Tag: pop

Taylor Swift | The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter)

Life of a Showgirl (2025) “is the 12th full-length studio album from, I guess, the biggest songwriter on the planet, Ms. Taylor Swift,” (The Needle Drop). “What can be said about Taylor Swift that has not been said a million, bajillion times already, or would even be widely agreed upon by everybody.

Continually, I find the strangest thing about Taylor to be that there is just so little agreement on her despite her immense fame and exposure. She’s almost like a Rorschach test for pop fans at this point … because not only are there just such vastly different reads of her and her music in terms of if it’s good, if it’s not, if it’s deep, if it’s shallow, so on and so forth, but often many of these takes say more about the person giving them than Taylor herself.”

Featuring her intermittent touring companion Sabrina Carpenter, “Life of a Showgirl” starts in G major. The second verse, a Sabrina Carpenter feature, shifts up to C major (1:19), but the next chorus reverts to the original key at 1:46.

Duran Duran | The Reflex

“All too often, transformative acts don’t score their first #1 singles until the party is almost over,” (Stereogum). “Duran Duran may have been the peak early-MTV group, the band whose flashy and pouty and colorful visual presence came to stand in for a generational shift in pop-music tastes. Perhaps because of that radical newness, it took a little while for American radio to embrace Duran Duran — or, at least, to embrace them tightly enough that one of their singles finally fought its way to #1. By the time that happened, Duran Duran had already started to bloat, and the giddy charge of their best records had begun to dissipate … already well into their tax-exile phase, spending too much money to overthink their drum sounds and to wonder whether they really wanted to cause any more teenybopper mob scenes …

Readers of this column have informed me that Birmingham, the town that birthed Black Sabbath and Electric Light Orchestra and Dexys Midnight Runners, is not, in fact, a Northern town, that it’s really a Midlands town. But wherever Birmingham exists on the English map, it’s not a particularly glamorous place. Thankfully, nobody told Duran Duran … ” (The band’s third studio album, 1984’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger), “isn’t breezily, gloriously ridiculous, the way that Rio was. Instead, it was ridiculous in some of the wrong ways.”

“The Reflex” begins in G minor, shifting to D major for the chorus (first heard from 1:22 – 1:51. Well, D major … more or less, since at several points during the section, there’s a prominent F major chord. In fact, F major is the final chord of the chorus, functioning as a bVII to the G minor verse as the bass line walks chromatically back up into its original key. As Stereogum summed it up: “… grand, ultra-produced, too big to fail.”

Hall + Oates | Love You Like a Brother

Psychologists say that contempt is the #1 indicator of a future divorce. For anyone wondering why Hall and Oates (the best-selling pop duo of all time) broke up a few years ago, here’s an excerpt from an Popdose interview (September 2009):

“Me (interviewer): You two have been making music together for nearly 40 years. What do you consider to be the secret to your success?

Oates: Well, Daryl and I have a healthy balance of give and—

Hall: (interrupting) Take one-fourth of John and three-fourths of me and you’ve got the winning formula. We’re the Beatles of the post-Woodstock generation, no question. It was the same with them in their day: three-fourths Lennon and McCartney, one-fourth George, and one-fourth Ringo.” …

The interview continued along these lines, with Oates walking out at one point. You do the math.

In any case, “Love You Like a Brother” from 1977’s No Goodbyes, was clearly released during better times. The intro (0:00 – 0:16), in D minor, repeats as an interlude (1:20 – 1:32). But the majority of the tune is in G major.

Pablo Cruise | Love Will Find a Way

“For the longest time I assumed Pablo Cruise took their name from an obscure Mexican revolutionary leader. This is not the case,” (The Vinyl District). “Others assumed there was a guy named Pablo Cruise in the band. This is also not the case. When asked ‘Who’s Pablo Cruise?’ the quartet said simply, ‘He’s the guy in the middle.’ I like a band with a sense of humor and I like Pablo Cruise (in a very small measure) and I am not ashamed.

Robert Christgau of Village Voice fame wrote of Pablo Cruise’s 1975 breakthrough album Lifeline, ‘You can take the Doobie Brothers out of the country, but you can’t turn them into Three Dog Night.’ I haven’t the slightest idea what this means, but I’m pretty sure it’s an insult … But if Pablo Cruise get no respect, that’s not to say they don’t deserve a smallish modicum of the commodity … The Pablo Cruise sound was a melting pot of faux soul, power pop, standard issue Yacht Rock, funk, fusion, Latin music, and New Wave even.” The critics might have panned the tune, but the public loved it: the track reached #6 on the pop charts in 1978.

