Switched on Pop
A podcast all about the making and meaning of popular music. Musicologist Nate Sloan & songwriter Charlie Harding pull back the curtain on how pop hits work magic on our ears & our culture. From Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
September 9, 2025 • 52 mins
Everyone should be in a band at some point—and Finneas and Ashe prove why. The Grammy-winning producer and rising singer-songwriter discuss how their friendship evolved into The Favors, a new band debuting their album The Dream on September 19th, 2025. We explore what it means to create as a band, how stepping back from confessional songwriting freed them creatively, and why sometimes the best way forward is embracing older ways of...
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September 2, 2025 • 54 mins
Fleetwood Mac has had a phenomenal resurgence in recent years, from TikTok viral fame to Broadway plays and streaming TV series inspired by the band. Their growing fandom among a new generation has created demand for the long out-of-print album Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks recorded before they joined Fleetwood Mac. The vinyl record is a collector's item, as this pre-band album helped secur...
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August 26, 2025 • 51 mins
You've heard those shimmering disco strings in Miley Cyrus's "Flowers," the cinematic arrangements on Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher, and the orchestral flourishes across Taylor Swift's catalog, but you probably didn't know they're all the work of one person: Rob Moose. The violinist and multi-instrumentalist has contributed to nearly 1,000 albums, quietly becoming pop music's most prolific string architect. In this conversation, Moose ...
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August 19, 2025 • 52 mins
The conversation around the new music this summer has been a dour one. Some of the biggest songs in the country right now are downtempo stomp-clap anthems and wistful Cranberries pastiche. Even on this very show, Nate and Charlie have asked: where's the fun?
As it turns out, the party (as always) is happening in hip-hop, led by a formidable influence: Pharrell.. On this episode of Switched On Pop, producer Reanna and engineer Bra...
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August 12, 2025 • 43 mins
Why do bad lyrics happen to good people? From "suckin' on a chili dog" to "making love to his tonic and gin," even the biggest hits from our favorite artists can feature lyrical turns that make us feel quizzical, offended, or even downright nauseated. With the help of Sam Sanders, brilliant host of The Sam Sanders Show, we plumb the depths of the worst pop lyrics of all time—culled from hundreds of submissions form Switched on Pop ...
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August 5, 2025 • 37 mins
Every music critic seems to agree: 2025 has no true song of summer. Last August, Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control” dominated the charts. This year…Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control” dominates the charts. What’s going on? Why is there no new summer song to unite us in collective listening, and will there ever be again?
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of the CBC’s daily culture podcast Commotion, joins Nate and Charlie to discuss the dearth of seas...
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July 29, 2025 • 43 mins
Justin Bieber is back with his seventh studio album: the aptly-titled SWAG. The lo-fi, reverb-laden record is a remarkably candid look inside the world of Bieber, using the palette of both underground pop and 90's R&B to accentuate lyrics about his wife, his struggles, and his "standing on business."
Notably, it's his first album post-split with manager Scooter Braun, and the first where Bieber has been in full artistic control. ...
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July 22, 2025 • 46 mins
What if the entire sound of modern podcasting can be traced back to a single Grateful Dead song uploaded in 2001? We uncover the musical lineage that connects NPR's classical gravitas to dubstep wobbles, from the very first RSS feed experiment to the mysterious masked composer who's scored over 200 podcast themes and shaped what millions of people hear when they hit play. This deep dive reveals how podcast music evolved from classi...
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July 15, 2025 • 49 mins
The robots have arrived, and they're making protest songs about boots on the ground. When an AI band called The Velvet Sundown fooled over a million Spotify listeners with their psychedelic folk anthems, it raised an unsettling question: have the machines gotten so good we can no longer hear the difference? Charlie puts Nate to the test with a game of "AI or Human?" featuring Wu-Tang deepfakes, phantom instruments, and songs that s...
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July 8, 2025 • 32 mins
In which we explore the unlikely rise, and surprising backlash against, one Benson Boone.
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July 1, 2025 • 32 mins
Why does the economy look great on paper but feel terrible in your wallet? There might be a more revealing economic indicator hiding in your Spotify queue. "Recession Pop" first emerged during the Great Recession and exploded into playlists, radio formats, and DJ sets in 2024. From melancholy indie anthems to escapist dance tracks, the songs we gravitate toward during uncertain times might predict where the economy is headed next. ...
