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I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. The other night I'm watching the Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Top Gun franchise reboot film, Top Gun Maverick. And there's this scene where they're playing beach volleyball the team bonding montage.
It's scored by this song, I Ain't Worried by One Republic. I'm thinking, I know that vibe. I think it's the whistle that alerts me to the fact that this might be something I've heard before. Where have I heard that whistle, Charlie?
It immediately took me to Peter Bjorn and John's song, Young Folks, from 2006. Yep. That song seemed to have launched a whole indie whistling vibe that took over popular music for a minute. I mean, check out Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zero's Home.
We're tightened up by the black keys. One year later, Foster the People that Pump Up Kicks, 2010. What a fascinating mini-trend you're elucidating here. So this vibe, this sort of indie rock whistle trend, runs its course by the early 2010s.
But now, a decade later, it's back. This One Republic song has gone to number 12 on the Hot 100. It is very much playing on nostalgia, as is the film which it's soundtracking. And in fact, I Ain't Worried is more than just nodding to that vibe.
It is a direct reference to the song that, for me, started it all. Peter Bjorn and John. Because technically, Peter Bjorn and John have songwriting credit on I Ain't Worried. I Ain't Worried is an interpolation of young folks.
Right. The interpolation, which is a term that's distinct from a sample. Because a sample is when you actually use the recording of an earlier song in your new track. But an interpolation is when you replay some of the musical material from an existing recording, but you're not actually using the original recording, you're recreating it yourself.
It seems like a very common technique in contemporary pop music. Yeah, I was kind of surprised by this one, because I took my time to recreate both. I haven't been able to identify at any particular moment exactly where the music is being interpolated. Like, it kind of feels like it's just borrowing the whole vibe of the song.
Like, if we take the drums, for example. Here's a groove of the original Young Folks. And here's the One Republic. I mean, similar, but not identical.
Yeah, similar in both kind of rudimentary rock drum grooves either way. You can't copy your own beat, so that's not the problem. What about the bass line? Bass line can give us some melodic information, some harmonic information.
Potentially, you can copy your own bass line. Here's the bass from the Peter Bjorn and John. And then One Republic. Interesting.
The two bass lines follow the same harmonic progression at first, but then the One Republic bass line goes in a different direction. And also, the actual melodic content is not the same, so... I mean, they're pretty... If you played these back-to-back, I wouldn't be like, oh yeah, those are the same song.
They sound very different. We're not here to talk about drums and bass. We're here to talk about whistling, aren't we? That's what you can copy, right?
Definitely a melody. Here's the Peter Bjorn and John. I'm on the edge of my seat. Digging the MIDI whistle, Chuck.
And the One Republic. And the One Republic. A, I love it. And B, they're clearly not the same melody.
There's some overlap. There's a note they hit at the same time. Is this true? The Peter Bjorn starts high, then descends lower and lower and lower.
The One Republic starts low, rises up, and then goes down in a similar arc as the Peter Bjorn around the same time. But yeah, they're different melodies. Peter Bjorn and John. I want to stand for this John Eraser, Charlie.
PB and J. Thank you, I stand corrected. Okay, but your point is well taken. When I played this One Republic song for my wife, I was like, do you recognize this?
Does it remind you of any other song? And she was totally baffled. She's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Because she thought I was playing her the Peter Bjorn and John.
These songs might not be in the same key, have the same chords, or share the same melody, but they definitely have the same vibe. Because what's happening here is a type of interpolation. In this case, the song's feel, it's arrangement, it's instrumentation. And it's working, because the song is a hit, it reminds us of the old one, and yet it's a new song.
And it's just one of the many ways that pop music today is often referencing the past through interpolation, whether a direct lyric melody or instrumentation, all of which I'm jokingly calling vibe snatching. Goose once. In fact, I think we've entered a new era in interpolation. We talk about it on the show.
Examples like Olivia Rodrigo crediting Taylor and Paramore, for instance. Or Beyonce giving credit to Robin S. Even Elvis, an old one, interpolated Hound Dog. It's different lyrics than the original.
