Switched on Pop

The world stops with a Beyoncé drop. On Monday, June 20th, our prayers were answered with “Break My Soul,” the lead single off of her upcoming album, Renaissance . The song draws from several places of inspiration: lyrically, it’s a cathartic dance-floor ode to liberation, soundtracking the current cultural moment that some have called the “Great Resignation.” Sonically, though, “Break My Soul” is...

Robert Glasper is the only artist to have an album debut in the top 10 of 4 different Billboard charts. He's a musical polymath whose resume ranges from Kendrick Lamar to Herbie Hancock. At the piano, he serves up jazz licks worthy of Mary Lou Williams before segueing into a Nirvana cover. Glasper brings his diverse skill set to bear on his latest project, the score for the HBO series Winning Time...

We recently deconstructed how Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” has found itself at the center of culture due to a placement in the Netflix, eighties, horror, sci-fi show, Stranger Things. For that episode we excerpted an interview with the composers of the show who shared great insights on how they created the iconic theme song and spooky soundscape for the most streamed show of 2022....

Kate Bush’s “running up that hill” has soared up the charts, performing better than its release in 1985. Heavily featured in Strangers Things Season 4, Netflix’s most successful English language release to date by watch time, Kate Bush has found a new generation of fans via the show. The coming-of-age horror/sci-fi show has leaned heavily on 80s nostalgia since its premier in 2016. Its iconic them...

There's been a meme circulating: pop stars lamenting making TikTok videos that labels force them to publish. Supposedly content creator wasn’t in the pop star job description. Since 2020 the short form video social media platform TikTok has utterly upended music discovery. In many cases giving unknown musicians a pathway to enormous audiences. And it's become increasingly important, especially dur...

If you've heard Latto's swaggering track "Big Energy"—and after 30 weeks on the Hot 100, you probably have—you may have heard a resemblance to Mariah Carey's 1995 hit "Big Energy." That's because both songs borrow a groove from the 1981 hit "Genius of Love," a genre-defying smash made by Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. "Genius of Love" was made when Frantz and Weymouth took a break from playing in...

It’s been five years since Kendrick Lamar released his Pulitzer winning album DAMN. Having established himself as a modern rap virtuoso whose songs have become anthems fueling social movements, expectations run high for his latest release. So when he dropped his new album Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, people tuned in - it is the biggest album drop of 2022 so far. Lamar moves his focus presumably...

PJ Morton is one of the hardest-working musicians on the scene today. Maybe you’ve seen him playing keys with Maroon 5, or fronting a full string section in his NPR “Tiny Desk” concert. Maybe you’ve immersed yourself in his Grammy-award winning album We Are. On all of these projects, Morton evinces his mastery for taking classic soul and R&B and updating it with modern sounds. Other musical le...

Greece, Spain, UK, Sweden, Italy and Ukraine are the frontrunners in the 2022 Eurovision competition. Switched On Pop analyzes the top six songs as well as some of the more oddball picks. Songs Discussed Amanda Tenfjord - Die Together Chanel - SloMo Britney Spears - Work Bitch Sam Ryder - SPACE MAN Elton John - Rocket Man Cornelia Jakobs - Hold Me Closer Zdob și Zdub - Trenulețul  Citi Zēni - Give...

Belle and Sebastian released the first album Tigermilk in 1996, and they’ve released eight more since—a catalog that helped define the sound of rock and indie in the new millennium through buoyant melodies and verbose lyrics.  Their new album, A Bit of Previous , continues to refine their unique sound but also embraces new musical directions. We spoke to Stuart Murdoch, leader of the 7-piece band...

In March 2022 an unusual entry made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart. 90s grunge band Nirvana entered the chart for only their fifth time in history with the 1991 track “Something In The Way.” The song’s success is owed to being heavily featured in the 2022 reboot of The Batman. According to director Matt Reeves, Kurt Cobain inspired the brooding performance of Robert Pattinson, who plays the c...

Allison Ponthier knows that the hardest part of making anything is getting started. For the New York based Texan singer/songwriter, “starting the song is so difficult.” When she was young she “always wanted to write songs,” fanatically scribbled rhymes in a diary. But she gave it up as an adolescent. The prevailing narratives of natural talent, artistic genius and spontaneous inspiration nearly pu...

There was something different about Justin Bieber’s performance of his hit song “Peaches” at the 2022 Grammy Awards. The recorded version, which spent thirty weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, opens with a full-blast chorus featuring driving percussion and ringing guitars. But performing live, the song’s instrumentation was stripped down, with Bieber alone at a grand piano, crooning into the mi...

