Click to listen to Glee's "Loser Like Me"

For their first foray into original music, the producers of Glee didn't exactly go out on a limb: They hired Swedish songwriting genius Max Martin, the most reliable and prolific hitmaker of the last decade and a half. The results are predictably fizzy: a fiendishly catchy verse with a hopped-up beat and pop-funk chicken-scratch guitars, followed by an even catchier singsong chorus. The lyric, belted out with bright-sided earnestness by Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, distills the show's theme: the mystical power of a good tune and a well-choreographed jazz hands routine to turn geeks into gods. "I could be a superstar," Monteith exults, "I'll see you when you wash my car."

Photos: TV on the Cover of Rolling Stone

“Youth Knows No Pain”

“Like on 'Youth Knows No Pain' — we are the ones that should demonstrate, because we can take it,” Likke Li said. “We can pierce ourselves, take Ecstasy, dance all night and still go to work at our McDonald's jobs.” Despite the hedonistic sentiment in the song, the Swedish singer also admitted in hindsight her youth had repercussions. “I remember when I was 18-19 and feeling that I know it all,” Li said. “I always feel that I know it all. But that song is about realizing you don’t, and reflecting, ‘Boy, if I only knew what would follow.’”