Latto's Big Energy samples the Tom Tom Club sound, but also interpolates Mariah Carey's fantasy. And it's just not stopping. There are so many of them. Like, check out Rita Ara and Ammonbach's Bang Bang.
This song's released in 2021, but it sounds like it's from the 80s. Does it remind you of something? Axl's theme from Beverly Hills Cop, maybe? Yes.
Wow. This song is Axl F, written by Harold Faltermeyer, who, to bring things full circle, also wrote the Top Gun anthem. Whoa, double goosebumps. Okay, we were just incepted, but I want to keep going deeper on this trend of interpolations.
We've heard previously on the show the song Betty Got Money by Young Gravy. This is not a rip-roll. Which is both a sample and an interpolation, because they've updated a lyric from Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, which is officially this time a rip-roll. It's an interpolation nation.
It is. That one went to number 33 on the Hall 100. And here's a sneaky one for you, another recent one. Just this year, the singer Ian Dior, who was famous for the song Mood, amongst many others, is a song with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker called Thought It Was, with an interpolation that I actually found pretty hard to notice.
Challenge accepted. Closing time. Oh, you got it, man. Closing time.
Open all the doors and let you out into the world. I'm a Dan Wilson head, what can I say? From the show. Closing time, of course.
Semisonic classic. Major 90s hit. Yeah, Semisonic. That is a weird one.
Doesn't it feel like there's an invasion of the vibe snatchers? This is just everywhere. Or I could be kinder and say that we're in the era of the rise of the interpolation. I mean, either way you put it, Chuck, it's a phenomenon that is worth understanding.
Whether you see it as a positive thing, like, oh, we're rediscovering, reviving these classic songs, and that's a good thing. Or whether you see it as a bad thing, like, oh, this is just derivative, unoriginal, uninspired. Either way, the question I want to know is, why is everyone interpolating? Why is everyone vibe snatching?
The first question I had to ask myself was, is this just some kind of confirmation bias? Am I hearing it because I want to hear it? Am I noticing these things? To be sure, I went to the year-end Billboard Hot 100 and looked at every single song from 2010 to 2021 and counted up whether or not it contained an interpolation based off of Genius.com's database, which is user-annotated.
So there's probably some user error in there. So I'm really just looking for the trend. But what I found is that roughly from 2010 to 2015, about 10% of songs had an interpolation on them on the Hot 100 year-end chart. Okay.
And then there's this inflection point in 2016. And from 2016 to 2021, about 20% of songs had an interpolation on the year-end Hot 100. That's double. Yeah.
Wow. So we can speculate why this changed. Like, it could be the rise of social media and TikTok, streaming as a dominant form of listening, right? 2017 was the year that streaming outpaces album sales.
So that timing makes sense. We could say that we just maybe live in an age of nostalgia. Everything is a remix. Wow.
But I wanted to get answers from the people in the business. So I spoke to about a half dozen songwriters and producers and a handful of managers, A&Rs and publishers, all people with songs, making or representing songs on the Hot 100. And most of them wanted to remain anonymous around this issue. I'll tell you what they told me right after a quick break.
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Follow Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. First, on the positive, we definitely are seeing a shift in citation. After years of dialogue on the role of cultural appropriation in pop music, artists are perhaps listening a bit more. You know, so Beyonce, we talked about on the episode about Break My Soul and her album Renaissance.
She's giving credit to folks who maybe she didn't need to on her last record because they weren't exact interpolations. Robin S, for example, on Break My Soul. But in doing so, she gives cultural and financial credit to the forerunners of dance music, the people that she's quoting. The second thing I'm hearing is that part of what's happening in songwriting sessions, one songwriter told me that every single time a session starts, Spotify is open, people are listening to music talking about what they're vibing on.
And it's not uncommon that in a songwriting session, you might pull Spotify back open and be like, huh, we need a cool snare sound or like a synth sound. Let's go check out another song we really like. So maybe interpolations are coming in because the music is in the songwriting session we're in. But there's another significant trend that I think is playing a very important role in the rise of the interpolation.
