Key Change: Jia Tolentino on "I Love You Always Forever"

My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Jia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at the New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe V. Wade to the internet to pop culture and music. And today, we’re going to talk about the 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. For more, visit songexploder.net/jia-tolentino. https://songexploder.net/jia-tolentino

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Gia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at The New Yorker, where she's been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe v. Wade, to the internet, to pop culture and music. And today, we're going to talk about the 1996 pop hit, I Love You Always Forever by Donna Lewis. Gia, thanks so much for being here.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 3:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Do you remember the first time you ever heard, I Love You Always Forever?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I heard it, I think I was in the third row of a minivan. I was seven years old, and I grew up in Houston, and there was a lot of just driving, a lot of just being put in the back of the car. And I remember it was totally dark, and I think I was being ferried with cousins, or like, the family friends that are called cousins. And I remember I heard the song.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And you know, like, that thing where you hear a song that is like enormous, and it's the first time you've heard it and you have no context, but you like get that feeling. I think that was the first time I had ever had it, like, and I love that feeling, like when you're just like, who is this? What is this? What is this thing? You know?

• 4:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And just to me, like, the song sounded so platonically perfect in every way, and it gripped me so hard.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And I was just like, wow, like, like, it felt like the curtains were parting into an entire world of adult music, and this was like my on-ramp to it.

• 4:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I think it was the first song that wasn't vaguely child-coded, you know, even though like it, to some extent, like, all music that sounds like this is, like, I realize this now that I have a five-year-old, and I'm like, oh, okay, so much girly pop is really for children in a great way, you know? She loves Addison Rae, whatever, and so do I. But yeah, I just remember being like, this is perfect. This is like, the heavenly sphere is some sort of like sacred geometry is just unfolding in front of me. And I, and I'm, and I remember just like, listening in the backseat of the car, being like, wow, this is what it's gonna be like to be an adult and be in love, and, you know, something like that. It was a really profound experience.

• 5:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  When you were a kid, was the radio basically how you found new music?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, that, like, a lot of my early experiences of like independent music discovery was like, one of my parents needing to buy something at like Best Buy. And I guess seven is around the time that I would have been allowed to leave their side and go to the CD rack. And do the thing, you know, where it was like the big console where you could listen to like one minute previews of songs.

• 6:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  I started getting into like Jewel and Mariah Carey and Spice Girls, I think was around then also. And so much of it came from being sort of benignly neglected at big box stores and like listening to CD samplers.

• 6:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. I feel like that's young. Seven years old is is young to be even thinking to find music on your own.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I was in third grade, so I was like a little older coded and I really liked being on my own. And I did do everything on my own as soon as I possibly could. I was a girly girl and music hit me really hard as a child, the same way that it hits me really hard right now. And I wanted it to myself and to be able to decide and to have like an independent solo experience of it.

• 6:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What do you think it was about the song that you were connecting to?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I had this moment, I was watching the Quarone Little Princess movie with my older daughter, a month ago, maybe. And she had her first grown up cry. There's this climactic scene at the end and I was crying and my five year old was crying and she was like shocked by the nature of this cry. Like she was like, but I feel happy and she was giggling. She was also really crying and she was experiencing what it was like to have a an overpowering emotional experience that had nothing to do with something in her own life, kind of. I think this song was kind of like that, like it was roughly equivalent to that. It was it was different in that like

• 7:36Speaker 01

  music that I would have been into up till that point would have had like a really specific narrative and characters. You know, I loved like the song from Pocahontas, but that's because I loved the story and what it looked like, but this was an abstraction. It was this pure shot of like joy and ecstatic adoration. I mean, the lyrics are totally abstract. The nature of the song itself, it's really like stripped down to this extremely clean structure. And so I think, yeah, like it was the first time that it maybe I had been moved so strongly by something that was as simple and the good kind of formulaic, where it's just a pure scaffolding

• 8:19Speaker 01

  for you to hang all of your shit on, the way that pop music is. Like the song was, it was so purely that.

