Taylor Swift '08: The Hype, Anticipation & Appreciation Begins Right Here

Fuck a rolling country thread (well, not really), Taylor so clearly needs her own alcove for in-depth discussion.

So Taylor's new album comes out in a few weeks. Probably many of you have even heard it, or heard some of the singles. Being in Australia, I haven't (Taylor has zero profile here) but I hope to correct that soon.

The album cover looks very modern, though it's not clear if that's gonna be a red herring. I've heard a live version of the title track "Fearless" which maintains the first album's vibe (at least in its live form) and Taylor's marvelously direct, factual lyrical approach.

I'm excited. I only hooked onto her first album this year, but it's become a favourite, perhaps the best confessional teen album of this decade, or at least on a par with Breakaway and I Am Me. I love Taylor's lyrics, which don't at all break with country convention but rather find ways to be distinct and surprising and indubitably hers through their use of country convention. I love the hyper-glossy, maximalist arrangements they're housed in, which would reinforce the slightness of a slight song, but b/c Taylor's songs are so strong they're like an endless parade of cherries-on-top.

My main hope for this album is that she doesn't fuck it up, but I could also see her tackling a launch towards the mainstream in a winningly idiosyncratic fashion - for some reason Shakira's Laundry Service pops into my head as an album she'd do well to learn a few lessons from.

I was reminded of how much I love her songwriting recently when I discovered that Fearless, Love Story and Change (that Olympic Song) have all been released so far off the new album. Fearless is by far my favourite, esp. in because of its lyrical specificity, which is always one of the strongest things about Taylor's work. (hands through your hair, absent-mindedly making me want you, dancing in the parking lot, in a storm in her best dress, fearless) Love Story throws in some fairy-tale Romeo/Juliet stuff but is also quite good.

I'm worried that she might fall into the trap of hewing too closely to a formula that admittedly works really FUCKING well. I don't see her fucking it up, though. In my Taylor binge this week, I downloaded the two post-album EPs which are uneven, but Christmases When You Were Mine and I Heart ? are both delightful and point in interesting directions for her (achingly gorgeous christmas songs and bluesy organ-drenched mandolin pop?).

No matter how the rest of the album is, Fearless's breezy anthemic whatever will be gracing my headphones on repeat for a while.

Here's what I wrote about "Love Story" for my Facebook Glamour Pop Group:

My two biggest non-2008 obsessions this year have been Fela Kuti and Taylor Swift. Fela, of course, invented afro-beat. Taylor meanwhile is the latest young star of mainstream country, her 2006 eponymous debut album one of the best pop albums of this decade – certainly as a collection of confessional pop only Ashlee Simpson’s ‘I Am Me’ (and, perhaps, Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Breakaway) comes close.

Those suspicious of mainstream country tend to think that an example of greatness in this arena would require some fundamental undermining, subversion or, at least, transcendence of the style’s modus operandi. Taylor does none of this: her first album is glowing, maximalist studio-perfected country-pop, every inch of the stereo speaker filled with glowing guitars, hokey mandolins, gratuitous violin refrains. Taylor’s voice is just twangy enough to be clearly of its genre without seemed confined by it. Most difficult to pin down is Taylor’s songwriting, which manages to combine the generic with the idiosyncratic in ways that are just endlessly loveable (most famously, her first single “Tim McGraw” is a sweet curse laid on an ex-boyfriend to always think of her when he even thinks of country singer Tim McGraw, let alone hears ‘their song’). Rather than break with tradition, Taylor finds new and interesting ways to say things within that tradition; if you’ve never quite “got” with mainstream country I can’t think of a better gateway drug. Plus, she’s definitely one of the best lyricists in pop right now.

“Love Story”, as you might expect from a forthcoming second album arriving on the back of an ever-expanding public profile, is much more internationalist in feel. Oh, there’s a twangy mandolin throughout, but this is more than matched by the burnished sheen of the almost new wavey guitar and the unexpectedly subtle slow burn of the chorus. The tale of fantastic (in both senses) young love is also much more in line with the expectations of broader pop audiences – whereas Taylor’s first album was filled with the typically country concerns of failed romances, “what does he see in her?” pining, and one of my favourites, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My)” which covers about eighty years of a proudly domestic long term relationship like an ad campaign for life insurance.

