Show Notes
Of all the pop songs released in the era this series has been looking at, there are few which command the depth of love and affection as Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time'. It brings with it, for many listeners, a powerful weight of nostalgic associations and memories, which is one reason it’s the perfect choice for accompanying the mesmerising dance sequence at the end of the 1997 film, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, but is there something about the song itself - something which goes ...
More from The Secret Life of Songs
Writing candidly about intimate, private moments and feelings is today such an accepted practice in pop songwriting that it can be startling to go back to 1971 and find Joni Mitchell reflecting that, at that point, 'the only thing that I could see to do fresh, that hadn't really been explored poetically, was the internal landscape. … [to] write from my own experience … was one of the few territories left for a poet to be a contributor of any kind'. The album she's talking about is Blue, and i...
When Bruce Springsteen was asked why he was invited to write the theme song for 'Philadelphia', the first mainstream motion picture about the AIDS crisis, and one of the first films made in Hollywood featuring a gay protagonist, he responded that the film's director, Jonathan Demme, had 'wanted to take a subject that people didn’t feel safe with and were frightened by and put it together with people that they did feel safe with'. The song that Springsteen would create in response to this brie...
'I Wanna Dance with Somebody' is now safely embedded in the pantheon of great songs: a 2023 Billboard poll named it the greatest pop song of all time, and it continues to be an ever-present on pop radio and wedding playlists. When it was first released, however, as the lead single from Whitney Houston's second album, it prompted a widespread critical backlash. Rolling Stone found it 'ridiculously safe' and the novelist Trey Ellis called it 'lifeless'. This would culminate in the notorious mom...
Why do we work? The answer might seem obvious; as teenagers the world over have long been told, the world does not owe you a living, but predictions by economists that technological advances would inevitably lead to shorter working hours have not been borne out. We work more than ever, and experience more stress and dissatisfaction with our lives as a result. As Dolly Parton's famous song about the working life, '9 to 5', puts it: 'it's enough to drive you crazy, if you let it'. It was releas...
‘When I was little, I really wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's what I always said at school. I had this idea of helping people, I suppose, but I found the idea of people's inner psychology fascinating, particularly in my teens.’ This is Kate Bush, talking about what she wanted to do before becoming a musician. In this episode I explore whether the trace of ideas from contemporary psychology can be found in the songs she would go on to write and what light it might shine on the meaning of on...