‘Switched on Pop’ podcast hosts reflect on their evolving relationship with music

Almost every episode of “Switched on Pop” follows a format: One of its hosts breaks down a timely pop song for the other, pointing out musical concepts and inspirations present in the track. As the hosts — musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding — take turns teaching each other about, say, the disco elements of Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” or the biblical references behind Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” us listeners are also learning along the way.

It’s a format that’s worked since they first created the show in October of 2014, the result of a stirring discussion about the musical concepts behind Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” during a road trip.

“We’re trying to bridge the love of a song and the language to describe it,” Harding said.

Their latest book, “Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why It Matters,” replicates their podcast format. Focusing on 16 chart-toppers of the 21st century, the collection of studies uncovers the mass appeal of each track through musical insights (and helpful illustrations by Iris Gottlieb). The goal: For people to be “switched on” to listening and to have the vocabulary to explain why a pop song can be so captivating.

“Ultimately,” Sloan said,” a song only means as much as what we hear in it.”

. . .

What’s your earliest memory of listening to music?

Nate Sloan: I vividly remember listening to Sonny Rollins’ album Saxophone Colossus. I think it was the last track of that album, called “Blue 7.” Jazz improvisation always sounded kind of like gobbledy-gook to me, but I remember sitting in the living room, listening to Sonny Rollins and having this Russell Crowe-in-“Beautiful Mind” moment where all of the pieces just came together. This soloistic, improvisatory music that sounded completely nonsensical prior to that, all of a sudden sounded perfectly logical and beautiful and limpid. I thought, “Oh, I understand. This is jazz. I like this.” I can’t be more articulate than that.

Charlie Harding: My parents and I used to go to a cabin in the deep woods of Maine. It was a very rickety place that hardly had walls dividing the rooms. It had an old, dark brown radio mono speaker with a brown grill on it. It only got one station, which was the public broadcast classical station. I always associate classical music with being in the woods of Maine because we never listened to it anywhere else. I thought it was vacation music. For a lot of people, classical serves as something in the background or study music. [To me,] classical music smells like wood smoke and bacon cooking on a cold foggy morning.

NS: Yum. Multi-sensory.

When did you realize you wanted to pursue a music-related career?

NS: I know exactly when it was for me. I did one year of college in which I was planning to be an environmental science major. Towards the end of that first year of college, I suddenly realized I hate science. I love the environment, but I can’t do science. 

I took a leave from school, saved some money, and went to New Zealand. I travelled around for three months, and worked on a farm and at a yoga ashram. I thought about what I missed in the world and what I really missed was music. 

I went back to school and took my first music history class and from that point on, there was no turning back. I majored in music, I went to graduate school to do music history, and now I’m lucky enough to teach music history.

CH: I don’t think there was a moment when I decided to pursue music. Because of the precarious nature in the arts, you’re always pursuing music. You always have to be chasing it. For me, I’ve fallen into it, out of it. It was an AP Music Theory course that I took in high school that really turned me on to [it]. I loved the interpretive, analytical side, trying to understand how it all works. A little bit more of a scientific approach.

I started as a music major; I dropped the music major. I played in bands; I broke up those bands. Now, I’m incredibly lucky to have a fabulous partnership with Nate, making our podcast and writing our book. It’s come in and out, and I hope it continues to blossom.

NS: Imagine if every high-schooler got to take a Music Theory class.

CH: We’d have too many podcasts. 

NS: The world would be healed and peace on Earth would reign.

It’s interesting that you both had an on-and-off relationship with music. With Nate, it was the absence of music that made you want to pursue it. And with Charlie—why did you have the music major and then drop it?

CH: Oh, because there were really talented kids like Nate in my class, who I thought were little Mozarts. We actually went to college together, but didn’t really build a friendship until afterwards. Nate was, self-admittedly, slightly pretentious. He’d wear these really handsome ties and was a very talented pianist.

What really turned me off was, frankly, the traditional pathway of music education that’s still being centered on 18th century classical music. I ended up being strong in the analytical side, but it required a lot of performance and as a guitarist who was playing more contemporary music, I really didn’t have the chops to transcribe fugues on the piano. Nate would just waltz in and sight-read that stuff.

NS: I reject that hypothesis! I stayed up all night writing that fugue! I’m sure I walked into class like it was no big deal, but it was a struggle for me.

