Hey y'all, DJ Louis here just dropping a preview of this week's Pop Pantheon All Access episode. If you enjoy this snippet and you want to hear the rest of the episode, you can subscribe at patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon, click the link in the show notes of this episode or subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. Welcome to Pop Pantheon All Access, the podcast where we do even more over analyzing of all your favorite pop stars and to other stuff too.

This is your host, DJ Louis XIV. Thank you all so much for being subscribers.

Today I am joined once again by dear friend of the pod, Annie Zaleski, who is a critic and author and has just published the new book, Taylor Swift, The Stories Behind the

Songs, Every Single Track Explored and Explained. Annie, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I am so thrilled to have you. We've been here before talking about Madonna, and it's

time to break out that old bit once again. You were, of course, featured on our Madonna

series. We were just talking about it.

You were on the episode where we explored the period of Madonna's career just before the

album we're going to speak about today, which is 2015's Rebel Heart.

It is 10 years old this year.

You were just mentioning how crazy that feels.

But time has also been totally destroyed, I feel like, in the time

since this album came out, like, what is time anymore? We've skidded off the rails in a lot of

ways since this record came out, actually. It seems like we've entered a different timeline or

something. But what I was going to say is you were on the episode where we talked about what I

consider kind of like the last golden era of Madonna's career.

The last time that for me, her music really like hit that A plus plus level that she had been known for up to that point.

And where she had had had the commercial success that, you know, she had known since the early 80s ended with the last record that we talked about confessions on the dance floor.

In between that moment and what we're going to talk about today, she of course released

Hard Candy, which was largely produced by Timberland and Farrell, and was kind of moderately

successful, had a hit in four minutes featuring Justin Timberlake.

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