Pop!ular

Album: The Tension and the Spark (2004)
Charted: 12
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Songfacts®:

  • This tongue-in-cheek send-up of celebrities and wannabes was the first single released from Darren Hayes' second solo album, The Tension and the Spark. The former Savage Garden frontman wrote the song with his producer Robert Conley.
  • Hayes told the story of the song in the album's track-by-track notes: "Robert had played me a five second riff from a piece of music he had written a while back. It was just one keyboard hook and I was obsessed with it. We wrote a whole track based around that vibe and created the craziest and most schizophrenic programming. There was so much editing and processing of the drums. It was laborious but such a challenge."
  • Hayes explained the song's lyrical content: "Lyrically it's me addressing the fact that I've made the most personal album of my career in the most fickle climate. We are obsessed with fame.. it has become a vocation we now train for and people are literally willing to do anything to get it. At the same time I was feeling completely bored with my persona and the corner of musical direction I'd painted myself into. I was bored with pop music, bored with the radio and really wrote this song as a way of poking fun at myself and the conveyor belt that brought me to this point in my career. It's ironic because in the song I'm proclaiming all the things I am not. And yet it rings true because I'm sure deep down there was and some days still is a part of me that is tempted by the devil that is fame."
  • The song reached the top of Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play Songs in March 2005. It was Hayes' first #1 on the US Dance chart, either as a solo artist or with Savage Garden.

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