We love listening to music at a ridiculous level of detail. But the other day we heard a podcast that made us fundamentally question the accuracy and reliability of our own listening skills. In it they played a familiar melody, “Yankee Doodle,” in such a way that we couldn’t recognize it at all. Our brain plays so many auditory tricks on us — some truly spectacular and unexplainable. In fact that’...

There’s no more iconic Britney lyric than the opening of “Gimme More.” It's 2007, four years since her last album In The Zone was released, and Britney is affirmatively back with the uptempo track leading off her album Blackout : “It’s Britney, Bitch.” The song echoes the dance-pop Neptunes sound of “I’m A Slave 4 U.” It's built around a driving riff and off-kilter drums produced by Floyd Nathanie...

In 2003 Britney Spears released “Toxic,” a song that would make converts out of pop skeptics, be named one of the greatest tracks of the 21st century by multiple publications , and become a personal favorite of Switched on Pop . Despite its success, when “Toxic” was released as the second single from Spears’s fourth album, In the Zone , even the song’s writers thought it was too “weird” to become...

On a crisp Autumn morning in 1998, the world was introduced to the voice of Britney Spears, and pop would never be the same. Britney’s mix of vocal fry, percussive pronunciations, and timbral play on “...Baby One More Time” hadn't been heard before. As successful as they were, these techniques were derided by critics as parts of her manufactured “baby voice." Listening in 2022, we can hear Britney...

Presenting Chartbreakers , in which Nate and Charlie listen to the Billboard Hot 100 chart from top to bottom and discover a TikTok controversy, a Nashville music mystery, a rogue duck-billed platypus, and Megan Thee Stallion's debut piano concerto. Songs Discussed Gayle - abcdefu Muni Long - hrs and hrs Ckay - Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah) Dustin Lynch featuring Lauren Alaina or Mackenzie Porter - Thi...

Leon Bridges is the soul singer hailing from Fort Worth, Texas, who burst onto the music scene in 2015 with the album Coming Home . Since then he’s established himself as an adventurous musician whose latest album Gold Diggers Sound combines retro sounds with contemporary production. Khruangbin is the Houston-based power trio——Mark Speer on guitar, Laura Lee on bass, and DJ Johnson on drums—who al...

The last proper, blowout concert Charlie attended was devastatingly long ago, back in the winter of 2019. Bringing some funk to buttoned-up Walt Disney Concert Hall, the duo Sylvan Esso rocked Charlie’s world with epic performances of songs like “Die Young.” When live music, and the world, shut down shortly after—well, it was a great note to go out on.  Now, that moment comes full circle, as Sylva...

The number one song on the charts is a bit of a mystery. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the unlikely hit from Disney’s sleeper animated musical Encanto. Set in a  mountainous village in Colombia, the film was a middling commercial success when it was released in Nov 2021. But in recent months it has become a pop culture phenomenon for a confluence of reasons: an expansive discourse on Colombian re...

Elvis Costello burst onto the music scene in 1977 with the album My Aim Is True . Songs like “Alison” established him as a powerful new voice in rock. His next album, This Year’s Model , introduced hits like “Pump it Up,” which has resounded through stadiums and arenas across the country ever since.  From then on he released album after album, decade after decade, becoming a force to be reckoned w...

Eric Nam is an accidental K-pop star. Growing up in Atlanta, and graduating from college in Boston, he did not expect that in his twenties he’s sign to a K-pop label, be named 2016 Man of the year by GQ Korea, and become a go-to television personality in South Korea. His music, imbued with his charisma and charm has charted globally. As fun as it is, the K-pop machine can be a real grind — it chur...

Dawn FM is The Weeknd’s most narratively compelling album yet. More than just a collection of eighties-nostalgia single bait, Dawn FM is a concept album that picks up on a multi-year meta narrative. Abel Tesfaye, seemingly killed off his character at the end of his last album, After Hours . Getting caught up in the “Blinding Lights” of fame and excess, the narrator ends up overdosing in the back o...

Why are there no new Christmas songs? One one hand, there's more holiday songs than we’ll ever need. Every year pop stars drop countless holiday-themed album. But despite the annual glut of Christmas releases, few of these new songs join the rotation of holiday classics. On Billboard's Holiday Hot 100 chart right now, there's only four songs from the past ten years that have made it to the top fif...