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Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm Constance Grady, Vox.com's book critic, and I am here today with my guests, Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan, the authors of the book,

Switched On Pop, how popular music works, and why it matters. Charlie and Nate, thank you for joining me.

Thanks so much for having us. Wow, how fun to be a guest on our own show. It's great to be here.

Well, today, it is my show, and I will go mad with power in my plan. Please do.

So, tell me about your book, Switched On Pop. What is it about?

What we really wanted to do was give people the essential musical knowledge that you need to understand what's going on in the pop landscape, and be able to apply that to think about how does popular music work? Why does it matter?

We want to give you that knowledge, but we want to do it like with our show through 16 really fun songs of the last 20 years, which we think are absolutely necessary listening.

So many people who listen to the show would reach out and ask us, where can we find a book that does the kind of thing you do on our show?

And we were always like, you can't, it doesn't exist. This is our attempt to put into a single book the kind of basic language and vocabulary you need in terms of talking about music to really dig into your favorite songs.

But we didn't want to do it as just like a boring reference book. It had to be not only what are these things, but also how do they help us understand how popular music works?

And so rather than examining ancient songs like many of our textbooks did, we wanted to look at the music that's happening now.

So we chose songs of the last 20 years that we think are absolute essential listening and through them we learned that vocabulary, but apply it to understand what's going on in this song.

What does it tell us about ourselves? What does it tell us about culture?

So whether you are a musical neophyte, you know, nothing about music, you're going to pick something up. But even if you have long studied music, I think you're going to find really interesting and surprising insights about how songs that you already know are really interesting.

You already know are operating on a level that you might not be thinking about.

Yeah, from Neophytes to nerds, we this book runs the gamut.

Let's talk a little bit about the titles. So this is also the title of your podcast or now my podcast, switched on pop.

In the intro, you guys talk a little bit about your origin story and you mentioned that for a long time you thought of yourself as like music snobbs who maybe weren't super into pop. So what changed for you?

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