Why You Should Love Modern Pop Music with Nate and Charlie of "Switched on Pop"

Monday Music Club with Will Anderson

Host Will Anderson sits down with Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, the creators of the Switched on Pop podcast, to discuss their journey from

Key takeaways

• Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding founded Switched on Pop as a way to maintain a connection after moving to different cities.
• The song 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen served as a pivotal moment for the hosts to recognize the technical brilliance in pop songwriting.

Main topics

• Origins of Switched on Pop
• The concept of 'Poptimism'

Notable quotes

You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy.

Conclusion

The episode provides a compelling argument for treating pop music with

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Support for Monday Music Club comes from Sonos. There's no denying that an amazing sound system can elevate a song's emotional impact. Sonos lets you sink into a song and hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Sonos is a holistic sound system with speakers and tech that work together and bring you sound throughout your home. Keep an eye or an ear out for a segment later in the episode where I'll show you how I use my Sonos Adventure Set to elevate all the audio I listen to in my home and on the go. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. Speaker 1 (0:35) This week on Why Are You Like This? I am talking with the one, the only Colin Kaepernick. Colin joins me for a fantastic conversation marking the 10-year anniversary of his protest. We dive deep into his football career, his decision to protest, the work he's been doing with Know Your Rights Camp, and his new memoir. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This? wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 4 (1:03) I'm Will Anderson, and this is the Monday Music Club. Today's podcast is a little different. I'm excited to be joined by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, the two hosts of one of my favorite music podcasts, Switched on Pop. We're going to talk about their podcast, how they got into it, and then talk a little bit about the history of pop music and how that relates to modern music. And then we're going to play a game to get some of their recommendations on what we should be listening to. As a pop head myself, I can safely say that if you haven't listened to Switched on Pop yet, It's incredible. They are both music professors and do such an incredible job of breaking down pop music for us mere mortals to understand. So Charlie and Nate, welcome to the Monday Music Club. Speaker 4 (1:43) Support for Monday Music Club comes from Sonos. There's no denying that an amazing sound system can elevate a song's emotional impact. Sonos lets you sink into a song and hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Sonos is a holistic sound system with speakers and tech that work together and bring you sound throughout your home. Keep an eye or an ear out for a segment later in the episode where I'll show you how I use my Sonos Adventure Set to elevate all the audio I listen to in my home and on the go. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. Speaker 4 (2:19) Nate, Charlie, how are you guys? Thank you so much for joining us today. Doing great. Thanks for having us. Awesome. Awesome. Speaker 5 (2:25) Great to be here. Speaker 4 (2:26) I'm so glad I get to talk to you because like I was telling you earlier, your podcast is one of my favorite music podcasts. It's awesome to finally get to meet you guys. And again, I, as a pop head, it's just a dream to have something where people are geeking out about pop music like I like to do. with my friends, or even just by myself in my own head with my poor dogs who have to listen to it. Can you guys tell me a little bit about each of your backgrounds? I know each of you come from the academic side, but Charlie, you're on the songwriting side. So tell me about how each of you came to study music, to analyze it and all that. Yeah, so I first Speaker 5 (3:02) learned about this thing called musicology when I was in college. Charlie and I went to the same college and took one class together. But we didn't really get to know each other until after college. Fast forward, we're both in San Francisco. I'm studying now a PhD in musicology after discovering and falling in love with it. Charlie's working a corporate gig out in the Bay. We're playing bluegrass together. Charlie on mandolin, myself on banjo. And Charlie is moving to New York, or I'm moving to New York. Who's moving to New York, Charlie? You're moving to New York. I'm moving to New York, yeah. And we're like, we got to stay in touch somehow. We're not gonna be able to play music together. And we have this crazy idea. Let's start a podcast where we talk about pop music. It'll be a way for us to connect with each other. And it'll be a way to explore this repertoire that we've always been kind of skeptical about, but we want to understand better. And that was really the genesis Speaker 6 (3:59) of the show. I've been doing some songwriting and production. So I was bold enough to think that, oh yeah, I can make a podcast. I can edit that. Since then, we've been doing the show 12 years now. Nate is a tenured professor at USC Thornton School of Music. I'm also a music educator, both at NYU and at Berklee College of Music, teaching songwriting and production. Speaker 4 (4:19) So did you guys go into this as huge fans of pop music? Or was it more just, I want to explore this in a way that like, see if there is some critical analysis that can be made of this vapid sort of genre. We were suspect. Speaker 5 (4:34) Yes. Really? Okay, okay, okay. Total outsiders, self-described music snobs. And one of the incredible journeys in making our show switch on pop for over a decade has been opening our ears to not only the sounds of pop music, but to all kinds of genres that maybe at one point we didn't take seriously. That's been one of the most... wonderful and unexpected outcomes of doing our show each week. We have Carly Rae Jepsen to thank. Speaker 4 (5:05) I saw Speaker 6 (5:07) that. So was it really Call Me Maybe that was the turning point of, oh, this song is actually a genius? Oh, yeah. I mean, we already had the idea for Switched on Pop, maybe as a blog. It was a nod to Wendy Carlos, one of the great synthesists who brought classical music and synthesizers together. But it was really Carly that... showed us that a great pop song is as thoughtfully composed as the you know great classical and renaissance things that nate and i had studied in our music degrees and undergraduate uh call me maybe is a song where every chord is deliberately