Taylor’s capacity for astonishingly on-point specificity is largely jettisoned as she paints more a widescreen, mythological tale of love found, lost and regained, but even if the eventual marriage proposal has an air of broad brush strokes about it (I liked this denouement in “Mary’s Song” just a little more), Taylor finds space to inject the mythic with her own sensibility. “You were Romeo/I was a Scarlet Letter”, she sighs, encapsulating the imagined and then real disapproval of her father and a broader conservative community at her shameful seduction (“Romeo” gets off scot free, of course). It’s rare for pop to find a way to express the intimacy of love while simultaneously painting in the landscape of the outside world, and most songs ultimately plump for one or the other. But Taylor learns as much from ‘Romeo & Juliet’ as you could hope for from an adolescent, and in “Love Story” each world traces the outline of the other, throwing the contours of the other into relief - abandonment is even harder to bear in the face of the whole world's "I told you so..."

In an odd way, I’m reminded of Vanessa Carlton, who at her best combined that earnest literateness with giggly youth and a deadly grip on a good hook – “Love Story” is a companion piece to “White Houses” in my head at least. Taylor is typically funnier or nastier or more voluptuously morose than Vanessa, but the distance is smaller than usual here: “Love Story” sacrifices such shadings for the sake of providing proof that she can deliver an anthem “straight”, without a tear or a chuckle. It’s not all of what I want from her, but it’s as much as I could ask from a wistful, heart-pumping pop song.

"Love Story" is fantastic. I'm hearing it on both country and pop stations out here, which makes for excellent wtf moments when it's followed by an r&b banger. That "say yes" bit is really, as Tim F says, anthemic. I've listened the hell out of the first record this year too, esp. "Tim McGraw".

"Love Story" has really grown on me. I've listened to it about fifteen times in the last two days. The more familiar I become with the lyrics the more they seem really tight and well-structured and thoughtful despite their metaphorical generality. Notice that she never actually repeats the same chorus, everything is tweaked to advance the plot.

I like to how it skews both older and younger than the stuff from her first album. This is partly to do with her vocals (she deliberately sounds a lot less certain of herself than before) but also the song itself, which on the one hand comes across as naive in its fairy tale-ishness, but on the other feels much more high-stakes than any of the relationship-songs on her first album. "I was crying on the staircase/begging you please don't go..." There's a tinge of desperation to all of this that totally gets me. It reminds me in a very wide-angle lens way of "Mr Brightside". It's got that same gut-wrenching fear that the notion of love itself is a cruel lie. Both songs ultimately turn on a blind, unreasoning pledge of fidelity to the idea of romance over the reality of relationships - "a triumph of hope over experience". Only Taylor's pledge is redeemed, which makes it the "safer", more conformist choice, but Taylor is a better songwriter than Brandon Flowers so it balances out.

"Mr Brightside" is a great comparison! Re. "desperation", that sounds totally right. Another feel is nostalgia: the song is a flashback, "when we were both young" (suggesting another Killers link). In that way it's like "Tim McGraw", looking back. That's a little jarring when you recall how old she is, but I can relate: I was tremendously nostalgic at that age for things that hadn't happened yet. The nostalgia is a way of experiencing things, and by framing the songs as flashbacks, she lets on that's she's conscious of this frame.

Another thing that strikes me about "Love Story" is how passive the narrator is: "take me somewhere we can be alone", "I'll be waiting", "Romeo save me". And even when she gets tired of waiting, all that she does is meet her lover. "Tim McGraw" is similar: she wants her lover to remember her. But she can't make the lover do that. But in "Tim McGraw" she at least leaves a letter for her lover; in "Love Story", it's like a dream in which she can't do anything.

"That's a little jarring when you recall how old she is, but I can relate: I was tremendously nostalgic at that age for things that hadn't happened yet. The nostalgia is a way of experiencing things, and by framing the songs as flashbacks, she lets on that's she's conscious of this frame."

This is spot on. I was so "nostalgic" at that age too! And this song tears me up because it's nothing like my own life but it's like I'm accessing a memory in the collective unconscious or something. This is definitely the payload you can get when you grapple successfully with mythic archetypes in pop songs.