The intro and verses are built in G mixolydian; the verse melody, given its repeated prominent flatted-seventh degree of the scale, is practically a poster child for the mixolydian mode! The sunnier choruses (first heard from 0:47 – 1:07) are in D major.

Jackson 5 | Mama’s Pearl

“Let’s go back to the end of the 60s. Motown needed to modernize their sound. The company had been showing its first hairline fractures as public mores shifted to albums rather than the singles on which it had built its reputation,” (BBC). “But then, the Jackson 5 came along and became the label’s big thing for the new decade. Well drilled in performance for several years previously, they burst on to the world stage with eagerness and vitality – and genuine youth.”

“‘Mama’s Pearl’ was the fifth single released by the Jackson 5 and the first release by the boys for 1971. 1970 proved to be the year of success for the Jackson 5.” (J5 Collector). “With four back-to-back number one hits, three top pop albums, numerous TV appearances, and a successful tour, what more could the boys ask for?” Here’s the most profoundly 70s pop trivia you’ll see today: “Mama’s Pearl” was kept from the #1 slot on the pop charts by the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple”!

The intro is initially in F major, with a second section in Ab major, complete with an eighth-note walking bass pattern so compelling that it could drive the whole tune by itself. At 1:19, there’s a shift back to the original key as the verse starts. The alternating pattern continues from there.

Utopia | Mated

“Todd Rundgren’s music has always been an acquired taste. His chart hits have felt like flukes, strange cracks in the system,” (PopShifter). “You aren’t supposed to know who Todd Rundgren is. He leads a cult that resides so far underground, they may as well be Morlocks. One of the reasons for this status is Rundgren’s musical twitchiness. He jumps from style to style, from Philly white-boy blues to synth-pop, from down and dirty rock and roll to salsa. Never knowing what he’ll do next is exciting for some, laborious for others.

In the late Seventies, Rundgren formed a band called Utopia. It was designed to be his big foray into progressive rock, exploring grand concepts and incorporating deep philosophical lyrics. As it gradually shrank from seven members to four, Utopia became one of the sharpest New Wave bands of its time, delivering perfect three-minute pop songs, deliciously textured with soaring, shifting harmonies. Utopia was never as gritty as The Cars or as raunchy as Blondie. It’s feasible to consider them as a bridge between New Wave and the New Romantics, with their ‘Shape of Things to Come’ fashion sense and lyrics ranging from sweet to snappy.”

1985’s POV featured cover art with a theme of military world domination; unfortunately, that was a concept completely at odds with reality. As the band faced flagging sales and the confusion and frustration of sustained troubles with several floundering and even failing boutique record labels, the album became Utopia’s last. “Mated” begins with a verse in F minor; the first chorus (0:52) shifts to Eb major. That pattern continues through the second verse and chorus; from 2:32-2:55, the bridge climbs to a new chorus in F major.

Dexys Midnight Runners | Come On Eileen

“Context is a funny thing. In the UK, Dexys Midnight Runners were a troubled institution — a chaotic young band who couldn’t stop breaking apart and reforming and who still managed to tap into some dizzy zeitgeist more than once,” (Stereogum). “In the US, Dexys are classic one-hit wonders: Scraggly and goofy-looking British weirdos in overalls who were all over MTV for a couple of months and who then disappeared forever. On two sides of the Atlantic, this one band has two vastly different legacies.

But where ‘Come On Eileen’ is concerned, the greater context of Dexys Midnight Runners almost doesn’t matter. The effect was the same. ‘Come On Eileen’ was a #1 hit in both countries, and it remains a fondly remembered piece of pop-music history. You could revere “Come On Eileen” as a classic, or you could see it as an embarrassing little short-lived gimmick. Either way, when you’re three drinks deep and ‘Come On Eileen’ comes on at the bar, you’re singing along.

A big part of the charm of ‘Come On Eileen’ (1983) is Rowland’s voice. He’s clearly not the soul singer that he wants to be, but he doesn’t let that stop him. He yelps and wails as hard as he can, and his Northern English honk bulldozes through all the strings and horns around him. When “Come On Eileen” turns into a big mass singalong, it finds a certain drinking-song grandeur … it’s an elegantly written song about real, intense feelings, and it’s got a monster hook. Besides that, a mass singalong remains a joyous thing. I’ve had nights that were greatly improved by the existence of ‘Come On Eileen.’ You probably have, too.”