chosen to make you feel the uh the nervous anticipation of really the most uncomfortable thing that you can possibly do as Speaker 4 (5:53) a Speaker 6 (5:53) human ask somebody out yeah Speaker 4 (5:55) I remember where I was the first time I heard that song. I remember I was in my living room at my house here in Nashville, and a friend of mine was like, you have to hear this song, because he knew the producer had produced it from Canada, and it was like... I remember being blown away. I'm like, this is the new bar for catchy songs. Maybe I didn't have the critical ear you guys did, but it was something shifted, I feel like, in pop music around that time where all of a sudden the hook, you know, Katy Perry kind of started it off in a way with kind of shifting towards that Max Martin, Luke Town, Dr. Luke Sound, and then Call Me Maybe was just its own level of hookiness. But what did you guys listen to growing up? Like in college, high school, what was your... I mean, I was a deep jazz head. My dad was a huge jazz Speaker 5 (6:42) fan, had a massive record collection. And that was like just the music I lived and breathed for most of my, you know, young adult life. And, you know, and then I got my kind of ears opened up. I discovered classical music in college. I discovered, you know, noise rock because we lived in Providence and it was like, you know, lightning bolt was huge. And then but yeah, but it was really only when Charlie and I sort of sat down, we're like, we're gonna make this podcast, we're gonna listen to these artists that, you know, our younger selves would have just like, turned our noses up at, you know, yeah, the Katy Perry's, the Britney's, the Maroon 5's or whoever, that I was like, wow, I really had shut myself off to a lot of sounds out there. And then let's hear, let's hear, I'm curious to hear Charlie's answer to this. I mean, behind Speaker 6 (7:35) you, Will, you've got the Beatles' Revolver. You've got Hendrix. You've got the Stones. Those are the things I grew up on. And I think it was probably Daft Punk that were the bridge into pop for me. Because Daft Punk incorporated so much of the sounds of 70s rock in their dance music. You know, they made synth solos that sounded like guitar solos. But they were making, you know, four to the floor, very dance-oriented and pop. adjacent music. That's, I think, what started to Speaker 4 (8:05) change my year. It's so interesting because I feel like when I was in college studying ethnomusicology, it was very... I didn't get my PhD in it. I was done. The only reason I studied it was because they let me tour. That was it. They were fine with me skipping class as long as I sent them pictures. But I do remember there was a subset of kids who were the jazz heads and a subset who were the... talking heads buffs you know and then there was like me and one of my friends who were the pop heads and we would argue venomously like i'm telling you guys like this is this is a legitimate genre and he's the one who actually moved down to nashville with me because he's like i gotta be around the music but it's such an interesting time now because i think about kind of pop music and eras obviously especially as i'm diving into this podcast because like you guys I started this podcast about history stuff because I realized there was so much about classic artists I just didn't know. All the stories behind the albums, all these things that people seem to know about these artists, I was like, man, I really need to read. I need to just sit down and read about this stuff, which is how I got into sort of diving into the history of it all. But for me with the era, it's like, you know, what was, in your mind, what was that shift in like 2000 to, you know, from that early kind of like, true prototype pop, which was the Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the NSYNCs. What was that shift into the 2010s like for you guys, both as young people and now looking back on it? Speaker 6 (9:35) Well, it was a great time to be covering music as a job because it was a big moment of transition. The thing about the music industry was at a real low post-Napster. Streaming is really just starting to take off in the early 2010s when we get started. It's not until 2017 that streaming finally is the dominant source of revenue. And so in this transition, the sound of popular music is really trying to find its footing. You have the development of EDM, which starts to influence everything. We hear the drop. ends up making its way into pop songs, into country songs. The development of trap music becomes huge. And again, another genre where it bleeds into every other genre. So there was a lot to discover then. And we also started to see songs getting shorter, songs responding to the streaming platforms. So it was a really fun time to think about music as it was evolving. Yeah. I feel Speaker 5 (10:34) like there was also a cultural shift. that we were writing in a lot of ways. Now maybe it's called poptimism, you know, the idea that pop music isn't just this corporate assembly line opiate for the masses, but actually like a legitimate art form unto itself that expresses like manifold identities and subcultures. And it was really cool to see this new appreciation for the pop star that hadn't really existed where like, you know, traditionally, I mean, when, when, when we were researching our, our 2019 book switched on pop, how popular music works and why it matters. It was so interesting to go through reviews of artists like say Britney Spears, you know, when, when, when she came out in, in the, you know, early 2000s, late, late nineties. And yeah, but no, but especially like, oops, I did it again, like 2000. That song was just destroyed. That whole album was just ruthlessly vilified by the indie music press. And then fast forward 10, 15 years, you find outlets like Pitchfork taking these artists seriously and trying to understand what they're doing and how it resonates with people. So yeah, I feel like there was kind of a big sea change Speaker 6 (11:59) as well in that respect. We had to shift our mentality from, do I like this? Speaker 4 (12:05) To, what does it mean? Who is it for? What is it doing? Speaker 6 (12:09) I Speaker 4 (12:09) think there's also been a shift, too, in the awareness of how songs are made. As 2010 hit, that was also the era when the home recording started coming out. It wasn't necessarily this mystery of sitting in big studios. I remember when my band was... going into these giant studios. That was like our first time ever seeing anything microphone related or, you know, like outboard gear related. So we were blown away. And this is in like 2006 or something. And then now, you know, everybody's making music at home. And it feels like the 2010s were also that transition period where,