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

also, maybe the most under-mentioned song on this thread for me is "sparks fly," which i'm pretty sure is the one i've hit repeat on the most. it's a jam.

I've SEEN. Sparks. FLY.

S'thisisme
Swallowin
Mypridestanninin
FrontaYou
SayinI'm
Sorry for
Thaat niiiiight

I'll differ with most of y'all: "Enchanted" is one of the meh songs. The slow part is nice, but the power chords, in this instance, are abrupt and tacky.

― sandra lee, gimme your alcohol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, October 29, 2010 11:25 AM (3 hours ago)

yeah part of me always wishes she kept going with that template for the full six minutes because the first minute and a half is pretty perfect but dude, that climax is right outta kelly's playbook! completely impossible not to love imo

On the issue of "Innocent" being spoiled for one listener because he or she knows that it's about Kanye West, I don't think the song is about Kanye at all. Like pretty much every song that Taylor writes, it's about Taylor. The "wasn't it easier in your lunchbox days" and "wasn't it easier in your firefly-catchin' days" sections are pretty clearly rewrites of the same sentiments that Taylor expresses in "Never Grow Up" - namely, that everything is simpler when you're young, and that growing up sucks.

Likewise the lines "Did some things you can't speak of / But tonight you live at all again" seem to me to be directed at herself, not at Kanye. I'm sure that Kanye was upset about the "I'mma let you finish" debacle, but I doubt that he was quite that upset about that he "lay shattered on the floor" about it. These lines seem to me to reflect Taylor turning the contempt directed towards the subject of "Dear John" ("your sick need to give love and take it away," "your dark, twisted games," etc.). I suspect that she is not solely the innocent who cried in the dress all the way home, and that "Innocent," although it may have been sparked by the Kanye West controversy, and does contain sections "about" Kanye ("32 and still growing up now") is primarily a song in which, consciously or not, she turns the poison pen of "Better Than Revenge" on herself.

I also think it's not a coincidence that the song that immediately follows the "slut-shaming," as someone put it, of "Better Than Revenge" begins with the lines "Well you really did it this time / Lost yourself on the warpath."

Meant to type above that "Innocent" represents Taylor turning the vitriol directed at "Dear John" on herself.

Just bought and listened to the whole thing. A bit disappointed really. Way too many huge choruses, too few memorable melodies. There are a few, to be sure, but on first listen I don't think this holds a candle to Fearless.

yeah I've made it through a couple of times now and it's just not as fun as fearless. don't know if its the midtempo speed or what

i think this is every bit as good as fearless

well, i'd say that it's slightly not as good, but it's dissimilar enough to feel exciting and like 'growth' and just 'fearless' but the songs aren't as good

Pretty convinced by now that this is better than Fearless, but it took a couple of listens.

i am pleased with thsi album but i'm pretty sure it's not as good as fearless, though the highlights here are just as high. i'm hoping i'll grow into them, but fearless doesn't have throwaways like "better than revenge" or clunkers like "haunted"

I love the chorus to "Haunted", her vocals sound so unhinged. I'm trying to think of a direct point of comparison, the closest things I can think of is Avril (circa second album) or The Veronicas (circa first album) covering Kelly's "Behind These Hazel Angels".

Or Kate Bush!1 Yeah, 'Haunted' is the most enthralling 'rock Taylor' experiment on this album for me. Still unsure about 'Revenge', but 'Haunted' is one of my faves.

i think this is not as good as fearless, but it's an album she had to make at this stage in her career. what makes it less good than fearless: it's more deliberately thought-through, from the concept on down, and for the first time her songwriting actively jars in a few places. jordan otm that it feels like growth, it's just that you can tell how conscious that growth is in places, it's not as seamless and perfectly formed as her teen/high school aesthetic was, and a lot of the new things she tries seem more forced into being.

all that is really more about isolated jarring moments than the album as a whole though, i haven't really been able to stop listening to it this week and the songs are still settling down for me - it's a much denser album than her previous. it'll be in my top 10 albums of '10, definitely.

Interesting, cuz I've concluded the opposite: Fearless was the gawky album showing growth, of which Speak Now is the culmination. I suspect she'll always boast some awkwardness (a good, charming thing, to my ears).

i'm leaning toward better-than-fearless (though not "twice as good as fearless" like rob sheffield said), but i'm happy enough to just call them the two best pop-rock records of the last 5 years. and the reference point "haunted" calls up for me is pink -- it's her kind of stormy goth-pop.

I took a while to wrap my head around Fearless because it was so different to the first album, then ended up adoring all of it. This one i clicked with instantly (because the leap is not so large). Not sure whether I'll end up liking it more or less though.

yeah, i know cis and frank were both sceptical about fearless because they were so into the debut. having heard fearless first, i didn't really have a feeling of the debut being SO different...

god, "long live"...this is one i keep coming to. i recignise that it's in the lineage of "change" but it's so much more than that, which was kinda throwaway and rote-anthemic - she just captures that feeling of being at your best, at your most yourself.

TAYLOR MADE: Drum roll, please. Taylor Swift's Speak Now (Big Machine/Universal Republic) will forever hold a piece of history. The album is now a lock to sell more than a million copies its first week, and wonderers are wondering how high that total could go. Swift is also set to break the mark for percentage of total sales in a single week, with 17-18%, topping NSYNC's record of 15.3% back in March 2000, when No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million. That means one out of every five CDs or download sales this week will be the Taylor Swift album. Whoa. (11/1p)

Swift is also set to break the mark for percentage of total sales in a single week, with 17-18%, topping NSYNC's record of 15.3% back in March 2000, when No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million.

