The Pop Song Professor

“High Hopes” Lyrics Meaning
When “High Hopes” released today, Brendon Urie tweeted, “I spent too long not setting my expectations high enough, worried about how it felt to fail. I hit a point when I realized I had to aim high and fail, fail, fail in order to keep growing. This...

“The LMFAO party . . . masks the way our ordinary lives have become an endless, joyless elaboration of the same party principles: want more, consume more, no amount of confetti can be too much.”
“Party Rock Anthem” marked a generation of party pop songs. Songs that boasted raucous, synth; autotuned vocals; and lyrics that had…uh…very little to say. No, I mean extremely little. Like nothing. It was . . . bad....

“Say Amen (Saturday Night)” Lyrics Meaning
While not all songs are autobiographical—in fact, one should never directly assume that they are—it is both a songwriter’s privilege and responsibility to allow his or her experience to influence the writing process in some way. In “Say Amen,” Brendon...

Today we're talking to Melissa Bel, a longtime artist from Canada who met her partner in Las Vegas and moved to Great Britain. She's been all over the world, and she's been singing and writing songs the whole time, and for this episode of the show, we...