What do John C. Reilly and Taylor Swift have in common? The Great American Songbook

October 14, 2025·57 min·5 clips

Imagine Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Justin Bieber all releasing the same single at once—that's how the Great American Songbook worked.

The hook is Taylor Swift. Nate Sloan and Charlie start with Life of a Showgirl and its theatrical 1920s flavor, then place that sound near the Great American Songbook. They talk about composers like Irving Berlin and performers like Ethel Merman, but the bigger question is how certain songs become part of shared memory. The music does not come across as dusty. It has showbiz shine, old-stage projection, and melodies built to outlast any one recording. Chris joins the thread and points to a time when listeners looked for music by artist, not only by one fixed track. That feels odd now. Set against Shazam, the older habit sounds stranger and more alive, because the composition could matter apart from a single version. Then John C. Reilly enters with Mr. Romantic, a made-up character built to perform love songs, part stage persona and part old-world myth. The setup is charmingly theatrical. Mr. Romantic has supposedly lived for thousands of years and travels in a steamer trunk carried by four musicians. That image earns its keep. It makes repertoire feel closer to ritual, as if the songbook is being summoned rather than pulled from a catalog. The episode keeps circling back to why artists return to this material. Taylor Swift borrows the songbook's aura on Life of a Showgirl, while Reilly reaches it through romance, character, and performance. The common thread is craft: melody, persona, style, and songs that can live beyond one definitive recording. The fun is hearing old forms translated into present-tense pop without sanding off their strangeness.

As heard by us

A smart, affectionate case for why old standards still resonate in modern pop.

Taylor Swift's showgirl era becomes a doorway into the Great American Songbook, and Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding use it to show why old standards still matter inside modern pop.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want pop history, standards lore, and John C. Reilly's Mr. Romantic.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Switched on Pop