hey, I have this conspiracy theory that these two songs are related. Is there any truth to it? Here's what you said.

I'm going to debunk that. It's a good story how this happened. Taylor was, she actually, she arranged those vocals to go at the end of the song. So she was doing those coral, like these angelic coral parts over the end of the last chorus of the song that you hear. When you listen to the song, you'll hear her doing that. But then she actually said, but what if that went at the beginning of the song? Taylor is interesting when she records because she's kind of mapped it out in her head. I think part of it's like comes naturally to her.

it's also because she's been thinking about it. So she'll come in and kind of have a whole architecture in her head that she's going to chase down. And that was one of those things that then we were like, oh, wow, that's so beautiful. But it was at the beginning. And then she kind of sang more to it. So I was wrong. But it did kind of teach me something, which is that you might think the introduction is the first thing you make when you're making a song. You know, seems like kind of logical.

Start with the intro and then keep going. Yeah. And it turns out that is not the case. In fact, it might be the last thing you do is you make the whole song and then you're like, okay, now what do we put at the very beginning? And the case of this song, it's what you did at the very end. Another really fun introduction that Aaron's cooked up is actually the lead single from Gracie Abrams' forthcoming album. It's called Hit the Wall.

And I love what Aaron and Gracie did at the beginning of this track. That is a crack in the pavement, I'm a slip in odd. I'm afraid that my fortress is a glass box. That is a cool opening sequence. It's like, right? It's really organic and yet it feels electronic? Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I had another theory that I wanted to share with Aaron.

I was like, maybe there's some inspiration from. from minimalist music, you know, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. Is there any truth there? Let's find out. The story of that song is basically that I was searching for something to inspire Gracie. Because I feel like we were hitting a wall creatively with the album where it was like, literally we were kind of stuck where we had like all these different songs. But we didn't have the centerpiece of it or like the glue. And so I was in the studio early searching one day and just was like,

fuck it, I'm going to make the coolest thing I can make. I'm going to sample myself. I'm going to sequence myself. And I'm going to write chords. And then she walked into that, you know, and she just started, and she wrote the song and like, it just, because it's like triggered her brain. And then we were, we felt, oh, hit the wall. That's the, that's the glue that binds everything else together because it's kind of minimalist,

weird avant-garde pops on, but it's also like clearly organic, you know, like related to the fulkier side of her world. But then there lyrically, it's really self-reflective and existential and just brilliant in the way that she's like looking at herself and the patterns of breakdowns and kind of what her life has been like in recent years and, and all the success too. But like, I think the intro is really on that song I would say it's very very important it sets the table in a way

and kind of it peaks your curiosity so the intro for Hit the Wall is actually pretty short but I feel like it captures so much of not only the song but also you know what went into creating it it's the whole inspiration for writing it yeah so when Aaron and I were talking he was actually speaking to me from his

studio called Long Pond in upstate New York where so many artists, including Taylor, have recorded. And I asked him if there was an introduction from his work that stood out. And he kind of looked around his studio and then he told me this. As far as intros and the introduction of saying, like Noah Khan, you know, the Great Devite came out recently. And we made a bunch of songs for it, the end of August, which opens his record. So it's the intro to his new record.

And I was kind of shocked when he told me it was the first song because it's kind of this, in general, it's different. It was like a new world in a way for him. But he had written that kind of impressionistic piano that you hear at the beginning that he sings to. And I created this drone around him. And when we recorded it, it was August. And here you can actually see like that pond right there.

And there's just a ton of crickets and frogs and all birds and all kinds of noise-making beautiful things. And so I just opened the door and the piano mics on the U-1 Yamaha U-U-N are right there. And so you really, it's like you hear just late summer feeling and like this drone of organs and other instruments. and he kind of saw that through with me and trusted it so much and loved it so much to make it the intro to his record and just how it's being received. That to me is really affirming,

life affirming and art affirming. And just felt like, oh, he took a risk, definitely putting like a long sort of out-there song as the first thing that people would hear. So I really appreciated that. Oh, man. I feel like I've had it all wrong. Right?

The introduction is alive and well. I mean, take it from one of the most in demand producers in pop right now. And even those long intros, they can be powerful starts of creation. They can help greet us into a song. Maybe I've been wrong this whole time. Okay, so if you're changing your tune on the introductory, Charlie. Yeah.

How do we want to think about this structural part of the song? Like what is its role? How does one approach it? How are we going to wrap this thing up? Well, first of all, I need to make a formal apology to all of my students. But, you know, to that point, like, an introduction has to make a memorable and unique first impression. Like, it's got to set that scene, but it can't do so in a way that it's just like repeating

the same chords. it has to be evolving and taking you somewhere. The sort of musical gesture can't overstay its welcome. Yes. It has to set up all of our expectations of where the song is going to eventually go. And it has to do that really quickly. It's a lot to pull off as a musician. It's hard work.

So we've discovered the introduction is alive and well. In fact, it might be one of the most important parts of the song. Yeah. Hopefully we've introduced ourselves well. We've captured that thin slice of your attention for anyone, finding us on Netflix who just, you know, scrolled away from binge watching Bridgeton or Love is Blind and stumbled upon our humble podcast.

We hope you come back because we have a whole series planned. What comes after the introduction, Charles? Well, the intro matters because you don't get the whole story unless you grab someone's attention and you pull them right into the verse. Yes. And next week, I believe that Nate, you are going to argue that justice is due for the verse. Yes, a very underrated part of it. of song structure, IMO.

Until then. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And listening. Oh. There you go. Got to work on that. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer.

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