Everybody Talk About

...pop music, but not everyone agree. And while there are plenty of sources for song facts (interviews, production details, ratings, criticism), facts aren't what's really interesting about pop music. Even what the artist says is just another fact. What's interesting is the meaning of the song to you. You may be the only person who thinks that "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is actually about Jesus (or maybe that's me), but that's what makes pop music so emotional and fascinating. The lack of a single, incontrovertible meaning is what makes it interesting.

Our favorite songs release a flood of addictive brain chemicals, but it can be difficult to identify the exact trigger. On paper, the lyrics are often pretty vague given how meaningful they feel when the song is playing. The meaning seems to waft up from a soup of musical and lyrical elements--that chord change, middle eight, drum pattern, intake of breath--combined with our own, often idiosyncratic, knowledge and experience. We may obsess about what strings Jimi used or dissect the symbolism of the English hedgerow, but those are more symptoms of our devotion than explanations. It's that complex, cloudy, personal recipe that we really want to condense into language and share when we're talking about our favorite songs.

I love pop* music. I love talking about it and listening to other people talk about it and what it means to them. Those conversations are almost always more interesting than published music criticism where the opinions have be justified and dressed up as facts. I'd rather just hear people talk about what their favorite songs mean to them. So I made a site for people to do that and I hope that you will.
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*I mean "pop" in the broadest possible sense to include pretty much anything not written by Mozart.