"Another thing that strikes me about "Love Story" is how passive the narrator is"

I can't help but wonder if the song implicitly is about unplanned teen pregnancy, if that's the shadow that falls over the second and third verses. Explicitly, the song seems definitely to marry the "love story" to the sense of the young female as powerless social actor: her daddy has told Romeo to "stay away from Juliet", and the only way they can be together is to escape the small town, "you can be the prince and I can be the princess" (in a trailer park presumably).

re. teen pregnancy, that's a reasonable idea. She calls their love "difficult" and "a mess" without exactly saying why. We could read many things into this---a straightforward reading is suggested by the Romeo and Juliet references, a wrong side of the tracks romance, but calling herself a scarlet letter suggests another dimension.

I like the song's ambiguity at the end too: you're led to believe that it all worked out well, but it's left open, even from the much-later-in-time perspective that frames the song.

i just watched her performance of "love story" on the country awards or whatever. homegirl is a ten, but damn that song is Horrible.

finally got around to this album. pop record of the year etc. sort of hilarious that it's called "country," but i couldn't care less about that. she can pull singles off this all through next year.

man, i've got to learn to look for that embed disabling. anyway, it's just the "love story" video.

oops they're all disabled. whatever, everyone's heard the song a thousand times.

haha just caught up to rolling country thread and see chuck complaining about a lack of hooks (!). i like her first album too, but that's just silly. "hey stephen," "you belong with me," "tell me why," "the way i loved you," blah blah blah. i think she might suffer from something -- indecision, maybe, but that's probably a virtue because when she gets more decisive she'll probably get more boring. but anyway it isn't a lack of hooks.

I love "Fifteen," "Hey Stephen," and "Love Story," but there's too many midtempo numbers.

i could do without "breathe," and maybe "you're not sorry" (although that one has a nice chorus), but the midtempo stuff mostly has nice big beefy melodies. (including "change," which probably should have been on that last my chemical romance album.)

what are the odds there's a youtube obama video to "change"? the odds are pretty good:

She should cover the Jon Waite "Change."

"Love Story" is easily my single of the year.

absolutely insipid bullshit IMO

The hooks are just relentless in "Love Story". Hardly 2 seconds go by without another amazing vocal turn - it's diabolical!

absolutely insipid bullshit IMO

But do you like her music?

i have nothing against her, she seems like a nice girl and she's had some nice songs. somewhat charasmatic and, as i mentioned upthread, is dropdead gorgeous. i just think "love story" is just about the most ordinary tune i've heard people praise in a while (well, as far as pop music goes at least). i like the vibe of the song a lot, it's youthful and carefree and i want to smile at it, but the hooks are boring to me and like i said, the lyrics are just beyond horrendous and mundane. it just directly contradicts the attitude of the song to take inspiration from such worn territory (romeo and juliet? really?) and add abs. nothing to it.
again, i don't dislike her, and i've got to listen to the whole album still. just not digging the single, is all. :)

also, i'm 19 years old, and i can tell you guys just haven't heard enough terrible emo music to have perspective on this. i have HS friends who unsurprisingly love this, which seems right considering it reminds me of dashboard confessional.

also, i'm 19 years old, and i can tell you guys just haven't heard enough terrible emo music to have perspective on this. i have HS friends who unsurprisingly love this, which seems right considering it reminds me of dashboard confessional.

I'm 33 and have heard enough terrible emo music. Also, your friends have somewhat...catholic taste for Dashboard Confessional fans.

some of the record sounds emo-pop to me, but i like some emo-pop. especially sung by girls. (i have much more tolerance for chirpy girl-pop than dolorous boy pop. i like the shirelles more than the doors.)(not that there's a shirelles song to be had on this album, but that's a ridiculously high standard.)

I love emo pop (really) and I love this. I'm not sure I like them for the same reason, though. This isn't quite as bombastic as, say, Fall Out Boy. But, that said, this might not be worlds away from Meg + Dia, who I did consider emo pop. So maybe I'm wrong.

I love "Love Story", it's at least top five of the year for me.

Picked up the album last week but haven't listened to it enough to organise my thoughts.

I'm 33 and have heard enough terrible emo music.

I'm 37...what is this 'emo' music you kids are into these days.

lol, "into" is not the word
when i refer to "emo" i'm talking about meaningful-core stuff in the vein of dashboard etc. also, lots of modern pop-punk/hardcore that you see on Warped! tour. obv i know you guys had a very different definition for the term back in the day.

