Playing it Cool: How Tove Lo Aims High

Switched on Pop

Vox Media Podcast Network

Music Interviews, Music History, Music, Music Commentary

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the surface, Tove Lo's new hit "Cool Girl" boasts a snappy, earworm chorus and an empowering message of self-reliance. Beneath its chill exterior, though, Lo's song burns with a passion bordering on rage, and sinister sonic undertones suggest an unreliable narrator who doesn't always mean what she says. The more layers one pulls back from this song, the more Lo's source material—the novel and film "Gone Girl"—comes to the fore, turning "Cool Girl" into the kind of pop smash that sticks in your head in more ways than one. Featuring: Tove Lo - Cool Girl Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster Alessia Cara - Scars To Your Beautiful Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Switched On Pop, I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, and I'm musicologist Nate
0:12.9	Sloan.
0:14.9	So Nate, I have a new favorite song.
0:20.4	It is seemingly about one thing, but actually about another nice.
0:26.0	It's a Tove Lose Cool Girl.
0:28.8	I'm a cool girl.
0:30.8	Yeah, exactly.
0:32.6	It's written by Tove Lose and also written and produced by a group called The Struts.
0:38.7	I'm going to go out on a limb here.
0:41.0	Are they Swedish by any chance?
0:43.0	Very much so.
0:44.8	Taken over pop music.
0:46.0	Yeah, this is a catchy number.
0:48.6	This one is seared in my frontal cortex right now.
0:53.3	I really love this song because of its dualism, its narrative twists and turns.
1:00.5	Let's just jump right in and take a listen.
1:02.9	Great.
1:53.3	So I said at the top that this song has many layers of meaning and what I want to do together
2:05.1	is work out what's happening at the surface and what's happening deeper in the song, both
2:11.1	narratively as well as musically.
2:13.5	Right on.
2:14.5	Because I think they link really well together.
	...

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