Number Ones: What Is Meghan Trainor’s ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ Doing At The Top Of The Charts?

What does Meghan Trainor’s dominance of the charts say about us? Bringing his popular column for The Vine to Junkee, Tim Byron takes a deeper look at the top song on the ARIA Singles Chart.

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One way to market a song in 2015 is to make it a Big News Song. The Big News Song inevitably has some sort of controversy deliberately attached to it; it aims to launch a thousand thinkpieces, with a video that gets carefully analysed and prolifically GIF’d for its visual messages. The singer of the song has probably done something controversial at some point, too.

People who don’t ordinarily care about pop music sometimes find themselves begrudgingly discussing these types of songs and clips around the watercooler or, more likely, on social media. And in a world where music streaming is becoming increasingly dominant, the more people who feel like they need to listen to that bloody Big News Song in order to stay abreast of these conversations, the more money the record company makes.

The Big News Song of the moment, of course, is Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’. As the Guardian trumpeted on their frontpage, feminists are apparently falling out over it.

Big news songs become cultural footballs because their popularity draws attention to contentious issues in society. A big news song’s meaning is purposely ambiguous; if everyone agreed on what the song means, there’d be no controversy. The sexual politics of ‘Blurred Lines’, for example, are questionable precisely because they’re up for interpretation. You can take the “blurred lines” as being a bit rapey, but you can also take them as being a little bit of fun between two implicitly consenting partners. In contrast, Brian McFadden’s ‘Just The Way You Are (Drunk At The Bar)’ was not questionable; it was simply beyond the pale. The only question it raised was why McFadden and the record company ever thought it was a good idea. And, importantly, it wasn’t a hit.

Meghan Trainor’s ‘All About That Bass’ — her previous #1 single — was another big news song. It came to the right place at the right time: Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’; Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Booty’; Kim Kardashian’s internet-breakage — the second half of 2014 was the era of butts. While apparently not identifying as a feminist, Meghan Trainor seemed to at least be promoting body positivity, while mixing a 1950s housewife aesthetic with a rap style often reminiscent of fellow butt-promoter Nicki Minaj. Thinkpieces were indeed launched in their thousands. Did her mention of ‘skinny bitches’ show that her body positivity was limited to people who looked like her? (You could take it that way if you wanted to). Is it a shame that her song was entirely focused on women being proud of their appearance rather than, say, being proud of accomplishments or being a good person? (Yes). Was her subsequent single ‘Dear Future Husband’ outright sexist? (It certainly does emphasise traditional gender roles).

‘All About That Bass’ was a hit because it sat at the faultlines. As a society, we’re still not quite sure how to deal with the disconnect between what others want us to weigh and what we actually weigh. At its heart, ‘All About That Bass’ reflects that disconnect, whether you like its message or not.

‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ Is Not A Big News Song

Meghan Trainor’s new #1 single — ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ — is not a big news song. Instead, it’s utterly unassuming. There could well be some music video in the works, carefully choreographed to inspire some op-eds, but it got to #1 in Australia without any of that. The lyrics eschew controversy for anodyne sweet-little-nothings about not taking a relationship for granted. There’s little inherent drama in not taking a relationship for granted, and so the lyric in ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ transparently tries to inject some Diane Warren-style bombast for the singers to sound concerned about. Trainor dreams that she loses him, but then she wakes up and he’s there. This motivates her to tell him that she won’t take him for granted. And so on.

It’s unspecific everyday stuff, but Trainor and her songwriting partners — Justin Weaver and Caitlin Smith, who are both best known for their work in the country genre — try to make it sound dramatic, like a life-changing event. Ultimately, though, there’s not enough at stake – neither Trainor nor Legend really explain what exactly they were doing wrong when they were taking it for granted.

Musically, what’s interesting about ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ is what’s absent: most of Trainor’s more distinctive quirks. The retro soul motifs you hear on ‘All About That Bass’ or ‘Dear Future Husband’ are mostly missing; there’s an occasional doo-wop piano and the kind of 12/8 beat you sometimes get in ’60s soul, but it’s relegated to tasteful background duty here, where it’s upfront in her other singles. Instead, ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ is sonically vaguely reminiscent of the Rihanna/Kanye duet ‘FourFiveSeconds’. Both ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ and ‘FourFiveSeconds’ are duets based around acoustic guitar, big harmonies, and heavy sonic compression. Similarly, there’s no trace of Trainor’s nasal white-girl rapping, the type at the heart of ‘Lips Are Moving’.

