The pop song that quietly became my guilty pleasure

There's a particular kind of track that lives in the shadows of any respectable playlist. The one you skip past when friends are watching, the one you queue only after midnight. For years I treated a certain glossy pop song with that exact caution, convinced it had nothing to teach me about songwriting. Then a flat white in a Melbourne café, a Triple J Unearthed rabbit hole, and a long drive down the Pacific Highway rearranged everything I thought I knew about what counts as a "real" song.

It started, as most of my musical conversions do, with denial. The track had been sitting in a folder marked guilty pleasures for nearly two years. I would shuffle it on while cooking, never once adding it to a public playlist. The lyrics were over-sincere, the chorus too neat, the production about as subtle as a billboard in Kings Cross. And yet every time it came on, my shoulder started tapping. I let that go on far longer than I should have before admitting the obvious: I liked the thing.

The song that taught me to stop sniffing

For most of my twenties I approached pop the way a sommelier approaches supermarket wine. There had to be credentials. A bit of grit, a trace of melancholy, a Spotify bio that referenced influences I could recognise. A radio-friendly track with a bouncy synth line and an unironic key change felt like intellectual surrender, the kind of thing I would skip past in a DJ set without thinking.

Then I started working with younger artists who openly worshipped the song in question, and the snobbery began to look tired. They weren't pretending to like it. They weren't being ironic. They had built workouts, study playlists, and late-night drives around it, the way I'd once built mine around Nick Cave and Beth Orton. That kind of easy, generous enjoyment was something I'd quietly lost without noticing.

The song itself was never designed for the tastemaker circuit. It landed somewhere in the lower reaches of the ARIA charts, picked up a bit of late-night rotation on regional stations, and quietly built a following among listeners who just wanted something bright in their ears after a long shift. Critics panned it. Aggregator scores sat low. By every metric I usually trusted, the song had failed. The streaming numbers kept climbing anyway, year after year, until I had to confront the possibility that my metrics weren't measuring the right things.

On charts, credibility, and the cult of cool

Australian music culture has its own quiet hierarchies, and I had internalised most of them. Triple J still sets the tone for what indie-heads consider serious. The ARIA Awards dictate what counts as mainstream success. Somewhere in between sits a long tail of artists who thrive without chasing either crown. The misunderstood pop song in question sat in none of those tidy columns. It wasn't alternative enough for the college crowd, and too earnest for the club circuit. It simply existed in the gap.

I used to think there was something virtuous about liking only what the critics liked. There isn't. There is, however, something genuinely suspicious about liking nothing much at all. Pretending to enjoy only obscure records became a kind of performance, one that consumed more energy than listening to a two-minute pop hook ever could. Letting go of that posture took longer than I expected, mostly because the social rewards of being "tasteful" run surprisingly deep.

The other revelation was local. APRA AMCOS pays out royalties on streams, radio play, and live performance whether or not the track is cool. So every time someone replays that song on a long-haul truck route between Sydney and Brisbane, somebody is being paid. Treating a song as disposable because it doesn't fit a subculture has a real monetary cost to the people who made it. Once I sat with that, the argument against enjoying the song started to fall apart.

Driving songs, coffee shop confessions, and quietly changing your mind

The moment I fully admitted the song had won me over happened on a weekday afternoon in a window seat at a café near Newtown. A Spotify-curated mix drifted through, and there it was, sandwiched between a Hozier deep cut and something from Gang of Youths. I didn't skip it. I didn't turn the volume down. I let it play, and I watched two strangers at the next table start mouthing the chorus. They didn't look embarrassed. They looked like they were having the best afternoon of their week.

That kind of moment is hard to engineer. You cannot force a song into your life by deciding you should love it. It either happens through repetition, mood, or memory, or it doesn't. Looking back, the path from suspicion to acceptance ran through dozens of small situations. A late shift at the pub with the track thumping over the speakers. A friend belting it on the drive home from Falls Festival. A quiet Sunday morning with the curtains half-drawn and nowhere to be. None of those contexts were planned, but together they wore down the resistance.

It also helped to read around the song rather than only listen. I dug into interviews, traced the songwriter's previous credits, and discovered she had a hand in writing some of the more thoughtful country-leaning tracks I'd been championing for years. The person behind the gloss had range, which reframed the surface simplicity almost overnight.

Why a guilty pleasure is just a pleasure waiting for permission

A guilty pleasure, properly examined, is usually just a pleasure attached to a story we tell ourselves about who we are. Drop the story and what's left is a song. Songs have no obligation to reflect our taste back at us, and neither do we have an obligation to be consistent listeners. Plenty of Australians who would never admit to loving certain pop hits will happily belt them at karaoke, on camping trips, or in the privacy of their own car on the M1. The song never changes. The permission to enjoy it does.

There's also something refreshing about being openly out of step with a critical consensus. Australian music writers tend to reward restraint, often unconsciously. Songs that do too much, feel too eager, or wear their hooks on their sleeves get quietly dismissed, even when they're structurally inventive. Letting a track like this one become a favourite is a small rebellion against the idea that enjoyment has to be earned through obscurity.

I should also say something about songwriting craft, because the song in question is genuinely well-built underneath its gloss. Anyone interested in how certain genres lean into twang, atmosphere, and mood can learn a lot by reading this guide to twang rock and noticing how the same structural instincts show up in mainstream pop. The lesson travels further than the genre tags suggest.

Notes from the other side of the conversion

For anyone currently nursing a similar secret obsession, a few practical steps helped me shake off the embarrassment and just enjoy the music. None of them are heroic. They mostly involve admitting what your headphones already know, then paying attention to the writing underneath. Some of this thinking shows up in my own notes over at my blog, if you want to keep exploring after the list.

The list that follows is deliberately mixed. Some of it is about listening habits, some is about looking at credits, and a couple of points are about treating musicians like human beings who get paid. None of it requires any particular taste or training.

A short, deliberately mixed list of things worth trying:

• Listen with the credits on. Songwriter names often surprise you, and they reframe entire catalogues in a single glance.
• Drop the song into a context your usual taste wouldn't allow: a long drive, a boring chore, a morning shower. Mood does a lot of the heavy lifting.
• Don't aim to "appreciate" it on its own terms. Just notice whether your body reacts before your brain gets involved.
• If the writing strikes you, dig into the producer's other work. There is almost always a deeper conversation behind the tracks we underestimate.
• Pay attention to how APRA AMCOS distributes streaming royalties. Liking a song is small; supporting the people behind it matters more.
• Compare the lyrics against what you usually read. Sometimes sincerity is the only thing the song has that your taste is missing.

The track in question still lives in that folder I created years ago, though I have long since stopped calling it guilty. It plays on the stereo when I'm writing, when I'm cleaning, when I'm not paying attention to anything in particular. It has earned its place, not because it impressed a critic somewhere in Newtown or Fitzroy, but because I keep choosing it, day after day, in private. That has to count for something. If you have a song like that, the one you refuse to defend in public, give yourself permission to enjoy it without apology. The rest of the playlist can catch up later.