"therapy"

k3vin, I think you'd be surprised about what people on this board are familiar with. I listen to a lot of pop emo/teen punk. Or at least did. This year not so much. But have there been any huge releases this year? Teenage Bottlerocket was good - but that was more pop-punk. New The Academy Is... album. Foxboro Hot Tubs sorta counts. Gym Class Heroes? Rise Against is definitely a Warped band. I think the Taylor Swift album (well, "Love Song," really), is better than all those albums this year.

obv i know you guys had a very different definition for the term back in the day.

It was a strange, disturbing time, as we fought the dinosaurs and conquered Mongolia.

don't forget invented fire and the wheel! don't be so hard on yourselves! ;)

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=56834

Maybe we need an 08 version.

Love it--every bit of it. Love it so much that I'm starting to become immune to it from over-listening--just the way I do with all my favorite records. "The Best Day"--so bittersweet.

She has a Christmas e.p. out too--I heard some samples and it sounds pretty mainstream, but I may break down and get it. Also liking her take on "Umbrella."

that's a rihanna cover? i'd really love to hear that

Took me five seconds to find it on YouTube. I thought the younger generation was the tech savvy one.

okay, i was really wrong about this song. i'm sure this isn't anything everyone else hasnt thought of yet, but i just IMed this to my friend (a taylor swift fan):
"anyway, i changed my mind. i used to think the lyrics were really amateurish and boring, and also the song was typical of "oh im a teenager my problems are so meaningful etc." but what makes it so much immeasurably better than something like dashboard confessional or some other garbage like that is instead of insistence on its own depth and "look at me" earnestness, it's naive and fun and totally okay with being so. it's great."

xpost

Re: Taylor's Christmas EP. Most of it is unnecessary, with the exception of Christmases When You Were Mine, which is another aching, meticulously detailed Taylor song, except about post-break-up Christmases.

FWIW I was ambivalent about "Love Story" the first few times as well. It's an odd thing about pop like this in that, instead of realising that you didn't "get" the song, you just... stop caring about whatever it was that made you suspicious. Or it's like, "yeah, why did I think that was a bad thing again?!?"

This song has definitely grown on me. I liked it enough the first time, but I love it now. I think there are little vocal things she does that I pick up on during further listening. (Like, oh, listen to that trill there, that sounds great to my ears).

Yes. The vocals on this feel simultaneously complete unthought-through and immaculately judged, like the way she scrunches up with compressed excitement when she tremors, "he knelt to the GROUND and pulled out a RING..."

Also, and I can't believe that this is true, but I like the girlie-fantasy lyrical content. It's totally ridiculous and cliched and nonsense, but I feel simultaneously like it's a very true feeling for Swift to be expressing. Like, that this kind of archetypical romance speaks to her. And I really buy it. Which is, I guess, to say that I could see Taylor Swift doing a Ren Fair concept album in about 5 years.

there are little vocal things

i like "this love is difficult/but it's a-RE-eel". also the key change on the very last iteration of the chorus is totally shameless and totally effective.

but enough about "love story." the one i've been wearing out lately is "the way i loved you."

man she loves those crescendoes.

Man, if I wrote "Complicated" I'd be calling my lawyer right now. I'm sure that's been noted elsewhere.

Yesterday on the local top 40 station I heard the "Pop Mix" of "Love Story" (as part of a half-hour mix in which it was bookended by "Say It Right" and something by Ne-Yo). And I was wondering, those of you into this song, which mix are you more into, the mix getting heavy play on country radio, or the mix on pop radio? I think I like the country mix more, mostly because the beats on the pop mix are pretty lame. But I wonder how common this has been, to have both country and pop mixes of a song in heavy rotation on two different kinds of radio stations? Does Carrie Underwood get this treatment?

Spell completely broken for me by her inability to carry a tune live.

i have heard that, but not seen it. going to check out snl tonight for validation. (not that i actually care, tbh.)

She's been off tune-wise on the CMAs that I've seen, but I usually listen to her records so this is no big deal to me.

(not that i actually care, tbh.)

Fair point. And it doesn't detract from the recorded material. Just... breaks the spell, is all.

The song is about as anti-feminist as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is.

― Tim F, Monday, February 8, 2010 8:02 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

I reckon that chart is accurate and kinda funny, but it shouldn't be seen as some kinda KO blow (I suspect it's by a fan anyway - who else would sit through all her songs in order to work it out).

