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

that's also the front cover of her putative witch house album

he say im down with him, i say youre the best thing thats ever been mine

*hits electronic drum pad arrhythmically*

ws

hoooooly shit this performance of "haunted" from the thanksgiving tv special is WOWOWOWOW O_O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92isX62fv1g

ws expecting 'chonkyfire' 2 start up after the first coupla violin notes

idgi

She is 21 years old. No disrespect, but Hanson were better than she was. There is something phony about the way establishment liberals embrace someone whose lyrics are so teenagey. Like, these are the people who hated Tom Petty thirty years ago and now they think he is a distinguished folksinger or something.

ilxor, you know they're just playing the album track over some footage, right?

I always appreciate trolling that starts out with "No disrespect". A+ dude

xxp wait, was that a youtube comment or are you really talkin' there?

i mean, someone can tell me if im wrong, but even just "fast forwarding" through that thing, i cant hear a difference

I know it sounds mean, but this is music for young people, not people in their fifties who listen to NPR.

Yep, there are TONS of people in this thread in their fifties.

I still maintain that Speak Now is a pretty marginal affair, but Fearless was an instant classic.

ilxor, you know they're just playing the album track over some footage, right?

too busy rockin out to notice ;_;

still enjoying this lots. probably too long though; when the songs are this good cutting it down to 10 tracks would be better methinks. sort of wish there was maybe one faster track in the second half?

title track so great.

also December and Dear John are too close to each other near the start and slow things down a bit much. basically they need to let me sequence the next one.

These may have already been linked somewhere on here, but I just got around to the live clips from her Ed Sullivan Theater gig. They're good.

http://www.vevo.com/watch/taylor-swift/back-to-december-live-on-letterman/USCJY1003821

This is an honest, innocently curious question- what sets her apart from every other country pop star out there? I'm having trouble seeing why she stands out.

serious answer: you should listen to some more country pop. she barely fits the genre.

haunted sounds like an evanescence song

Well, it mostly sounds like just pop to me, but isn't she branded as at least country-ish pop? I know there is banjo and steel guitar throughout.

Which is usually enough.

there's def some country branding going on, but you asked what makes her stand out from other country pop which isn't the right question (bc outside branding she really doesn't sound like any other country pop music).

Alright, then what makes her stand out among other top 40 singer-songwriter radio friendly pop?

i think that's a better question. i find her songwriting a bit more um natural sounding? stripped down compared to other big female pop acts this year (kesha, katy perry, etc) + that def stands out to me. this is, i think, even clearer on the first two albums (and particularly the first one). obv she has a compelling backstory/pop culture presence too and fits into this weird cultural place between the entire vulgar and this christian (country) niche, not to mention all the kanye west, john mayer stuff that people seem to enjoy thinking about

but like, what makes X artist stand out from Y context is always a tricky question, right? if you're really into Y context you can always point out small differences that might make something more or less interesting and if you're not into the context then everything sounds the same. it's the same if you're talking about Bollywood soundtrack, eastern european fiddle music or american pop music.

In the beginning, when she was def. more country-pop-proper, what made Taylor "stand out" was the intermittent clarity of her songwriting - the way she tosses off so casually as her very first line on her debut "You said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, that's a lie", or the accumulation of little details in "Our Song". But mostly she didn't "stand out" so much as just seem really winning and charismatic and tuneful and sympathetic, so that there's really nothing to say about "You're Beautiful" in this regard except that it's charming.

Now that the country-signifiers have been so heavily reduced, Mordy is right, there's simply no mistaking her for country-pop, and it's better to ask what makes her stand out from pop generally. Ironically at this point it's in part the remaining country signifiers, but also simply her deft songwriting and her knack for structuring her songs around metaphors (extended and one offs), which I think she inherits from country somewhat but then applies to a kind of teen-pop-rock confessionalism, the consequent mixture feeling pretty novel. I think a lot of the intensity of her success among young girls is based on songs like "Fifteen", which are unusual in applying the tropes of confessionalism to (early-to-mid) adolescence. Lyrically she's comparable to, say, Vanessa Carlton, but Vanessa's confessionalism pitched slightly older (though she maybe sounded younger?), which is the norm I think.

Thanks! Seeing this thread kind of baffled me. I've heard this album and the one prior multiple times and it just sounded so slick and generic to me that I wouldn't be able to pick it out among anything other female pop stars (that are less dance-oriented currently). I'm not here to bash her or make anyone upset I'm really just trying to get in touch with the appeal of this type of music.

