Switched On Pop: A podcast that’s music to your ears
Though we often don’t notice it, music acts as our constant traveling companion on our daily journey through life. It tickles our ears during our commute; it tempts us at the workplace; it assaults us as we celebrate our journey home and it soothes us in the heavy thread-count confines of our homes.
Switched On Pop – a Vox Media podcast – acts as a kind of hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy of music. It’s a peripatetic podcast that dismisses boundaries on what a music podcast should cover and whisks the listener off on a magical mystery tour to everything from the music chosen by restaurants to the trend toward shorter songs due to streaming services. Episodes hold constant surprises with a dissection of the new National Public Radio (NPR) morning news musical theme to a re-invention of music genres with the Lil Nas X number one country hit “Old Town Road” from a black hip-hop artist.
Switched On Pop started in October 2014 and immediately attracted attention with episodes about heartbreak songs, songs that make us move and a holiday episode about why Jingle Bells is so popular. After four and a half years of growing its audience, Switched On Pop became part of the Vox Media Podcast Network earlier this year.
”Charlie and Nate have built a wildly popular show that helps music fans understand why they love their favorite songs,” said Vox’s senior audio producer Jillian Weinberger in February 2019 when the announcement was made. Weinberger, who collaborates with Charlie and Nate on the show, added, “Their fans are strong and loyal and we are excited to share this podcast with the wider Vox audience.”
Switched On Pop is co-hosted by songwriter Charlie Harding and musicologist Nate Sloan.
Harding is a songwriter, music journalist and a multi-instrumentalist who also executive produces the podcast. Harding deftly uses his songwriting and musical instrument skills to dismantle songs piece by piece – the melody and tempo, the intro, the verse, the chorus the bridge, the chord progression and the outro. His precision, for example, when he surgically takes apart Lady Gaga songs and her modulation from different keys is fascinating.
Sloan is a USC Thornton School of Music Assistant Professor of Musicology, with degrees from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford University and a knack for scoring films. Sloan’s musical embrace ranges from Tin Pan Alley to jazz and, of course, popular music. Sloan’s expertise often takes the form of looking under the hood of music such as discussions of major and minor chords, quarter notes, beats per minute (BPM) and andante, which is a moderately slow tempo.
Like many successful podcasts, it is the interplay between Harding and Sloan that makes the podcast a listening pleasure. More important, the diversity of their musical backgrounds enriches the podcast. In fact, each seems to take a lead on a particular episode and it’s clear that their partnership is about sharing knowledge for the benefit of the listeners.
Consider the 2016 episode about a cell phone ring tone. How is the ringtone of a Nokia cell phone related to music you may ask? Sloan and Harding delight into this deep dive to decipher any hidden music craft in these beeps and bloops. Amazingly, Sloan and Harding dissect the musical phrase and harmonic language that intuitively attracts us to this cell phone ring tone and discuss the cell phone tone’s musical ambiguity. Then, Sloan reveals that the Nokia cell phone tone is actually a musical phrase lifted from a 1902 composition by a Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega called Gran Vals.
One recent episode “Prince Ali” and Why We’re all Music Theorists addresses the social media complaints of many about the newer Will Smith version of the main song from the new Disney movie Aladdin. When they discuss the tempo difference in both versions of the song as the source of the displeasure, Harding and Sloan discover that the difference between the versions is only eight beats per minute but conclude that even that slight difference is enough to make people social media grumps. Then, they inspect some Lady Gaga hits and note that the tempo in some of her songs matches that of a typical walking pace and wonder if that intentional synchronization can offer another reason why her songs are so popular.
One key perk of the podcast is the distinctive voices of Harding and Sloan. There are podcasts where the male or female co-hosts actually have similar speaking styles and voices and it forces the listeners to orient themselves about the identity of the speaker throughout the podcast. Sloan’s voice, lower in pitch and punctuated by gravelly roughness, counterpoints perfectly with Harding’s middle-range, glossy voice.
Switched On Pop has also leveraged its new Vox connectivity with an episode about digital tape hiss and vinyl crackle with Estelle Caswell, creator of Vox’s Earworm series. That episode delves into a true musical paradox that modern, digitally sterile music is returning by choice to some of the messy, analog sonic tones of the previous generation to add texture and depth to “0s and 1s” of today’s streaming tunes.
Harding and Sloan also invite guests on the show such as Giles Martin, the music director of the film Rocketman, Sam Harris of the group X Ambassadors, Rochester NY indie rock group Joywave, actress Elle Fanning and even a restaurant critic Hillary Dixler Cananvan.
In its description of the podcast, Switched on Pop claims that it breaks down pop songs to figure out what makes a hit and what is its place in culture. “We help listeners find “a-ha” moments in the music,” the podcast asserts.
In fact, this claim actually discounts the breadth and depth of the podcast. Switched On Pop does deep water drilling on an expansive definition on what we call music – from how a songwriter’s location can re-define their musical tastes (in this case, Madonna) to the murky intricacies of rhyming lyrics (Shawn Mendes).
Recently, music podcasts have discovered listeners eager for their content. Some groove to the song dissection stories in Song Exploder, while others boogie to the music charts in the Slate Hit Parade podcast and still others sway to the professorial depth of Sound Opinions, a WBEZ Chicago NPR podcast with similar inclinations to Switched On Pop.
For listeners who not only love music but also the allure of musical harmony and dissonance, Switched On Pop never hits a sour note and always seems to strike the right chords.
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