Taylor Swift - RED - October 22

WEIRD. she should have used lobby.

lover in the foyer vs lover in the lobby. hm.

I pronounce it in the proper French way, but then again I watched a lot of Truffaut when I was a teen.

Being a dumb American, I am lucky to be unaware of the apparent terror that is Ed Sheeran, so I will say that I find "Everything Has Changed" fairly beautiful, I especially love how her voice rises on each subsequent occurrence of "I just wanna know you better." Tonally, it reminds me a lot of "Enchanted."

The other day I went on a hike during a gloomy and windy day and wept to "I Almost Do." I really love how it switches from pining almost-calling him, to dismissive almost-but-not wanting him back. She does this often, wonderfully, using stress in her voice to change the intent of her language.

Really only skip "Sad Beautiful Tragic" (title of which seems like a Morissette reject) and "The Lucky One" (boohoo fame whatever, even though it reminds me of Wham!)

Sheeran collab is good. Snow Patrol collab is not. Not sure about: "The Lucky One" and "Red". The rest sounded fantastic on first listen. I got the deluxe edition and all of the three bonus tracks are worth having.

Favourite so far = "All Too Well".

yeah you can easily sub "the moment i knew" and "girl at home" for the collabs

no one else is gonna love me when i get mad, mad, mad <3 <3

(it's like portishead's "nobody loves me, it's true, not like you do" translated into swift)

In what represents the eighth largest first-week debut in modern chart history, Swift’s fourth studio album, the follow-up to 2010’s Speak Now, debuts at #1 with a gargantuan total of 1.21 million, beating that last record’s 1.05m.

It’s the highest first-week total in a decade, since Eminem’s The Eminem Show debuted with 1.3m in June 2002, finishing behind The Beatles’ 1 compilation, which sold 1.26 in January 2001. Swift’s the first artist since Eminem to have two first-week million sellers in a row. In addition, Swift will set the record for largest, non-99-cent-sale-priced digital album, besting the 420k digital first week most recently set by Mumford & Sons' Babel.

the cultural implications of tswift selling 1.2M records in 2012

I'm definitely buying this CD, which will be my first CD purchase in ages. That should tell you something.

you're a masochist?

Damnnn

Those sales! Holy crap

wtf 770 posts

go tay tay

wtf 770 posts

how is this even remotely a surprise to you

the most amazing thing just happened to me. I was watching "red" performed live at Ellen and when the "flashbacks and echoes" part came it felt like my breath was taken out from my mouth. I literally couldn't breath for 3 seconds and it's like there were tears welling up.

770 is nothing. this thread deserves more. it's too quiet here.

i have a feeling her tour for this album is going to be amazing and full of such moments

taylor swift can't sing live: myth or fact?

in concert she was fine

yeah she did fine when i saw her on the fearless tour, and i'd guess she's probably worked on it since then given the criticism

Obv she's not a vocal powerhouse that doesn't mean she can't sing

In my very humble opinion "The Last Time" would be a great song if a) it was mixed better and b) it appeared on a Snow Patrol record.

Otherwise the record is all over the place, so many stylistic variations, not surprisingly my favourite stuff is the U2-hybrid stuff like "State of Grace" and "All too well". Her band is awesome

"the moment i knew" is killing me

love this album so so so much now, maybe almost as much as fearless??

great article imo

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/164733-taylor-swift-red

It doth protest too much. xhuxk tangled with a few defenders on FB yesterday:

I like a lot of what's in this piece (what I got through, anyway), but I guess I think Nathan's setting up a bit of a straw man. There have always been critics who've taken Taylor Swift seriously, since her first album -- and in fact, given that he thinks she's made some major lyrical advance on her new one (which I definitely don't hear myself), I'm guessing that maybe more than a couple critics took her earlier (and sorry, better) albums more seriously than he did. *Speak Now* finished 26th in Pazz & Jop two years ago (35 voting critics put it on their top 10 lists), and Rob Sheffield gave it a 4-star lead review in Rolling Stone, a magazine he seems to be saying hasn't given her music its due. (On RS's website, *Fearless* gets 4 stars as well.) Took me less than two minutes to verify all that. So I'm stumped. Also, "Gangnam Style" is way more fun than he thinks, and in general it seems like he's coming a couple decades late to the Guess What Guys Pop Music Can Be Good Too revelation. It's still true, of course, but if whoever he's arguing with is too stupid to have figured it out already, I wonder if they might also be too stupid to argue with.

