Modern pop music is HARD

[Polkasound]

It helped, but there's no getting around her perfect diction and "schooled" performance.

Sorry for thinking that was your wife, but yes, that's what I was hearing... a schooled performance. I tend to favor enunciation, but over-enunciation can be as undesirable as cursive singing.

So yes, the next step is to find the right singer. It's actually the most important thing - far more important than all the production details I've been geeking out over. The vocal is what sells a song.

When I write a song, I either have a particular vocalist in mind and write the song to mesh with their range and style, or else I write the song first and then spend hours or even days searching for and auditioning singers to find the perfect one.

To understand today’s pop music you have to really listen to what’s out there - and happening. Then analyze and sub-analyze. Tomorrow it may be different.

Exactly. You can't just arbitrarily pick up bits here and there and get the vibe. You have to immerse yourself into today's pop music and analyze it like a WWII code breaker until you understand the language. It takes real ambition and commitment to do that.

 

[Mike Greene]

Really good track IMO. Mind you, I'm far from immersed in that genre, and totally agree with the others who have emphasized the importance of understanding so genre, so take that as a caveat. Hmmm ... I hate having that disclaimer, so let's just go with "Really good track!" and leave it at that. Seriously, I like it a lot, and if it were on the radio during those rare times I'm on KIIS FM (the contemporary hits station), I'd believe it.

I totally hear you about modern pop music being hard. I haven't tried that much with today's modern pop music, but in various times in the past, it's been an education, and never as easy as I think it will be.

Back when I was starting out as a songwriter/producer (after failing at the "Gonna be a rock star" dream), I would pay my bills by doing demos for aspiring singers (and rappers.) Want heavy metal? I gotcha! 80s New Wave? I'm your man!

Oh wait. Nobody was coming to me for either of those. Everybody wanted their songs to be either quasi-R&B dance music (mostly white girls wanting to sound "black") or hip hop.

So I had to do whatever style they wanted their song to be in, and this turned out to be great for me, since I was essentially being paid by the hour to learn styles that were out of my comfort zone. That was one of the best things that could have happened to me, because I not only learned the styles, but developed a real appreciation for them.

 

[Mike Greene]

When I write a song, I either have a particular vocalist in mind and write the song to mesh with their range and style, or else I write the song first and then spend hours or even days searching for and auditioning singers to find the perfect one.

That paragraph applies exactly to me, too. The right singer is so important, but often soooo difficult. I've had songs where I've gone through 4 or 5 singers to get to the right one.

 

[Nekujak]

I think this particular musical adventure was an especially rude awakening for me, because in the past, I've been quite successful at absorbing and creating music across multiple styles.

Clients would say, "We need some <insert_style> music for this scene," and after a bit of research and listening, I'd deliver the goods. It was a point of pride for me, and one of my key selling points as a media composer/songwriter. Plus I've always been able to do it "in house" with resources already in hand.

Naively, I thought tackling modern pop music would be no different. But, as this entire thread has expressed multiple times, and I've learned from the punishing experience of trying, simply skimming the landscape of cutting edge music isn't near enough effort to do it convincingly.

For now, it's pretty clear vocals are the primary Achilles heel in my tracks, so that's my next area of focus.

Thanks everyone for your contributions so far. Aside from my own personal interests, I think this has been an interesting and illuminating conversation

Onward ho!

 

[Polkasound]

Naively, I thought tackling modern pop music would be no different. But, as this entire thread has expressed multiple times, and I've learned from the punishing experience of trying, simply skimming the landscape of cutting edge music isn't near enough effort to do it convincingly.

I've always felt the same way. There's a learning curve that comes with creating music in different styles, and most of the time our experienced ears and critical listening can get us there. But what's different with creating today's pop music is that our experienced ears aren't adding very much, because 99% of what they know is old by comparison. That remaining 1% is us relying on critical listening and "skimming the landscape" as you eloquently put it.

When I was a teenager listening to pop music in the mid 1980s, I liked the day's fresh pop music, but if the radio played a song from 1981 or going back into the late 1970s, I didn't like it. Whether it had that dry sound that carried over from Disco or the synths sounded too thin, I could hear it. I could hear the distinct sounds of a slightly older pop production. We're talking about the minutiae of only a few years of music evolution. That's because, like a typical teenager, I was fully immersed in music as it played a large part in me finding my identity.

Now, in my 50s, I can hear a pop song and name its approximate era up to and through the 2000s, but after that, I'm a fish out of water. There's no way on earth I could do what a young person could do, which is discern a pop song from 2026 vs. 2021 by its sound. The only chance I'd have of creating a 2026 radio-ready pop song would be to become like a teenager again and devote my ears to today's pop music.

But I wouldn't be capable of that. I'd fail because my heart wouldn't be in it, because I'm not a pop music producer. I'd create something nice, but it wouldn't come remotely close to competing with anything currently on the charts. So I'm not ever going to try. I do have some pop music works in the can, but they're not designed to sound like charting songs. They're a hybrid of modern pop, synthwave, and "gas pump" music, culminating in a pop sound that appeals to me.