taylor swift red poll

the horns on "babe" are so good wow

"message in a bottle" is better than any of the martin/shellback tracks that actually made the album

the vault tracks are more consistent than the original album, obv the gorgeous brass arrangements on "forever winter" and "babe" wouldn't have been there originally but still how did she leave some of this material off in favour of "stay stay stay" etc.

even "run" with sheeran is good!

the “girl at home” change-up is so good. feels like a complete song now

"Holy Ground" is maybe an improvement though? That and "Red" suggest she might make a solid hard rock record.

― Freeze Instr., Friday, November 12, 2021 9:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Oh man, you're right, she'd crush it.

i have wanted her to make that record for eight years now, alas we live in a fallen world

revisiting this is a good reminder that its first three songs are just incredible ... well, really nine, imo, but definitely three. or five.

i like stay stay stay, but ok, maybe eight

but the first three, holy shit

i love treacherous and all too well like everyone else, but the title track ... i just love the lyrics of the title track.

yeah, my main takeaway so far is that the title track is really good and way better than I remembered it.

I said upthread that opening track "State Of Grace" gets me every time and it still does

On the faithful re-recording; interesting or not as the project may be in the abstract, their actual effect is to create an event that induces people like me, who never heard this record the first time around, to listen to it through and enjoy it! As popular as Swift is, there are a lot more people who haven't heard these songs than who have.

The new songs not only sound terrific, but the performances/arrangements are just new enough to make them "interesting" for me (I loved the original album, but haven't been compelled to listen to it in years).

The poppiest songs (like "WANGBT") do kind of lack the "snap" of the originals - which reinforces my skepticism that this approach can pay off for an album like Reputation (whose greatness relies so much on the specific details of the production, and the performances she delivered at the time)... I guess we'll see!

(it occurs to me that, in 2021, the idea of “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine” may no longer apply!)

“The Last Time” sounds gorgeous… what a song. I love her duets

I’ve always wondered what indie record she was thinking of when she wrote that line. Born to Die? Suck It and See?

Ravedeath, 1972

she was actually talking about best coast

like i’m not joking, that’s the real answer

SNL performance was great.

She must just not be my type of performer… I’ve heard great things about her concerts, but whenever I see a TV performance, it leaves me cold.

I loved the way the song *sounded* on SNL but I didn't actually think her expressed facial affect worked with the song

Yeah I feel like that's a perennial thing with her, her lyrics are much more nuanced than her kind of rote, literal physical presentation of them.

(Also why I generally don't like her videos.)

lol peace man

her over-acting is goofy but endearing

I have no problem with her facial expressions but was put off by the music video with its exact visual representation of everything we're being told about in the song lyrics. And also that it looks like a bunch of spliced-together scenes from Gilmore Girls.

Yeah the “short film” playing in the background doesn’t help

That was what I meant; I just felt silly calling it a short film when it's just a longish music video. (It's not even one of those music videos where there's some story playing out unrelated to the song, which could more reasonably be called short films but usually aren't.)

But yeah I meant the part where it was playing behind her and you couldn't look away.

Visually it was distracting but I enjoyed the meta-queen-of-all-media vibe of the whole thing.

She announced a new music video premiering tomorrow, for a different song (she’s actually calling this one a “music video,” ha ha).

i enjoyed the short film, it was less literal than i expected

new music video is for "I Bet You Think About Me"

i hope she pushes "message in a bottle" as a single but probably won't happen

I love the arrangement for the long "All Too Well", the way the muted throb establishes this basic consistency which allows for subtly different emphases as the song progresses, much in the same way that Taylor herself plays with her top line melodies, continually finding new variations on the underlying theme.

I remember thinking even back in 2012 that the fake-lightness of the upward lilt on "now you mail back my things and I walk home alone" felt like a minor milestone in Taylor's songwriting, the way she managed a perfect marriage between a shift in the narrative and a shift in the melodic variation (this is something that she picks up again a lot on the most recent two albums).

That denouement feels even more powerful coming after all the additional details - the age gap, crying at the Hollywood party, her 21st birthday etc (though arguably the descent back into bitterness afterwards (let alone the "just between us" section) then feels more like an add-on than if it had appeared earlier) - Taylor really gives the impression that she could keep on adding verses forever and keep coming up with new variations on the melody. I flashed back to the liner notes for Bjork's Debut where Nellee Hooper talks about having listened to the songs hundreds of times but still loving them - and he says something like "we're so lucky to have Bjork's voice!" I could imagine Taylor's collaborators similarly being knocked out by her melodic generosity - it makes a song like this so much more interesting a proposition than it would be otherwise (relatedly, I love the story from The Long Pond Sessions about Taylor spontaneously adding the second bridge to "August" while they were recording it).

Also I can't quite believe that Taylor has kept "You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath" in her back pocket for almost a decade. It's almost the archetypal TS lyric.

That the best you can do? Amateur stuff. Here's how it's done: https://rateyourmusic.com/music-review/nostalghia/taylor-swift/all-too-well-the-short-film/160999757

Great post, Pope Tim.

At the time, after Speak Now topped my 2010 best-of list, I dismissed Red as her weakest album. It took this version to undercut my bullshit.

she was actually talking about best coast

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Sunday, November 14, 2021 10:38 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

like i’m not joking, that’s the real answer

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Sunday, November 14, 2021 10:38 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Thank you Brad!

Just read the Fork review and ... it doesn't particularly read like an 8.5/Best New Music. But whatever.

Yeah, the review has an oddly grudging tone.

It’s actually very possible to be into this stuff without being a Swiftie or caring about Swift semiotics (…I’m living proof).

yeah, it’s the swift semiotics that turn me off the whole taylor project even though i greatly respect her as a songwriter and melodist. i almost never want to listen to her because each song comes with a wiki article’s worth of extra-textual baggage

It’s actually very possible to be into this stuff without being a Swiftie or caring about Swift semiotics (…I’m living proof).

― heterologous booster (morrisp),

hi!

Yeah I think as somebody who listens to Swift because my teenage kid does, there is an entire world of pretty normie Swift fandom which has very little extratextual stuff in it, and this world is much bigger than that of the semioticians.

I didn’t even know she dated Jake G, let alone that that song is about him!

i did but it was impossible for me to avoid the discourse at the time. regardless i do not give even the remotest shit that it's about him

she should write a song about gyllenhaal’s character in okja

I find it annoying that the implied choice (not on ILM per se, just in general) is between caring about all the autobiographical detail and not being invested in the songwriting at all. One of the best aspects of the shift in her songwriting in the last two albums (especially on Evermore) is the sense that that binary is no longer applicable. "Ivy" and "Cowboy Like Me" are two of the very best songs she has ever written, and both clearly have nothing to do with her own life.

I was discussing with Brad a while back all the questions I wish TS would get asked in interviews, basically all of which would dig into her songwriting craft. A big question I had coming out of Evermore is whether she feels like, if she is writing from the POV of a fictional character, her lyrical vocabulary changes. Which of course she would never actually be asked by an interviewer.

She doesn't really do many interviews does she?

I'm not really a fan, but I gained a lot of respect for her when I watched her documentary, which reveals a lot of the songwriting process. I wish there was a documentary just about Max Martin and how he writes for and with people. But he's even more locked down (certainly by choice, probably also by NDA) than she is.

Fwiw, I was at the time disappointed she went with Martin, which seemed to be such an easy, lazy choice. But in retrospect, it's afforded her the success and money to do whatever she wants. Though Speak Now, which she wrote entirely herself, of course already proved she needed no ringers.

Maybe pitchfork knew they couldn't really top Brad's previous review.