Minus Trainor’s idiosyncracies, ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ is fairly anonymous-sounding; if you heard it on the radio not knowing who it was by, I’m not sure Meghan Trainor would be your first guess.

What Music Sounds Like When You Treat It As Competitive Sport

There was a certain style of singing that flourished on the various TV talent shows of the last decade which was, well, mostly about overdoing it. Singers were rewarded on those shows for technical proficiency, for being able to hit the high notes and nail those Mariah Carey melismas. Which meant they would hit those high notes and nail those melismas in every bloody bar of the song.

This makes sense when you view music as a competitive sport, rather than as emotional expression. But years of hearing similar singers do identikit melismas meant that stuff started to sound like noise — which could be why pop music in the late 2000s experienced a big AutoTune fad, and prized singers who tried to sound distinctive rather than proficient.

That Idol-style singing is exactly what Trainor and Legend sound like they’re doing on ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’. Listening to the song fade out, you half expect to hear Dicko or Simon Cowell begrudgingly say a couple of nice things about the performance. Not coincidentally, I just don’t hear authentic heart in ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’. Legend and Trainor don’t have much chemistry together; you feel that they’re mostly duetting because some Sony executive guy saw both of them in the charts and did the maths. It really does sound like Legend did his part at home in LA and sent it to Trainor via email. And Trainor, I think, sounds a bit like she’s trying to compete with Legend’s more soulful singing style, rather than be herself.

Still, the Sony executive guy’s maths clearly works. John Legend made a lot of new fans with his piano ballad ‘All Of Me’ recently, and Meghan Trainor’s had several top 10 hits by doing her wannabe-’50s-housewife thing. Two fanbases will buy more of a single than one fanbase, which is probably why ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ is at #1 rather than #4 this week.

While the song itself is as efficiently bland as you’d expect from a vehicle for Idol-style singing, it has a fair few melodic hooks that sound more natural than forced. It also has a producer who knows how to emphasise the hooks — listen to the big harmonies when they sing “love you” and “lose you” in the chorus. And John Legend certainly sounds more natural in this context than he’d sound duetting on something like ‘Dear Future Husband’. It will likely get played at more than a few weddings this year.

Where Meghan Trainor Fits In The Fracturing Pop Marketplace

There are essentially three ways in which Australians consume pop singles right now: 1) downloads, 2) the radio and 3) streaming services. (CD singles, by the way, are a dead format). ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ was the most downloaded single in the last week, which is why I’m writing about it — but in the last week, ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ was only the 10th most played song on Australian radio, and only the 19th most streamed song on Australian streaming services like Spotify.

The take-home message here is that how you relate to an artist changes how you want to consume. There’s no implied ownership on Spotify; if an artist yanks their music from the service, you suddenly can’t listen to it. You don’t own the songs they play on radio, either — but when you press the button on your phone to pay money for a song on iTunes, it feels like its yours (even if you only legally own a license to listen to the song). To buy a song or a CD is to literally put your money where your mouth is, assuming your mouth is singing along.

In order words, Meghan Trainor has a dedicated fanbase in Australia. There’s a sizeable amount of people who want to not only listen to but own her songs. In the 24 weeks since she released her album Title in January, the album has been in the Top 10 for 21 weeks; in fact, it’s the only single-artist album released in 2015 to go platinum in Australia so far. All five of her songs to have charted in Australia were Top 10 singles, and the only one of them not to go platinum (i.e., sell 70,000+ copies) is, so far, ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’. (Considering it’s at #1, it’s gonna get there in a week or two.) So if more casual music fans are less excited to hear her on the radio or put her on their Spotify playlists, Meghan Trainor shouldn’t be too worried; after all, she’d easily have made more money in Australia last week from downloads of ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’ than Major Lazer did with the current #1 streaming track, ‘Lean On’.

And perhaps that’s the irony of ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’. It’s meant to be the Meghan Trainor song for people who don’t really care about Meghan Trainor’s schtick; it’s meant to be unassuming, rather than a Big News Song. But the song mostly preaches to the converted. They relate to this unassuming little song because they relate to Trainor’s cultural politics; her fans can insert their relationship to Trainor into this song, where cynical old music-critic me can only insert emptiness. And so regardless of the unassuming nature of this particular song, it’s Meghan Trainor’s well-tested ability to make clickable headlines that still dominates how people feel about ‘Like I’m Gonna Lose You’.

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Tim Byron completed a PhD in music psychology, plays in too many bands, and chronically overanalyses everything musical. He has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine.