Lots of music is truly similar, it’s fascinating, and now we’re all circle of fifths detectives. Gimlet’s Surprisingly Awesome podcast put together one of its best episodes yet, providing a crash course in music theory and explaining the circle of fifths. The episode starts at the very basic level of explaining what is a pitch, moving up gradually to chord progressions. The explainer reaches the circle of fifths, which is prevalent in a large number of music pieces from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, to I Will Survive, Fly Me to the Moon, and The Simpsons’ theme song, which when mashed up together, will “actually fit on top of each other perfectly.” Co-host reaches a eureka moment when she asks “DJs are really just scammers, they’re just exploiting a fundamental component of music theory. When you’re composing, do you sit down and do you say to yourself like ah, I think this is a moment where I’d like deploy a fifth?” To which composer Nicholas Britell answers: “yeah, absolutely. It depends. Especially where you’re writing film music where you’re really trying to think about things that are happening dramatically in a film and you’re trying to imagine the way that your music can emotionally relate to those things.” (Run time 35:15)