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June 27, 2025 • 35 mins
As we've been examining over the course of Country Week, country music has found a larger audience, in part by widening its sonic palette. For the final episode of this series, we take a look at a genre on the outskirts of country – Americana music – and how it's being used to connect to the scene's musical roots.
Historically, Americana has embraced an acoustic sound, traditional repertoire, and an appetite for virtuosic techn...
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June 26, 2025 • 32 mins
More often than not, country music is seen as an "American" genre – meaning that the music is seen as strictly from the United States. In some ways, that's true; but the genre's iconography, sound, and ethos can actually be traced to the south of the border, in Mexican regional music.
The worlds have been more intertwined than you would think, and in musica mexicana, we find the closest comparison to what we traditionally call "c...
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June 25, 2025 • 28 mins
There's often an unspoken (and deeply misogynistic) rule on country music radio: never play two female artists back to back. In this episode of Switched On Pop's country week, we aim to do just that. Looking at two artists on opposite ends of the country music spectrum – traditionalist Lainey Wilson, and genre-bending Jessie Murph – Nate and Charlie try to understand the state of female country through their respective songs "4x4xU...
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June 24, 2025 • 35 mins
One of the biggest country hits of the year has been "All The Way," by Texas rapper BigXthaPlug and country rocker Bailey Zimmerman, which peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is a perfectly mixed cocktail of trap sonics with country melodies, held together by a shared southern drawl between the two artists.
As the genre of "country" expands and morphs to include different sounds, artists, and styles, "All The Way" ser...
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June 23, 2025 • 35 mins
Country music stands at a crossroads between tradition and evolution, and no artist embodies this tension better than Morgan Wallen. His song "I'm the Problem" opens with beautiful bluegrass guitar before hitting you with hard-hitting 808 basslines, creating a sonic reflection of country's current identity crisis. Wallen has this uncanny ability to turn his endless personal problems into undeniably catchy hooks that somehow make hi...
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June 17, 2025 • 29 mins
Looking for relationship advice? Skip the self-help books and turn to Sabrina Carpenter's latest single "Manchild" instead. This deep dive into the art of musical insults reveals how pop's newest sensation joins a legendary lineage of women artists who've perfected the craft of calling out incompetent men through song. From Dolly Parton's subversive "Dumb Blonde" to TLC's iconic "No Scrubs," there's an entire musical tradition of w...
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June 10, 2025 • 48 mins
What if the Chairman of the Board's biggest contribution to music wasn't his voice, but the blueprint he created for modern pop stardom? Frank Sinatra didn't just sing songs: he invented the concept album, injected his full personality into every performance, and created a template for artistic control that today's biggest stars still follow. His influence runs deeper than you think: Amy Winehouse titled her debut Frank as tribute,...
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June 3, 2025 • 45 mins
The UK outfit Sleep Token has done what we once thought impossible: Found commercial success playing heavy metal music in 2025 AD.
Their fourth studio album, Even in Arcadia, went to number one on the Billboard 200 upon its release, with all ten of its tracks charting on the Hot 100—this despite the fact that the band has been entirely masked and anonymous through their nine year existence.
Sleep Token's willingness to inject the...
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May 27, 2025 • 38 mins
Five years ago, Charli XCX released the track "party 4 u," a melancholic ode to throwing a function for that one specific person. Now, in 2025, the song has gotten a renewed life – motivated by a foolproof cocktail of TikTok trends, the Billboard Hot 100, and a post-Brat Summer clamor for Charli.
It's rare for pop songs like this to get a second wind. So, on this episode of Switched On Pop, Reanna, Nate, and Charlie put on our det...
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Charlie is America's hardest working grassroots activist who has your inside scoop on the biggest news of the day and what's really going on behind the headlines. The founder of Turning Point USA and one of social media's most engaged personalities, Charlie is on the front lines of America’s culture war, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of students on over 3,500 college and high school campuses across the country, bringing you your daily dose of clarity in a sea of chaos all from his signature no-holds-barred, unapologetically conservative, freedom-loving point of view. You can also watch Charlie Kirk on Salem News Channel