Switched on Pop, now in its fifth year of production, beautifully and unpretentiously picks apart the best (and occasionally, worst) songs on charts past and present, offering their rabid listeners a rare understanding of what some music fans might consider to be throwaway commercial entities.
They had both just read a Slate piece in which musician Owen Pallett utilizes theory to explain another immaculate pop song, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Sloan took a similar approach with his students, using musical theory to analyze Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” Sloan, now an assistant professor in musicology at USC, and Harding, who has added producer to his resume, realized the same concept could be used to study pop music of all kinds, and thus a passion project was born. The pair were traveling across California with their wives, sequestered in the backseat where they were free to air their music geekery. In 2014, Harding was a part-time songwriter and Sloan was a high school teacher with a music theory class in his charge.
When you hear “Call Me Maybe,” the smash 2012 hit by Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen, what do you hear? Garbage? Repetition? Annoyance? Perfection? For longtime musical collaborators Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan, hosts of the popular Vox music podcast Switched on Pop and recovering music “snobs,” the inescapable song-of-the-summer was a door to the big, wide world of pop.
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