• 8:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hmm. When we were emailing, you said that "I love you always forever" helped you understand what pop music is and what pop music should be. And I'm curious about that. What do you think pop music should be?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So there's like a kind of song that sounds like this, like Mario Kart, Rainbow Road, pure dopamine, like, you know, angels opening their pink wings, sunlight, like all of the chemicals in your body just coursing and late afternoon and like a car driving as fast as it can, like pure sugar, cotton candy. "I love you, you love me, we're gonna be in love forever." Like it's this perpetually suspended present of pink fluffy ecstasy. I mean, pop music contains so much more than that, but this kind, this lane of it, where

• 9:18Speaker 01

  it was like, the song is gonna summon this like feeling of the purest expansiveness from an extremely simple pattern. That's so legible that a child can understand that it's about the happiest you've ever been or could be somehow, and it has something to do with loving somebody. There's maybe something about this kind of music and the, it's just like direct to your body that just overrides.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  All of the parts of me that are normally thinking. And yeah, it's like that specific lineage that I think this song was my first experience of.

• 9:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so then, did you specifically try and seek out other music that would give you that feeling?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Well, I think what I realized that I could seek out in music and what I still seek out in music is that sense of like, I can't think about anything else but this song. And this like instant, all encompassing transportation and like miniature surrender to a three minute thing. There were Mariah songs that would do it for me and like Whitney songs. And yeah, I think I realized like, music could do this. Music could make me feel like this. I can summon this feeling on demand, or I can be surprised by this feeling. And so chasing that feeling is certainly like a tendency within me that has driven a lot of my life. I was a festival rat for a decade plus, you know?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I was like in, starting as like a teenager, I was just always like pressed up against the front of the speakers, actively losing my hearing, like wanting to leave the venue, totally emptied out with my ears ringing. I wanted that override, like, yeah, like almost like a shortcut to this thing that I feel like I chase in a lot of ways, but this was the quickest and like, in a way, the most transcendent way of getting it. These have in many ways been the purest moments of my entire life, really. And I can't remember one of them before this.

• 11:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Giata Lantino continues after this.

• 11:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 12:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 13:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Just go to linkedin.com/songexploder. That's linkedin.com/songexploder. Terms and conditions apply.

• 13:53Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Do you remember the first time that you wanted to write about music?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I guess this wasn't really writing about music, but it is nice how kind of explicit the childhood of the sort of 90s and teenagerhood of the 2000s made your relationship with music. And I was on LiveJournal as a teen and like, there was like, I think, a slot to put whatever music you were listening to. And then there was MySpace and, you know, like so much of it was like, really, you were waving this song like a flag. And that was the currency and the language. And then, I think for like a full year, when I was in grad school in Michigan in 2012, which is when I started like writing on the internet in general, like I was blogging for The Hairpin for no money. And so like my friends were music blogging.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  And because I was writing and could write quickly and easily, they would have me write for these music blogs.

• 14:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And then when I got hired at the Hairpin by my now best friend, Emma Carmichael, it was just like the two of us running this website and we had to just like fill space. Like we, I think it was like nine posts a day, just between the two of us. And both of us love music and so we would just, kind of just to keep putting stuff on the website, like we would write about music almost every day. And it seemed kind of like a natural extension of anything that I'd been thinking or writing before, even as a kid. Like I think I was always trying to sort of like have and share transcendent experiences with music.

• 15:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Nowadays, when you write about pop music, how much is your perspective still informed by the experience you had, you know, in that minivan and the feelings you had when you were seven years old? Like, is there a standard that other music is being held to that was established by that experience?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  This is interesting. I've never thought about this before, but maybe it's why bad pop music is, you know, it's offensive in a way that other music that I don't like is not. Cause it's like a perversion of this thing. It's stevia and I want sugar, you know? And I find things like stevia like quite offensive to my physical form. Like I, not to offend anyone that might need to eat stevia for dietary purposes or whatever, but I find it unbelievably offensive when it's the worst part of pop music without the thing that animates and makes transcendent the good stuff, you know? Which is like a kind of utter sincerity. It's sincerity and commitment and like real sweetness and real open-ended ecstasy.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  And when something is borrowing all of that for more likely product placement in an Old Navy commercial or whatever, it like, it hurts. Like it hurts me.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Like, the artificiality of pop, when it's magnificent and when it is soul-crushing, I find that very interesting, and so much of that is just how it hits you in your body.