I like how they're skating over the not so subtle shift in overall sales amounts between 2000 and 2010...

i've listened to this so much i think it's making me ill

yes i'm addicted. pleasantly so it must be said. i'm interested in that i felt after 3 listens that i'd heard it all, but that with subsequent listens it unfolds still more. it's a very accomplished piece of work.

going back to that yahoo exegesis -- bob lefsetz? really?

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/10/19/that-taylor-swift-song/

I get e-mail every day telling me I’m an asshole. As a matter of fact, the same guy e-mails me every day to tell me I’m a shithead. Let me see, he’s e-mailed me 295 times so far.

ok fess up

Taylor Swift captured the teen zeitgeist better than anyone in this century. And the hooks in her songs made them catchy. Her material was sincere and honest.

But she still can’t sing.

And if this song is really about me, I wish it were better.

lol

wowowowow @ taylor's sales. surely she'll be the last person to cross a million in a week. & she's probably going to outsell the top 50 combined.

I really like her songs that are sort of directed at kids (Mean, The Best Day, Never Grow Up). She should totally do a children's album.

This record is growing on me, but slowly. I've got a laundry list of complaints, but don't really want to post them until I listen to this a few more times to see if I'll come around on them.

the grammy criticisms may have triggered "mean" but everything about the actual song refers to stuff from much earlier - the overt country feel (and gauche language) acting as a throwback to a younger taylor, the lyric about "someday i'll be living in a big city" (like, by the grammys she already was).

this album is kind of like love king in that objectively i have a ton of complaints and reasons why i prefer older albums, but in practice i just keep on listening to them over and over again - it was a real shock to me when i checked last.fm and found that i'd listened to love king WAY more than any other album this year, as i'd assumed it'd wind up as, like, my no 5 album of the year or something. same thing happening here.

On "Better Than Revenge" she pretty obviously wants to be Hayley Williams (via Misery Business), but she comes off more like someone's mom.

Last Kiss is dope as fuck imo, but those processed echoes on the snare are really unnecessary.

How does living in a big old city solve the problem of the person being mean? Is there a moat around the city or something?

Ask iatee.

the last three songs are really opening up for me, haunted last kiss and long live...

still can't really get into innocent

its okay, life is a tough crowd :-(

officially sold 1,047,000 copies this week - the largest in 5 yrs.

talk about "Back To December," and the album as a whole, here:

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=2894

the first time I have ever seen Alfred give a song higher than a 6 on TSJ

woulda given it a 9 but i been busy

I think David is a bit too hard on the lyrics in his review - partly by comparing the song to what remains Taylor's best song from a lyrical perspective ("Tim McGraw"), and partly because that comparison focuses so much on their relative accumulations of specific, scene-setting details.

Whereas I think the better connection between the songs is the sense in which Taylor looks back on a past relationship from a somewhat ambivalent or ambiguous position (as opposed to just being angry or sad about it).

In "Tim McGraw" she hopes her ex still thinks of her (and maybe misses her) but it's not clear whether she actually wants to resume the relationship or just hopes she comes out of the story-in-her-ex's-mind looking good. The ambiguity is in her current perspective, which is (deliberately?) left vague (as is the relationship's aftermath) while the reverie, and the intended outcome, are sharp. But we don't even know whether Taylor shares the associations that she invokes.

"Back to December" is the opposite in some ways - or rather, it's the answer song, the answer being "I do think of you, constantly" This time the details of the relationship are vague, a bare recitation, while her perspective on it is sharp. The ambiguity is not what she thinks but whether what she thinks will make a difference, and Taylor is too humbled even to suggest a resolution.

It seems counter-intuitive that a song called "Back to December" would paint December itself in such vague terms, but I think this works within the structure of the song, which is less about what actually happened in December (in some senses, irrelevant, other than that Taylor feels guilty and regretful about it) than the ceaseless revisiting of it, the compulsive retreading of old ground. Taylor doesn't bother to attempt to explain or contextualise her actions, but makes a bare plea of guilty with her subsequent remorse as mitigation. And something feels right about this approach to me: a memory that is so haunting that it takes on a life of its own detached from the real events that gave life to it, until you're living in a constant memory-of-the-memory, less bothered by the specifics than by the lurches of guilt and remorse and wishful thinking to which its rumblings in the unconscious give rise.

If "Tim McGraw" is the casting of a spell, "Back to December" speaks from inside the spell.

I haven't read this thread, or even listened to the album yet, because I feel like it's an album I need to Pay Attention To and not just put on while reading or whatever, like I use most music in my life. But! Theon Weber's Village Voice review is really good.

That piece is excellent.

It's kind of like a better version of the review I would write.

Best thing I've read on the album.

the first time I have ever seen Alfred give a song higher than a 6 on TSJ

Untrue!

haha it seems most of the songs you review fall into the 4-6 range ghetto

I imagine you give most of your students b- to b+'s too

xp I really the analysis of the 'mean' lyrics in that piece

^^^ already I feel like I like the song more than I did fifteen minutes ago.

Most experiences, like songs, are pretty good to okay.