CH: The pedagogy wasn’t suited to what my skills are. And a lot of what we’re trying to offer in the book are ways into essential musical concepts that are contemporary, that are relatable to a modern listener. Had I had more opportunity for that, I might have stuck it out.

Nate Sloan (left) and Charlie Harding (right). Photo by Ellyn Jameson.

How did the two of you meet?

NS: We met in Professor Shapiro’s Orchestration class.

CH: Nate made an absolutely absurd orchestral transcription of Beethoven’s “Pathétique Sonata” as designed for an orchestra plus… accordion?

NS: Yeah, it was an arrangement of a composition by John Zorn for string orchestra and accordion.

CH: I thought Nate could play the accordion, but it turns out the music was just avant-garde and he could fake it. We became closer friends when we both moved out to California and played in a bluegrass band. Nate played the banjo and I played the mandolin. We were just doing something for fun and we built a really fun community around that group. That’s what really formed our friendship.

What inspired you to start a podcast?

NS: We were driving in California on Route 1 with our incredible, romantic partners, Whitney and Bess, and we were talking about this song “Call Me Maybe” that I was using in a class to discuss different musical properties. As we discussed it together, we had this light bulb moment when we both suddenly thought about how neither of us took popular music very seriously. 

Charlie was more of a techno, electronic, rock snob. I was kind of a jazz, classical snob. For both of us, this moment of uncovering all of these different musical, clever techniques that are present in a song like “Call Me Maybe,” which I think in our eyes was the epitome of pop fluff — that was our lightning bolt moment. [The song was] the doorway through which we walked into this world of popular music. 

How do you come up with the themes of each podcast episode?

CH: I wish we could say that it was more scientific, but frankly, how we’ve done this project for five years now, I think we really trust our ear. We’re constantly listening to what’s happening in the Billboard or more properly, in the popular zeitgeist, looking at releases and so on.

We’re looking for something that grabs our ear and has something new to offer. In much of the same way we talk about great songs on our show, we’re often deconstructing the elements of a song that happen very intuitively. Our ears are well-trained in pop music and our job is to then translate that to people who might not have the same fluency and comfort in sourcing, “This is why I really like that song.” We’re trying to bridge the love of a song and the language to describe it.

How do you go about researching for each episode after you’ve picked what your theme is?

CH: Deep listening. Reading and watching a lot of interviews. Maybe booking the songwriter or the producer, if we feel like it would be helpful for our audience to understand how that song was made. Oftentimes, our listeners are our best guides. Sometimes it’s putting a call on Twitter, saying, “Hey, what are you hearing?” or asking people to drop us voicemails, which will often find their way into the show. It really is not just me and Nate. It feels like an entire collaboration of so many people who love pop.

“In much of the same way we talk about great songs on our show, we’re often deconstructing the elements of a song that happen very intuitively.”

How did you pick which songs you wanted to cover in your book? And did you both come up with a comprehensive list before whittling it down?

NS: We assembled a huge list of what we thought were songs that were objectively popular and charted in the Hot 100 over the last 20 years; songs that we thought would have some longevity, some lasting power and relevance; and finally songs that could allow us to explore different musical concepts and different cultural changes within the popular music industry in the last two decades. It was a long process of going through every significant artist in the last twenty years and trying to ascertain whether or not they would make the cut.

In the end, what allowed us to finally pick the 16 songs that make up the core of the book was thinking about the overall goal of the book, which was to scaffold musical concepts in an increasing level of complexity. 

The initial chapters break down basic concepts of rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre. As you progress, the book uses those concepts to talk about more sophisticated uses of them. Once we had that, it became clear that we should start with Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” because that allows us to talk about basic concepts, like beat. We’ll do Sia’s “Chandelier” because that’s a great example of timbre. And then later in the book, we’ll talk about M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” because that’s a really good introduction to sampling, and maybe “Since U Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson is where we’ll talk about genre and meaning. What made our final decision was, “How do we tell the story of pop music and these musical concepts in a way that’s coherent and compelling?”

Are there any topics or pieces that you wanted to cover but didn’t make the cut?

CH: There were certainly a lot of artists that we wished we could’ve given more attention to. For example, we only very briefly touch on Janelle Monáe. I think we would’ve liked to talk about her more, especially with her recent album. 

There were also some more advanced topics in music that we decided were unnecessary for this book, like secondary dominance, more advanced modulations, and compound time signature. They aren’t that important when understanding how popular music works, but they are things that Nate and I get really excited to talk about. 