• 16:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So, you've name-checked Donna Lewis, obviously, but Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. So many of the paradigms of the perfect pop song that you've mentioned, they're all sung by women. And I was wondering if you think that that's part of what's necessary in order to achieve the feeling that you had, or if it just happens to have worked out that way?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  No, this is a me thing. It's like, women are angels, you know what I mean? Like, I prefer a female subjectivity, I just do. There's something about the female subject position that is negotiating around so much more to begin with. Disempowerment, submission, receptivity, that them singing pure sweetness hits harder for me and means more to me. And it's also like, the baptism into pink fluffy clouds, angel wings parting, rainbows and cotton candy. It's obviously not purely coded for girls, but it basically is.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  There's a reason that gay men, who also court this feeling and love, also prefer the female subject position in music and art in a lot of ways, right? Like, maybe there are exceptions, like Justin Bieber in "Sorry," right? But this is the girls' zone. It belongs to girls. It always will belong to girls. And men can listen to it, they can ghost-write the songs, they can produce the songs. Max Martin did "Teenage Dream," right? But they can't do it. It's for girls and it's by girls. And there's a fourth-grade part of me that loves that. What I think I like about this kind of music is it's kind of pre-Lapsarian.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  It is the Garden of Eden, and it's a sort of willful summoning of a type of feeling when anything is possible and nothing will ever go wrong. And as a kid, you don't have any thoughts about that other than the feeling itself. You're just like, wow, what an incredible feeling that this song can summon. And that I feel on my own, anyway, probably, about just being alive. And I guess, slowly in time... As one comes to realize in a personal and then structural sense that the world is not like that, these songs still pretend that it is, kind of.

• 19:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hmm. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was your daughter, who you said she's five.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I was wondering, how much do you feel like you can play a hand in shaping her musical taste? Or how much is she like you when you were younger and fiercely independently wants to make her own choices about music discovery? Like, have you played her "I Love You Always Forever"?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I did, actually. And I was like, did you like it? And she was like, yeah, I liked it. And then she was like, can you put on Pink Pony Club or whatever? You know, it's so funny, when she was like an infant, I don't know whether this was projection, but it did seem to me that I could soothe her by putting on cotton candy songs. Like, I did play "Teenage Dream" for her a lot. And they would soothe her, but maybe it was just because I got happier when I listened to them and, you know, and I was holding her and then she would get soothed, like, I don't know. But it seemed for a while that she would really respond to them. I do remember "Teenage Dream" made her stop crying once. And now, in the last year, it's like, yeah, you know, like, I don't know how many four-year-olds you have in your life right now, but it's like, they love Chapel Road.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Like, they're obsessed with Chapel Road. So she does like this kind of music already. She likes some Taylor Swift. She likes the Taylor Swift songs that are made for children, like "Shake It Off." And I can see her, and she's a mini-me in every way.

• 20:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And she loves music. You know, like, she's locked in.

• 20:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  She's really tapped into all this stuff. She asks to, if she's in a bad mood, I can, like, turn on a disco light and play "Run Away With Me," you know? And in a way, I'm like, oh, wow, you're just like me on someone's rooftop in Williamsburg, like, you know, in 2015 when the song came out, you know? It's funny to see it come together, because I still like this music, too. Like, I went to an Olivia Rodrigo show at MSG, like, when Paloma was, like, three. And I was looking at all of the little pre-teen girls that were in their, like, first little halter tops and, like, first makeup and, you know, really trying to pretend they were teenagers. And I was like, wow, like, I'm pretty close to doing that with her, you know?

• 21:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll be kind of sad when our tastes diverge. But I kind of suspect we'll have a lot of, like, maybe she'll be like me and she'll still, she will want the sugary stuff forever.

• 21:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thank you so much.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 21:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Jia Tolentino's bestselling book, Trick Mirror, is available everywhere. And you can find her writing at The New Yorker. Her website is gia.blog. Visit songexploder.net/kechange for more Key Change episodes and for a playlist with all the songs that have been discussed. This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm watching and listening to and thinking about, you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website.

• 22:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh, your way. Thanks for listening.