And it's all about financially-backed publishing companies looking for new revenue sources. Dun, dun, dun. Hi, I'm Justin Shukat. I'm president of Primary Wave Music based in New York.
Primary Wave is a publisher with financial backing and owns a lot of catalogs. Justin, their president, he subscribes to this age-old wisdom in music. Once a hit, always a hit. So a music publisher's job is to make money off the songwriting copyright of a song.
They make money every single time that song is streamed, but they also try to get TV placements and covers that help build the value of that copyright. That is music publishing. It's just taking what was, recreating, enhancing. The one thing that's never changed has been these iconic evergreen songs.
And all publishers want to rework them, but most never focused on it. Over the last few years, there's been a sea change in publishing. Financial firms have started offering large payouts to buy-out artist catalogs on the theory that listener data from streaming provides forecastable future revenues. And some folks are getting big checks.
$400 million from Bob Dylan for his catalog. Neil Young got $150 million for 50% of his catalog. Steven X came up 80% of hers for $100 million. Primary Wave bought that one.
When you buy a catalog for heightened multiples, you need to drive revenue into that catalog. How do you drive revenue? You drive revenue through shit. You drive revenue through no big city items, stocks, or buy-fix.
And guess what? You drive through covers and then even further through interpolation. So someone interpolates your song. The rights owner to that song is going to get a credit and paid publishing royalties, which also enhances the likelihood that maybe you hear that cool interpolation and will go check out the original song.
So it's kind of a double whammy. I asked Justin how he came up with this strategy. I'm a hip-hop long-round boy. Who said it better than anyone?
It was Puffy, the king of it. Man, you take a hit from me, it would make a boom so crazy. Take hits from me, but do it sound so crazy. Diddy, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, he's been doing the interpolation game for a long time, very successfully.
But it took going to Hollywood for Justin to realize that what Puff Daddy was doing could play out for countless other artists. One day Justin's talking very colorfully, if you will, with Ezekiel Lewis from Epic Records who tells the story of Jerry Bruckheimer, the top-end guy. Brooke. Zeke tells me that I sat with Bruckheimer and his crew and fucking TV executives and here they have this monster film franchise.
They're working on picking songs for the 2020 Bad Boys film, Bad Boys for Life. And Zeke has worked with a who's who of writers and producers and they make the best records and the first meeting he did 789 records and Bruckheimer seems like he got nothing there. Zeke says, fuck. And then he comes back like two weeks later and he goes, I hit play again.
He brings in the Black Eyed Peas and J Balvin's song, Ritmo. He shifts his whole strategy. He says he's done chasing new stuff and instead tells his team. So I ask him, how do you even start?
How do you get someone to write a song with your song in it? We literally make lists on a weekly basis on songs and pitch ideas and sometimes we'll have the original idea and you know, if you can't just pitch an idea in an email, so we'll have our in-house producers maybe create the idea that we've articulated and so there'll be a pitch idea to stand out in something that's, you know, a little big, not fully cooked, but you know, you put the ingredients together and we'll send an idea and make it a little bite. There's no marketplace for these kinds of ideas and pre-produced tracks. Justin says it's all about relationships.
He's been doing this thing for 30 years and he lands songs consistently, successfully. Take for example that Ian Dior song that samples Closing Time. I lost my mind. I mean, it's funny because Closing Time actually happened.
And, you know, we actually did a camp. A camp is a songwriting camp where songwriters and producers get matched up to make songs together. When we do these camps, we'll take one of our songs that we're just going to create with the mindset of how can we really extract more income from the song so that Ian Dior one was obviously Closing Time. It was just, we knew again, just classic melody and we were rippin'.
We probably had like six or seven different versions of it. So they hosted this camp specifically to leverage interpolations in their catalog. They've got multiple versions of Closing Time that they own. They need to get it to an artist.