Think of those motifs like you might think of the following references in R&B songs:

- being in a club
- dropping by for a booty call
- making love until dawn

etc. etc.

And as with R&B, what marks out Taylor is not the use of particular motifs but the way in which she assembles and redeploys them, the way the songs hang together etc.

Like recently i've become quasi-obsessed with "Hey Stephen", even though it's got one of the most cliched and Taylor-Bingo-Scoring choruses ever ("'Cos I can't help it if you look like an angel / can't help it I wanna kiss you in the rain, so...") - I still feel like it's a really clever, well-constructed, interesting song.

always thought the "i can't help it" innocent shrug of a line was taylor being kinda self-aware about that - i love that song too

yeah, I figure a lot of my problem w/ Taylor is I'm just simply not interested in country or teenpop tropes

It's interesting to hear people reject music based on its lyrical tropes, though (and I mean that without being snide)---I have no interest in clubs or booty calls and while making love is awesome, going on until dawn just sounds tiring and/or drug-induced (which tbh also sounds tiring), and yet I'm interested in contemporary R&B b/c it's full of great *songs*. Ditto for Taylor Swift. If I were to reject music on its lyrical tropes I doubt I could enjoy any non-backpacker hip hop post-Chronic, and that would mean missing out on lots of great songs.

rap's lyrical tropes have changed a lot in the past 18 years and backpacker rap has plenty cliches of its own

sure, but I mean, if I wanted to avoid songs about drug dealing it would reduce the amount of rap I could enjoy by a lot---if that's wrong, let me know, b/c it's something I have to overcome when listening to rap.

right, but that's an ethical issue with a specific trope, not an issue with tropes in general

Right; I'm just saying I'd miss out on a lot of songs I love if I rejected them on their lyrical tropes.

credit or blame for this goes to nerding out on REM records in my earliest musically obsessive years, b/c the lyrics were nonsensical. My friends who grew up on classical say the same thing: they just don't notice lyrics.

I can sympathize more with rejecting contemporary country based on its production (though I don't do that at all).

Oh, I like some contemporary country, I'm just not at all invested in it.

This past year I liked "Need You Now" and "Moustache" and "Welcome to the Future" a lot

"Need You Now" is a jam, it is true. I await a version with Taylor Swift at the next CMAs.

can't really imagine her singing that one (wait weren't we mentioning booty calls as an r&b trope?)

booty calls are also a country lyrical trope! Hell, so are clubs.

but wrt Swift, she's going to be up for an image makeover with album #3 I suspect.

oh totally, she almost has to

she's probably going to have go through an awkward "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" phase

one tricky thing there is that her songwriting is so meta, which deflects attention from "her" as the one being written about. Will she turn into a more confessional songwriter? I hope not b/c I suspect her life is pretty boring, and she doesn't have a wealth of experience to draw on.

What's a confessional songwriter? If she isn't one now, what would you call her songwriting?

By "confessional" songwriting I mean songwriting that's about the songwriter, and moreover "really" about the songwriter: its truthfulness matters. Maybe this is nonstandard usage or there's a better term for what I mean? Swift's songwriting, it seems to me, is more "fantastic", in that it's about imagined happenings. We know that she's had very little happen to her, and so her songs have to be about fantasies---and Swift's meta tricks remind us of this if we forget.

But all fictional scenarios are confessional. I really don't understand the distinction, or why it should matter. When a novelist or songwriter sits down to write, I assume it's all made up.

Don't know if that (the idea that Swift's stories are based on fantasies) is true at all really. For "Love Story" or "You Belong With Me" or "Mary's Song", sure, but "Teardrops On My Guitar"? "Fifteen"? "Picture To Burn"? "The Best Day"?

It was interesting how, in her live concert the other night (which is the second time I've seen her live, but the first time with multimedia) there was a massive amount of emphasis on how she writes songs about actual boys she's gone out with. There was this really corny fake tv special investigation into all of these guys whose lives she's ruined.

e.g. apparently "Hey Stephen" is about the Stephen Liles from Love & Theft (though in that case obv it's a nice song)

My sister turned to me toward the end and said "she must have gone out with a lot of guys already..."

