Two American experts analyse popular tracks and offer insight into why they reached the global charts
Post Malone with Taylor Swift in a video from the album
What would Taylor Swift do if she weren’t a singer? Hardcore Swifties will tell you that she’d be a great model or an actress, while others believe that she would be a competent businesswoman. But the most common, undebated response in the fandom is that if Swift weren’t singing, she’d be an English teacher. Our pick for this week’s podcast, Switched on Pop, has an hour-long-episode which builds on this theory. The proof, American hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan say, lies in between the lines of her new two-hour-long double-album The Tortured Poets Department.
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Swift as the professor of the Tortured Poets Department
The episodes of the podcast meticulously dissect popular music. This includes Ariana Grande’s new album, Eternal Sunshine, and how her compositions rely on microphone technique to let the music take over her voice, much like the crooners of the mid-20th century. One such episode invites Stranger Things actor Joe Keery, whose 2022 self-released album Decide is now gaining traction, to shed light on his lesser-known knack for creating music. Expect mind-blowing trivia that links Duke
Ellington, United Airlines and K-pop group Red Velvet — they have all covered George Gershwin’s’ 1924 piano concerto, Rhapsody in Blue. In these well-researched conversations, you will also find the reasons behind Beyoncé’s rise to fame, if Olivia Rodrigo is stealing from Taylor Swift, Elvis Costello and Paramore, mid-career crises of Travis Scott and Post Malone, Louis Armstrong as the inventor of the modern pop star, and a compilation of the best of 2024.
Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan. Pics courtesy/Instagram
In this writer’s favourite episode, musicologist Sloan, and songwriter Harding, delve into Swift’s literary era. The double-album, which Swift touts as an anthology, is further divided into book genres by the experts. They pick up lyrics from her songs to prove how they can be classified into period novels, pulp fiction, thrillers, love stories, an autobiography and a fantasy.
They joke how only in Swift’s literary world, which she stresses in the album only she has access to, Aristotle and Grand Theft Auto can come together and even rhyme. They end by defending the key reason for the hate the album received — it sounds familiar to her previous albums. “But don’t we turn to a particular writer because it is their standard style of writing that we most love?” The duo argues. Swift’s new album, in that case, continues to give the same warmth to her listeners as her previous songs.
A bedtime binge-worthy episode, we recommend that Swifties tune into this one after listening to all the tracks on the album. Their observations and theories will leave you with a new-found respect for the performing artiste.
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