After beginning in C major for the intro and first verse, the chorus shifts up to D major at 1:07. At 1:28, the original key returns for an interlude mirroring the intro, then another verse. The two keys continue to alternate from there.

The Winstons | Color Him Father

“In 1969 an interracial R&B group from Washington, DC posted their one and only Top 40 hit,” (45RuminationsPerMegabyte). “The song, ‘Color Him Father,’ is written from the point of view of a young man explaining the role his father has in their house. He sings of coming home from school, and how his father stresses the importance of education, and how the man he calls father helps his mother, and all of that. At first, it seems like just another cute song with simple lyrics (‘My mother loves him and I can tell/By the way she looks at him when he holds my little sister Nell’ isn’t the greatest rhyme ever written, but it works). After a quick bridge, the tone abruptly changes:

My real old man he got killed in the war
And she knows she and seven kids couldn’t have got very far
She said she thought that she could never love again
And then there he stood with that big wide grin
He married my mother and he took us in
And now we belong to the man with that big wide grin

Yep – this is a song about step-parenting, and it just got really, really dusty in here. The song went on to become a huge hit, making it to #7 on the pop chart, #2 on the R&B chart, and claiming the Grammy award for Best R&B song in 1969.”

After running in Ab major through several verses and choruses, a brief instrumental interlude (1:59) shifts us up to A major for another verse and chorus.

Survivor | The Search is Over

“Where did Survivor’s soaring power ballad ‘The Search Is Over’ come from? It’s partly a mystery,” (The Tennessean). “The group’s Jim Peterik — who penned the tune with bandmate Frankie Sullivan — believes the title came from something he heard on a news broadcast. But as for that daring key change, which turns every chorus on its ear? Thirty-five years later, Peterik still doesn’t know how he came up with it, or why it works so well. But it did: ‘The Search Is Over’ became one of Survivor’s biggest hits, and a staple of its concerts.”

Peterik: “‘The Search is Over’ is still on the radio partly because it really has a message that sometimes you take for granted what’s right in front of your eyes, and you have to go full circle around the world to come back to where you started … one of my favorite royalties, and it’s not money — It’s the stories. ‘I got married to that song, and that’s our song.’ I get, ‘It was at my father’s funeral.’ Even Alcoholics Anonymous meetings use that song. ‘The search is over.’ You’ve got it right here.”

Built in a slightly de-tuned Eb major overall, the beginning of the chorus shifts to C major at 0:55. But partway through the chorus, the tonality returns to the original key (1:10). The pattern continues from there. Be forewarned: the video is 100% industrial-grade ’80s! Many thanks to regular contributor Rob P. for submitting this tune.

Neil Diamond | Hello Again

“If 1980’s Bob Gaudio-produced The Jazz Singer marks the point at which Diamond crossed over from respected, rugged torch balladeer to schmaltzy cabaret act, he could take solace in phenomenal sales,” (BBC). “His biggest in the States, it shifted over six million. This despite the fact that the film which it soundtracked, in which Diamond starred as a Jewish singer opposite one Laurence Olivier, was generally panned. (It was a conceptually bizarre remake of the Al Jolson classic.) Still, it spawned songs as emotionally domineering as ‘Love on the Rocks,’ ‘Hello Again,’ and the patriotic (and therefore enormously commercial) ‘America.’

Neil’s acting gained him nominations for both a Golden Globe and the first ever Razzie Award for Worst Actor (he won the latter). To add painful injury to insult, he’d recently been wheelchair-bound for months, having had a tumour removed from his spine. So for all its gaudy sentimentality, The Jazz Singer was a personal triumph over adversity. If he now traded in the tingling presence of his earlier, rawer recordings, he hit on a polished soft-rock sound that even today is being rehabilitated by hungry ironists. ‘Hello Again’ is a Lionel Richie-style weepie, the lady in question awkwardly addressed as ‘my friend.’ It became Diamond’s calling card for the next few years.”

‘Hello Again,’ released as a single in 1981, was co-written by Diamond and Alan Lindgren, hit #70 on Billboard’s year-end singles chart. After a cinematic intro whose sustained chords at first seem to be written in G major, 0:17 brings an apparent shift to F major. But at 0:25, C major takes over. Neil’s voice is beyond center-stage — it’s absolutely primary, with a gentle piano-and-strings ensemble backing him up. At 3:11, a half-step shift up to Db major unfolds. Many thanks to our regular contributor Rob P. for this submission!