So Justin passes it to an AR guy who knows Ian, who passes it to Ian, who likes the song. Cut the record. I like this version of the story because what I heard thought it was. I mean, I guess you heard Closing Time right away, but it kind of incepts the song enough, it changes it.
They've made something new from that material. But that proactive approach isn't the only way of leveraging your existing catalog of songs. There's another side to interpolations. It's the vibe and you can't talk.
to write the vibe. But you can't stop people from trying. Here's the thing. As you're saying about in songwriting sessions, people probably being inspired by things, sometimes vibes sneak their way into your song in a way that maybe you didn't intend for it to do so.
And then you get in trouble. Just give us an example. The Maroon 5 memory song. You know, listen, do you hear an interpolation of that?
Here's who the ones that we got. Cheers to the wish you were cute, but you're not cause I drink spring back all the memories of everything we do. I heard Pocket Bells canon. Did I?
I don't know. You hear anything, Nate? No, I don't think so. We're both wrong.
Yeah, there's a Bob Marley No Woman No Cry. Now, they could probably argue, but you know, they came to us well in advance than before. We didn't pitch that. I would love to tell you I got shit, but we didn't.
One of the managers I spoke with, Lucas Keller, called this preemptive musicology. Basically, people hire musicologists like yourself to check that their songs don't infringe and to avoid costly lawsuits like the famed Blurred Lines case where Ron Thicke and Pharrell Williams had to pay Marvin Gates for using the vibe from Got to Give It Up even though the songs don't really share exactly any material. You don't end up in that kind of situation. And so, people will either change the song or reach out just in case.
I got a call from the attorney and he goes, listen, Sheila, you're going to save his record. He goes, we think we're safe. We went to our musicologist, but I know it's Marley and he goes, I don't want to get in a pissing match and the guys are comfortable and he made me an offer. And by the way, you know it was a record.
I could have been a fucking pain in the ass because I could have my thing out there and I heard the record. It was opposite memories. But I appreciate the way he did it and I was on the fence about what I thought and we took his offers. So just as these songs weren't the same, why mess with something that could hold anything up?
That train is too fucking big is what I'm guessing at the other day. I feel like we're back at the beginning of this conversation. Why is OneRepublic crediting young folks as an interpolation when we listened to each part isolated and we saw they didn't actually map up? It's because of what Justin was just describing.
It's not worth maybe getting entangled in a potential lawsuit, both the financial and the publicity fallout from that. Just get the interpolation credit and move on with your life. On a giant Jerry Borkheimer production, I don't think people are messing around. Nobody wants to have a controversy with this song.
This song might have been an intentional placement. As we've heard, Borkheimer loves interpolations. Maybe that's what he's going for. Maybe he gave that brief.
I did try to reach Interscope Records, the label for OneRepublic, but didn't hear back. But I do know that this is just one song that's part of a much larger trend of interpolating old songs into new hits. I even confirmed this over email with Hypnosis, one of the largest publishing investment management firms. They too are making interpolations a part of their strategy.
You might think that this sounds crass or shady. It's just business. But the reality is audiences love these songs. They've doubled on the year on Hot 100 in the last decade.
And for Justin at Primary Wave, it's simply about the music. When we hear something, what is that melody that brings us to a moment that is already identifiable in our world? And that's why interpolations work. They bring us back.
That's the musical reason for it. The songwriter Jenny Owen Young has playfully put it to me this way. No new hook will ever be as hooky as a hook that's already hooked you. Switched on Pop is produced by Brianna Cruz, edited by Jolie Myers, engineer Brandon Farland, illustration by our Scott Lee, community manager by Andy Barr.
Our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashok Kerwa, a member of the Box Media Podcast Network and production of Ultra. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop wherever you get podcasts. I'm talking Spotify, I'm talking Apple Podcasts, and I'm talking our website, www.switchedonpop.com. Also, we love hearing from you.
What interpolations are you hearing on Pop Charts right now? Hit us up at switchedonpop on Instagram and Twitter. We're dying to hear from you. We'll be back again on Tuesday.
And until then, thanks for listening.