Switched on Pop, the music theory podcast hosted by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, started with Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' and has grown into one of the most analytically rigorous pop music shows running. Sloan holds a musicology professorship at USC Thornton School of Music with research spanning pop, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley. Harding is a working songwriter and music journalist. Together they dissect production techniques and harmonic choices in mainstream pop with academic precision and zero condescension.
The interview goes beyond credentials. The conversation pulls out specifics: guitar pedals, dietary habits, and the creative friction between two people who have built a shared critical vocabulary over years of close collaboration. These details matter because they reveal how the show actually gets made, not just what it covers.
If you want to understand why a pop song works at the structural level, this is the podcast. The full Verge interview is worth reading for anyone curious about where Switched on Pop goes next and what Sloan and Harding think about the current state of the industry.
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