I guess I am too concerned with sonics here and her appeal comes lyrically.

any other*

I'd say that at least 50% of her appeal is tonal + not necessarily lyrical. you see a lot of people talking less about what she says than how she says it.

Really? (I'm sure you're right but I can't say I've noticed that myself.)

It's what I've noticed at least.

I don't think anyone is ever going to treat her lyrics as poetry distinct from her songs for instance

A nation of young fans with doodle space on their notebooks and/or quote boxes on social network profiles mocks you for your blindness. (Perhaps.)

surprised Ned isn't a fan of "Haunted"-- the lyrics are so goth

ya, evanescence goth

I think her appeal is based on "songwriting" (which encompasses tonal elements to some extent) rather than "lyrics" per se.

a lot of it is how disciplined and attentive her songs are -- they're about extremely specific situations, not just detail-wise but emotionally. so like instead of a song that's just generically about how much she loves you, there's a song ("mine") about how she's been living with you for a while and feeling her usual fear of commitment and edginess because she had a difficult relationship with her father in ways that aren't made explicit but the emotional effects of which are clear, and about how you have confounded her expectations and reassured her and provided the support and love she'd been compulsively afraid of not getting. and the song is really well-structured: every line simultaneously moves forward the present-tense plot (you and her) and fleshes out the past-tense one (her and her dad); there's no dedicated flashback verse or explicit descriptions of her childhood.

part of this structural thing is that she uses words much more carefully and with much more attention to their effects than a lot of other pop stars: cf. the multiple implications of the word "mean" in the song "mean"; the thing in "back to december" where she wishes she could go back to december (so she could fix a mistake) but also does go back to december (as in obsessively remembers it) all the time, and there's this huge poignant gulf between the two meanings of the phrase; in "sparks fly" she keeps saying "DROP EVERYTHING NOW" and means both "drop what you're doing" (so you can fuck her) and "drop your hesitations and moral qualms about this probable bad idea" (so you can fuck her). at her best there's this economy of language that's really really great.

all that stuff is lyrical obv but on the last album she's gotten a lot more interesting sonically -- become a much better performer, grown more in command of her songs, learned how to sell the different characters she adopts for them, spontaneously giggles more. one of the things that's cool about her is that she actually seems to be working on her talent, which is likely to grow.

^^^^ All highly OTM.

^^ very well put

xp

xxxxxpost -- Well, I have a general indifference to her work as much as I have for, say, Mr. West's -- I fully realize both of them were essentially the American (worldwide?) music/popular commercial and press stories of the past three months and I've heard the singles here and there but my focus and interests have been elsewhere. Also, as difficult listening hour kinda just showed, I listen to music in a much different fashion than others.

spontaneously giggles more

i might argue this point, actually-- not sure there's a moment on the new album that rivals "hey stephen" in the spontaneous giggle dept.

Ned, thanks (didn't expect a full response!)

it's okay re: Kanye, though, he retired and doesn't need yr fandom

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fully-validated-kanye-west-retires-to-quiet-farm-i%2C18724

part of this structural thing is that she uses words much more carefully and with much more attention to their effects than a lot of other pop stars: cf. the multiple implications of the word "mean" in the song "mean"; the thing in "back to december" where she wishes she could go back to december (so she could fix a mistake) but also does go back to december (as in obsessively remembers it) all the time, and there's this huge poignant gulf between the two meanings of the phrase; in "sparks fly" she keeps saying "DROP EVERYTHING NOW" and means both "drop what you're doing" (so you can fuck her) and "drop your hesitations and moral qualms about this probable bad idea" (so you can fuck her). at her best there's this economy of language that's really really great.

I want to single this out.

Even Taylor's fondness for switching the song's perspective to the dude in the final chorus is basically an outgrowth of her enjoyment of wordplay in general and wringing new implications from the same words specifically.

as difficult listening hour kinda just showed

wait, was there a thread on this?

xpost

she giggles again in "speak now", and it's cool cuz "speak now" is this totally selfish (and slightly mean!) fantasy and she giggles right at its climax and it makes the whole "man i like imagining that this is actually real, it is fun to write songs!" thing clearer/funnier.

but yeah other than that maybe she doesn't at all, ha. maybe i was just thinking of the over-the-top stuff on "better than revenge" -- "NOW GO STAND IN THE CORNER AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU DID", etc. anyway, at the very least i'm glad she knows it works.

i'm with ya Ned

xxpost -- On what? I was just referring to his (quite detailed and thoughtful) post a few spots back -- this is the kind of level of attention to lyrics that I have never strongly felt. I thought that was old news!