Photo by Oxford University Press.

Would you consider writing a second book?

NS: Yeah! We’ve talked about doing a book that would bring in more of the voices of some of the figures behind pop music of the 21st century — producers, artists, songwriters — and create a compendium of how the actual actors within contemporary pop music think about their craft and the state of music. Nothing like that really exists right now, so it could be a great addition to the canon.

What are you hoping readers take away from the book?

NS: What the book and podcast create together is a “switched on” method of listening, where you engage deeply, interpret, and try to unpack a song, rather than passively accepting it. That’s what I hope the book will accomplish — to incite listeners to do this “switched on” listening because ultimately, a song only means as much as what we hear in it. I’m excited about the idea of galvanizing more and more people to listen critically to pop music. In the end — maybe this is Pollyanna-ish — but make us all more informed, compassionate, and understanding citizens.

CH: Who’s Pollyanna? 

NS: We need a dad joke buzzer.

CH: Summarizing what Nate was saying, I really hope people can come away with great confidence in their listening, no matter their perceived skill level as musicians. They can love music how they love it. 

On top of being confident about the music they love, it’s having the bravery to step out and listen to things that are not within their boundaries. By offering an expanded vocabulary of how music works, we hope it gives people the capacity to apply that vocabulary to things where they aren’t as comfortable. I think that that is what Pollyanna would want!

. . .

“Given that Nate and I spent three years on this project and carefully picked each track, we'd like to focus on these songs, which are both intellectually and sentimentality important to us,” Harding said. Here are their 12 songs:

The dexterous electronic production, belting vocal, and endless hooks are not only an earworm, but also a shining example of how a song can take on new meaning. Ostensibly about a relationship, "Break Free" is also interpreted as a powerful queer anthem.

Beyoncé reinvigorated our love for 90s pop with its joyful upward modulations, new jack swing production, and soaring Whitney Houston-like vocals.

We have swung the pendulum on this song since first hearing it nearly twenty years ago. Britney performs multiple identities in this song, constructing two distinct choruses that complement each other and Britney's dueling public personas.

We call her Saint Jepsen for a reason. "Call Me Maybe" is a master class in pop songwriting with its timeless lyrics and thoughtful production, which together evoke the most uncomfortable feeling: Asking someone out.

Much maligned, Drake teaches us how lyrical aesthetics change over the decades. He often buries his rhymes. His half spoken, half sung vocal approach sounds off-the-cuff, but simultaneously clever, blurring the lines between intention and improvisation.

The only way to celebrate this song is to sing the chorus as loudly as possible with your best friends. Fun. captures the melancholy and joy of fleeting youth, literally bending time in their song like a time machine into the past. Listening to this song makes you feel young again.

This song has had a much longer life than the average pop song and it was one of the first to convert us to love pop. It magically balances an indie aesthetic with an over-the-top stadium-sized chorus. Plus, its source material, "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is a real favorite.

This generational PSA warning against the dangers of drinking contradictorily gives you the feeling of being inebriated. By mashing up his syncopated triplet flow against the double feel of the hi-hats, Kendrick gives us a woozy feeling and a song with a powerful message.

We both heard this live in an arena where it felt like M.I.A. was leading a coup d'etat against pop music patriarchy. She reinterprets samples from The Clash and Wreckx-N-Effect into a parody fever dream of immigrant stereotypes that takes bigotry and sexism to task.

You thought you knew "Hey Ya!" but only get it when you listen deeply the hundredth time. This song about relational discord is inappropriately also a frequent wedding playlist song according to Spotify. But André 3000 is intentionally tricking us with strange harmonies and odd time signatures in our favorite song that defies pop convention.

This club banger has more than meets the ear. It was one of the first successful pop tracks to merge the build-and-drop EDM song form with a traditional verse-chorus song. By raising the energetic stakes, Rihanna fulfills the song's prophecy, giving us space to meet on the dance floor, dance together, and escape from "a hopeless place."

Ever the master of melody, Taylor Swift delivers hooks after hooks. We particularly love how she changes up the second verse, delivering new musical ideas that feel totally familiar and novel at the same time. Her song evokes the restless anticipation of teenage romance. Plus it’s just super fun.

Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding’s book, “Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why It Matters,” is out now. New episodes for their podcast come out every Tuesday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to Switched on Pop’s curated 12 songs playlist below: