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

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!

btw ned i totally understand the position of not being won over by lyrics alone. with t-swift they're certainly the larger part of an unequal package, although again i think the sonics are catching up.

Which could be of great interest to me the more time passes, who knows? I'm certainly not going to project or assume she'll continue towards some sort of path towards double-album avant-garde symphonics or whatever, but maybe we'll be all looking back on this stretch as 'only' her Kick Inside/Lionheart phase or something.

Sonics as in how the lyrics are delivered? Otherwise it is so slick that I always feel the life is completely sucked out of productions aimed specifically for radio and mass audiences.

Ned, I tend to be like you in generally not focusing much on lyrics (though there are always some exceptions), but I somehow ended up really liking most of Fearless, despite not being into the overall sound that much, and largely on the basis on the basis of the lyrics and their delivery. (I still haven't gotten into Speak Now so far.)

Sonics as in how the lyrics are delivered? Otherwise it is so slick that I always feel the life is completely sucked out of productions aimed specifically for radio and mass audiences.

a lot of it is how the lyrics are delivered, yeah, which is why i'm using the goofy word "sonics" instead of "music". but she's also loosened up on the new album arrangement-wise: there's a song you can actually dance to; there's a song where she pretends to be Paramore; the musical character of the songs isn't as uniform, or as close, as it was on fearless. i don't think she's gonna make something that sounds like hounds of love (though ned is right that you never know!) but she's moving into the more rewarding end of "00s radio girlpop". if you just can't stand 00s radio girlpop (with exceptions made, maybe, for aggressively weird-sounding people like ke$ha) then you're still and possibly forever gonna have a problem with her.

i think the production on "mean" is really alive and exciting and backs up the lyrics but it would take long boring essays to really explain why and ultimately it's just that fucker personal taste again.

xxpost -- On what? I was just referring to his (quite detailed and thoughtful) post a few spots back

lol just realized this is his/her username

oops
ilxor fail

i agree the production is very slick on one hand, yet very warm and inviting on the other-- doesnt sound on paper like it should work, but it does!

I think anyone hung up on slickness and things aimed for mass audiences isn't going to dig T.Swift anymore than they were likely to dig Def Leppard 30 years ago. Mentioning DL specifically because she always cites them as a big influence -- her mom's favorite band. And she always mentions Shania, too -- Taylor is very much a Mutt Lange disciple, which helps explain why people who love mutt lange might tend to gravitate toward her. For me, the big pop sound is part of the appeal, not something I have to forgive or overcome.

Also, as much as I agree with most of the discussion of her lyrics and especially the way she isolates and enlarges particular moments, my first answer to why I like her always starts with "hooks and bridges." Yes, lots of people write hooks and bridges, but I just think hers are better -- hookier and bridgier -- than most people's. She's using formulas, of course, but she's internalized them so well that they don't always feel obvious. And on the new album especially, she's really expanded her melodic range. "Back to December" is my favorite song on the album because it does some really colorful, imaginative things in constructing its melody, and the dynamics of the verses, chorus and bridge are really finely arranged.

(and serve the lyrics, obviously)

yeah i think all that's true. a lot of the growth on the new album that i describe kinda vaguely as "more confidence" or "more dynamics" could probably be described better, with attention to specific bits of melodic cleverness that i don't quite have the vocabulary to pinpoint. like, i know there is something about the chorus to "enchanted", the courtly oddity "it was enchanting to meet you", where swift is variably: 1) remembering someone saying this to her at a party; 2) saying it back to them via the song; 3) fantasizing about them showing up out of nowhere at her door tonight and saying it again; and 4) worrying that this wasn't the start of something new but just a bit of small-talk, and saying it back to them again anyway because even if this was small-talk she was still enchanted to meet them. and the song gets increasingly excited and emotional, but whenever she comes to the chorus it goes back to the same kind of loping tempo, and it feels musically circular in the way that the lyrics are narratively/emotionally circular. i dunno.

i guess "whenever she comes to the chorus it goes back to the same kind of tempo" is just HOW A CHORUS WORKS.

I had forgotten the DL connection, actually -- good point made, and lord knows they meant the world to me in the eighties. At the same time I have an increasingly ambiguous feeling towards much of what shaped my taste as a teenager, and not just musically -- there are some definite throughlines (my School of Seven Bells love says that much) but without trying to be self-consciously and pointlessly reactive I do find that there are other things that resonate more than maintaining, however unforcedly, some contiguous sense of who I was then into the now. This however gets into an extremely insular take on my own aesthetics which I've had hard times articulating of late; I'll just say that the 'big pop sound' -- which should be a blog name or a genre term or something, it functions as a much more all-inclusive descriptor than so much out there then and now -- functions best for me now as the occasional randomly heard encounter rather than the place to be in. And as such Swift fits in that context as one of several players rather than a specific head-turner.

you know, my three little ones play her music nonstop. and dang, much to my dismay, it's pretty daggone cathcy and well put together. would never by her music on my own, but she is (or her producers are) quite talented.

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.

― difficult listening hour, Saturday, January 8, 2011 5:15 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i wish one could favourite posts on ilx

Hope Frank K is reading this thread or someone syndicates it to him.

I'm a bit hesitant to endorse the whole "her sonics are catching up" line, not because it's wrong per se but because I loved the over-stuffed county sound of songs like "Mary's Song (Oh My My)" (when the strings come in during the chorus!!!).

Her sonics are changing and growing with her songwriting - it just wouldn't make sense to give "Haunted" a country-pop arrangement, or at least I'm having difficulty imagining what that would sound like - but I don't like the implication that the country sound was limiting her before, I don't think this is actually true (the "problem" with the debut to the extent that there is one is not the production but less consistent songwriting).