But yours is an attitude toward the text/song that would ignore the text/song's aspiration to truth even if it did matter. In what I'm calling "confessional songwriting", I'm claiming its aspiration to truth does matter, in that it's part of the song's intention: I intend to communicate to you, confessionally, what actually happened.

As a listener/reader I don't typically care about this either.

yeah euler i have no idea the distinction you're trying to draw, or if the former would even be in any way preferable to the latter

xp o ok

But Tim, I take it your sister's reaction is that of course Swift isn't telling the truth. But it mattered enough live to present the songs as if they were true. As I hear Swift, she's writing with a wink, in case we're not as quick as your sister.

No, actually my sister meant it seriously!

Don't know if that (the idea that Swift's stories are based on fantasies) is true at all really. For "Love Story" or "You Belong With Me" or "Mary's Song", sure, but "Teardrops On My Guitar"? "Fifteen"? "Picture To Burn"? "The Best Day"?

But, again, who cares? It doesn't enrich our listening to find out that she really dated a guy named Stephen or cried on her guitar.

It doesn't enrich my listening, but evidently it enriches some listeners (hence the elaborate ruse in the live show Tim describes). Are those listeners listening wrong?

haha ok Tim!

It seems to be commonly accepted that any time she mentions a name in a song it's a real person. She even includes a photo of her and Abigail (from "Fifteen") in the cd booklet for Fearless.

And I think this is actually a massively important part of how a lot of people relate to her, although of course not every listener (and more commonly her teenage-or-younger listeners than adult listeners).

Well, yeah, certainly in the Facebook-Twitter age.

I'm probably the wrong person to talk about this, since even as a kid I found the notion of "relating" to musicians a bit specious. Being gay had something to do with it, I guess.

Yeah, Tim, that's my impression too. And I think it's part of what bothers listeners who don't "get" her: they're unmoved by her stories, and so they conclude there's nothing else to get.

One way to explain the seeming contradiction is to postulate that for a lot of people around Taylor's age and younger yr sense of what is fantasy and what is real life is much more blurred. And this may be partly because yr always projecting yourself into the future, imagining yourself "when I grow up", measuring yourself against the experiences you haven't had in the future (whereas the older you get, the more you tend to measure yourself against the experiences you haven't had in the past) - so what may seem like fantasy is instead processed as "what will/may happen next." Taylor writes in confessional mode about the past and fantastical mode about the future, but the latter is really a forward extrapolation from the former.

Well put! I agree with most of that, except that I doubt that she has much to draw on for confessions from her past. But this says more about my own lack of imagination, since my adolescence was quite uneventful, than anything else.

Well since most of her songs are about thinking a guy is great ("Stay Beautiful", "Fearless", "Hey Stephen"), being pissed at a guy for being a bad boyfriend and/or cheating ("Picture To Burn", "Should've Said No", "Forever & Always", "Tell Me Why", "You're Not Sorry"), and pining after a guy who doesn't notice her ("Teardrops On My Guitar", "Invisible", "You Belong With Me") it doesn't strike me as odd that she'd have a fair amount of experience to draw on.

The lyric I always found startling is when she says the relationship in "Tim McGraw" is from "three summers back".

true---there's not much depth of experience here. She fleshes out the experience she has with enough substance to work well enough. Or more like it, maybe: she has a structure of human relationships down pat, even if she has to instantiate that structure with projected details.

Yes. She's very smart about what are fairly straightforward and commonly-experienced adolescent situations.

as I said, I don't disbelieve that plenty of people genuinely like taylor swift and I do think there are reasons to like her...she makes simple and accessible pop music. I just think there's a difference between a. 'like taylor swift' and b. 'believe that taylor swift created the best piece of music in 2009'. I do think anyone in group b is fronting to some degree or another, and it's pretty apparent in the way some people here talk about her. this thread: Taylor Swift '08: The Hype, Anticipation & Appreciation Begins Right Here is filllllled with people projecting complexity onto her music.

oops wrong thread

nobody asked me, I know, but in response:

I haven't heard Fearless enough to start making grandiose claims about it, but I'm beginning to wonder just from what I have gathered if it isn't *THE* Album about the Adolescent Crisis Between Transcendence and Immanence. I mean, nowadays everybody knows that teenagers are, if not exactly experienced enough, then at least sophisticated enough to know that life essentially sucks, popularity is a stupid game with unfair rules, fairytale romance is a myth, and the object of your heart's desire is kept at a fair distance for a reason, but at the same time, all this knowledge does not keep teenagers from still playing these roles. k-punk described these tendencies with grim terms such as "reflexive hedonism" and "inter-passive nihilism" but surely these concepts transcend mere postmodernism. Teenageers should know better and know they should know better, but they still seem powereless against those compulsions, and I'm wondering if that is why Swift seems to connect so deeply with her audiences...

