Switched on Pop

Charlie Puth joins Switched On Pop in Studio A at Power Station at Berklee NYC, live before a room of current students, ten days after performing the national anthem at Super Bowl 60 and weeks before releasing his fourth album, Whatever's Clever. The conversation is grounded in one question: how do you absorb the music you love and turn it into something that actually sounds like you?Puth traces...

RAYE names Amy Winehouse and Edith Piaf as her artistic predecessors on the opening tracks of new album This Music May Contain Hope. Both died young, undone by the same darkness they sang about, and placing them there reads as a dare to herself. The album that follows is her attempt to find a different ending: a 17-track, 75-minute work featuring Al Green, Hans Zimmer, the London Symphony...

On a recent podcast interview, Kentucky rapper Jack Harlow said that, to craft his new album Monica, he “got blacker.” The problem is… Jack Harlow is white. The statement, while extremely tone-deaf, speaks to his intentions with this musical pivot: musically, Monica turns to the historically Black genres of R&B and neo-soul to craft a new image designed to shed the stigma of being a “white...

Jacob Collier is a rare musician: an expert in so many musical languages (western harmony, negative harmony, microtonalism) and a phenomenal communicator about music. He's something like an Ambassador for Music, traveling the world and getting thousands of people, musicians and non-musicians alike, to sing in his audience choirs.Live at On Air Fest, this conversation, catches Jacob between...

The dance floor is where Harry Styles does his therapy, and this album is the session notes. Four years after Harry's House, Styles returns with Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally, a record built from minimal ingredients: live drums, Moog bass, nylon guitar, and synth sequences that stretch across entire songs without a drop in sight. This is Styles' anti-drop album. Where classic disco era...

Bruno Mars is back with a new album called The Romantic, his first solo release since 2016’s 24k Magic. At first listen, the lead single, “I Just Might,” sounds like an outtake from 2021’s collaborative album with Anderson Paak, the Philly soul-inspired An Evening with Silk Sonic. Listen closer though and another element emerges: a fast-paced conga drum line.The rest of Mars’s nine-track...

Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 gothic romance "Wuthering Heights" is the most talked-about film of the year. But for pop lovers, the soundtrack is the real event: Charli xcx, asked to write one song, ended up recording an entire album for the movie while in the middle of the BRAT tour. If BRAT gave people permission to be messy on the dance floor, this score gives...

It's the middle of award season, and Ryan Coogler's ode to the Black music canon Sinners has emerged as the Oscars frontrunner and the most nominated film in Academy Awards history. The love the movie has for the Delta blues is front and center, and begs the question: will the movie's legacy help bring the blues back into popular culture? There's already been a precedent for films reviving dead...

A$AP Rocky’s latest album, Don’t Be Dumb, is a wild ride through a cacophony of sounds — punk, industrial, drum ‘n’ bass, indie rock, and of course, hip hop. But on one track, “Robbery,” he and the rising superstar Doechii sample the world of jazz, specifically Thelonious Monk’s 1955 cover of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” In the process, Rocky and Doechii don’t just loop and flow, they create a...

What makes Weird Al songs so indelible? Why is Bo Burnham more than just a comic? How do the biggest pop hits make us crack up in the middle of a somber ballad? Humor is always present in music, but we rarely confront it head on. Until now. With the help of Comedian Chris Duffy, author of the book Humor Me: How Laughing Can Make You More Connected, Present, and Happy, and a series of lyrical...