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

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".