It's correct to say that her sonics are more likely to tend in a direction Ned could start to appreciate in the future. Still, I imagine liking Taylor will always be wrapped up in liking her persona and listening attentively to lyrics, she's never gonna become a soundscape artist unless something very dramatic and unexpected happens - can't see you falling for her Ned!

difficult listening hour otm

yeah, another vote for DLH's post; that's right on.
I'm also simply struck by what a goddamn craftsman she is. Her songs are watertight.

It's correct to say that her sonics are more likely to tend in a direction Ned could start to appreciate in the future. Still, I imagine liking Taylor will always be wrapped up in liking her persona and listening attentively to lyrics, she's never gonna become a soundscape artist unless something very dramatic and unexpected happens - can't see you falling for her Ned!

Yeah, pretty unlikely! Totally down with her doing something that out and out surprises me because why not? (I think ever since I've become less invested in the idea of an artist's career-as-such I'm just down with random moments by whoever makes them.)

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lewtvboJDW1qbte03o1_500.jpg

so she is like hella vindictive right? thats like her thing.

"learned how to sell the different characters she adopts for them, spontaneously giggles more"
when this move backfires though, it can really ruin a song for me. The "next chapter" line in Story of Us just rankles me horribly every time.

this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp6tFk4vhPo

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

Yeah. For me her vocal confidence made this album stand out above the others. The lyrics are sharp and full of wordplay, but I wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't for how fully she invests herself in their ambiguities.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/13/taylor-pleads-guilty-to-sexual-misconduct-expected-to-avoid-jail

^^ big taylor news

What will Duran Duran do without him???

as for the Mutt Lange connection: I may have set it way upthread or in my own review, but "The Story of Us" sounds like a variation on "Breathless," except, you know, much more tonally complex.

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

Yeah. For me her vocal confidence made this album stand out above the others. The lyrics are sharp and full of wordplay, but I wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't for how fully she invests herself in their ambiguities.

― Gus Van Sotosyn (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 13, 2011 10:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my current fave is the last 'you shoulda known' at the end of 'dear john', where after all the prior accusations towards him she is perhaps addressing herself, flipping over the point of view and opening the song up to the possibility of regret at her own actions.

of course she may not have intended that, but it's there nonetheless.

thanks j0rdan for the link above. forwarded it to my daughter who loved it but asked if they had autotuned it :(

my kiddo & i listened to Speak Now on the way to school this week, wed-fri. totally great album. her favorite is "why you gotta be so mean?!?"

that samba "you belong to me" is one of my fave tracks of the year.

my kiddo & i listened to Speak Now on the way to school this week, wed-fri. totally great album. her favorite is "why you gotta be so mean?!?"

― ilxor, Friday, January 14, 2011 12:39 PM

:D :D :D

samba?

er bossa nova? I forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVHJhaExkgw

she gets in this phase where she only likes 1-2 songs on a new album -- first it was "mean" and "mine" -- always wanted to turn it to one of those two. but now that she's had a couple months to live w/ the album & played it in her room a bit, without feeling the need to always ask to hear her favorite 2 songs on a 15-minute car ride, she's come around to loving most everything on it. her current obsession is "sparks fly" -- luckily the subtext about t.swift wanting to hook up w/ a boy flies over her head (i think???) and she's still an innocent

xp to markers

back to december is so beautiful

i'm not sure what's going on in the video for 'back to december'. what's with the letter she stuffs in the jacket pocket? is she wishing it had been the lyrics of the song she couldn't have written unless she'd written a goodbye note in the first place that she now regrets?

i wonder if it's all going to get so convoluted that she one day in ten years time writes a song made completely of bridges. no verses, no choruses.

my current fave is the last 'you shoulda known' at the end of 'dear john', where after all the prior accusations towards him she is perhaps addressing herself, flipping over the point of view and opening the song up to the possibility of regret at her own actions.

of course she may not have intended that, but it's there nonetheless.

isn't it the other way round? all the other, earlier 'shoulda known' lines are actually "i shoulda known", like she is cursing herself for falling for him; then the last one is "the girl in the dress wrote you a song / you shoulda known", as in "you shoulda known better than to dump a songwriter".

so that "flipping over the point of view" definitely happens, just the other way

yes i've just reread the lyrics and you're right on the sequencing. there are several 'I shoulda known' throughout and then she brings down 'the girl in the dress wrote you a song' at the end.

i think what i meant - and couldn't type it right - was that the final 'you shoulda known' is her addressing herself. it echoes the previous instances of 'i shoulda known' but she's now looking in on herself from outside. i think that's what i meant to say, rather than flipping the perspective from him to her.

fck it's late and i'm rambling but i think i've said what i mean.

so it's not 'i shoulda known' but another part of her saying to herself 'you stupid ass'

http://blog.koda.us/2011/01/07/taylor-swift-cant-get-hired/

That article is pretty much the opposite of correct and i'm not saying that to defend taylor - it's hard to think of another singer where the fan base is more invested in the backstories behind the songs.

I rather suspect that the reason Rolling Stone, Glamour and Elle don't sell well when Taylor is on the cover is that the magazine-buying portion of her fanbase are buying, like, Disney Magazine with her on the cover instead.

that article is so wrong-headed - taylor swift can get herself hired in her actual line of work more than anyone else right now!

i agree totally; thought it was a boneheaded piece.

the last chorus in "back to december"

♪ youuuuu go back (to the last chorus in back) to december all the time ♫

looking forward hugely to seeing her in concert again.