The stuff I'm looking at are the flagrant contradictions in this album: Love Story vs. White Horse, You Belong With Me vs. Fifteen's "In your life you'll do things greater than dating the boy of the football team
But I didn't know it at fifteen" (apologies to J0rdan), the way the meta stuff, the incessant framing devices and false nostalgia accrue into a sly admission that, for her part, most of her key relationships have been self-penned fictions...though perhaps maybe this is just the stuff of emo, and I really should know better...as I said, I really haven't spent that much time with this album to be able to say anything really insightful...

it was just a thought...

http://allieunplugged.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/new_taylor_swift_remix.jpg

"reflexive hedonism"

http://allieunplugged.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/taylor_swift_new_video_you_belong_to_me1.jpg

"inter-passive nihilism"

http://allieunplugged.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/taylor_swift_new_video_you_belong_to_me3-235x300.jpg

"but surely these concepts transcend mere postmodernism"

http://allieunplugged.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/taylor_swift_new_video_you_belong_to_me4-236x300.jpg

"the way the meta stuff, the incessant framing devices and false nostalgia accrue into a sly admission that, for her part, most of her key relationships have been self-penned fictions"

Rockin' with Taylor Swift (TIME Magazine feature)...

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1985209,00.html

Taylor POX:

Jump Then Fall
You Belong With Me
Our Song
Fearless
Forever and Always
Hey Stephen
Tim McGraw
White Horse
Love Story
Should've Said No

I've grown to love "Today Was a Fairy Tale" through hearing it on the radio so much. It's just a great generic Taylor single. Gorgeously produced, her performance is perfectly judged and the sense of "oh noes she's talking about fairy tales AGAIN" fades a bit the more you listen - the fragile, climbing "time slows down... whenever you're around" pre-chorus and the ecstatic "can you feel the magic in the air - it must have been the way you kissed me!" bits are both awesome.

Yep, love that single. I think "generic" is the key word, though. It doesn't really do anything "new" with her sound/style, kinda runs with the fairy tale thing from "Love Story" and milks its success, but you're right -- the performance is great, and reliably makes my heart swell up each time I hear it.

Taylor Swift Has a Fishy Wish for Her New Home

Since moving into a decked-out Nashville apartment, Taylor Swift has made some significant changes to her home's original floor plan.

"There are rooms where there weren't rooms before, and I have a birdcage in my living room that is people-sized," the country musician, 20, told PEOPLE at Tuesday's BMI Pop Awards in Los Angeles. "Then there's a pond in the living room as well, and I want to get stingrays. I don't want people to think I'm crazy, but wouldn't that be cool?"

Stingrays (which are tropical marine life related to sharks) or no, such an eccentric pad requires an equally eccentric nickname.

"My friends and I have been calling it things like 'The Imaginarium,' because it has all of these crazy whimsical things in it," she says.

Will this fanciful state of mind carry over into her future song writing? So far, she's not saying, but does admit that the songwriting process for her new record, "has been amazing. I've been writing for the last two years. I keep making new lists, which is a good sign to me."

The trick, it appears, is in the editing: "I bump things off when I write something new that I like better," says Swift. "It's really all about honing it down."

she's smart

MINE! Out now, Speak Now released in the fall

'You were in college, working part-time, waiting tables
Left a small town; Never looked back
I was a flight risk with a fear of falling
Wondering why we bother with love if it never lasts.'

This is closer to something like "Mary's Song" than anything off of Fearless - not sure if it's a big step forward or anything, but it's damn good, and miles better than either of the soundtrack numbers she's given us in the interim.

Taylor Swift - Speak Now (Oct 2010) - hype, anticipation &c

Fuck, sorry. Apologies.

You're Not Sorry finally clicked with me. Don't know how I thought this was one of the weaker tracks on the album. Packs a punch, and has v. nice use of space.

Especially that last chorus modification with "there's nothing left to beg for".