Meg Warren on the book that gave her a deeper understanding of pop music

Meg Warren trained as an opera singer, but she switched gears and is now the lead singer of the pop band Repartee. Right now, she's reading The Song Machine by John Seabrook, a book that she says is giving her some real insight into the songwriting process.​

The book essentially analyzes Top 40 pop radio music. It talks about the main people who are writing a lot of the popular songs, and it looks at certain pop songs and certain genres, going back to the days of Tin Pan Alley and talking about how popular songwriting has evolved and where it is today. 

When I moved to Toronto in January of 2015, we were kind of thrust into this type of songwriting that we'd never really done before. Our backgrounds are indie band — we get together in a room and play keyboards and guitars and figure out songs that way. But when we moved here, we met with a lot of songwriters who are doing what's called the top line, which is basically the lyrics and the melody. There's the beat, which is everything else — the instrumental song — and then somebody will come in and write the top line over that. We started doing that, and when I read the book it was a whole other level of learning about that type of music.

Meg Warren's comments have been edited and condensed.