def just filed a piece where i argue that she's made a minor lyrical advance

this guy is definitely trying too hard tho

on pop matters? i'm shocked

it's hilarious that he's overstating the thesis of the name of the publication he's writing for

lol xpost

www.popisokay.com

i wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor that quietly deletes things like "That's right, pop does matter" from half the submissions they receive

i wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor

no

lol

wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor

by taking beleaguered out of the sentence you transferred it to me

don't get beleaguered

so my faves after like two weeks:

all too well
i almost do
stay stay stay (holy shit the isn't-it-funny-we-can-throw-phones-at-each-other-and-not-break-up conceit is so joyous it's infectious)

People are having a hard time dealing with Taylor Swift.

i couldn't get past this. for chrissakes the middle-aged white guys on the local afternoon sports radio show were riding for we are never ever.... when it came out.

yeah i think its "douchey elitist music snobs" who are having a "hard time dealing with taylor" than the nebulous "people," and who cares about that demographic anyways...

more than*

can someone post bad reviews of this record, just so i know they exist?

it's not even the real music snobs. critics love her; speak now in addition to selling whatever ridiculous number it sold got fawning pieces in the voice; this one is the same only more so; it's just college kids whose primary use for music is branding who say nasty things about her at this point. well i mean i still kind of hate this album but that's not the same thing.

i am NOT going to college newspapers for bad reviews of this record

it's not even the real music snobs. critics love her; speak now in addition to selling whatever ridiculous number it sold got fawning pieces in the voice; this one is the same only more so; it's just college kids whose primary use for music is branding who say nasty things about her at this point.

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't conflate "music snobs" and "critics" because as much as we might joke about, if you're a good critic, you're not a music snob.

i mean more ANYONE whose "primary use for music is branding" when i say "douchey elitist music snobs"

I've been delaying talking about this album until I can do it properly, but I think a lot of TS crit both pro and con focuses too excessively on the details of her lyrics and not enough on the songcraft. What I find endlessly fascinating is the way that Taylor's means of telling her favourite stories expand with each album (which forms a natural covalency with the sense of her expanding persona). Notwithstanding the more obvious pop / collab-o diversions, much of Red feels like it's bedding down and exploring the expansions in songcraft which she achieved on Speak Now - even if lyrically the shifts aren't as apparent, I think her musical craft feels much more flexible and varied than it did on Fearless (and again I'm not actually talking about e.g. "I Knew You Were Trouble").

As usual many of my favourite moments on this album are the musical easter eggs she hides in her songs like the "so you were never a saint..." bridge in "State of Grace" and the "get you a - get you alone" bridge in "Treacherous". Hard to think of another pop artist who can achieve lift-off in their songs so effortlessly and so regularly.

I suppose an obvious corollary for a lot of the tensions and dynamics at work is Nicks' work in Fleetwood Mac.

fair. but yeah, as you say, nobody anyone really needs to write a piece in correction of. xp

don't conflate "music snobs" and "critics" because as much as we might joke about, if you're a good critic, you're not a music snob.

i mean more ANYONE whose "primary use for music is branding" when i say "douchey elitist music snobs"

― king louie riel (rennavate), Wednesday, 31 October 2012 10:24 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I feel like the idea of pop music as mindless music for little girls is something which 99% of critics now have abandoned (if they ever held onto it) but which still circulates among the general public like some kind of pseudo-science superstition.

I'd say country-pop more than pop per se is an area which remains a blind spot for many critics (even if only to the extent that it is passed over in silence), which more than other reason maybe is why people writing popist defences of Red feels a bit tardy.

need markers 2 come back & post abt this album

The narratives, meanwhile, are sharply observed and often heartbreaking, as the phenomenal “All Too Well” exemplifies: “Here we are again on that little town street / You almost ran the red ‘cause you were looking over at me / Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well” leads to a truly wonderful image of dancing in a refrigerator light. This is heartfelt stuff, goddammit! Do you know how hard it is to find pop songs these days that are sung as if the singer has had actual life experience with the sentiment? Well, trust me, it’s pretty hard.

this is seriously written in the voice of an onion columnist