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

"better than revenge" really sticks out and kinda throws the second half of the album off but the run from the start through "enchanted" might be her best stretch of music

agreeing this is likely her best album; i think i don't care for Red when everything's said and done

Better than Fearless? Come on.

I think "Dear John" is my only real keeper from this... I just don't like most the songs that much, including the string of hits at the beginning (though I do like "Mean"). I feel like this album was sort of a stylistic dead-end for her(?), although obviously it was a huge success.

But then I only became a fan with Red, so I don't have much of a context for the earlier albums beyond knowing the hits.

(and now listening to them in toto every so often, as I've been doing lately)

Oh, I like "Last Kiss" too!

one of my students wrote her analysis essay about "dear john" and i wasn't familiar with the song but i like it -- so anthemic and also so relatable. the paper was top notch.

Tribute to Imran Khan on his 70th Birthday. The legend! #HappyBirthdayImranKhan pic.twitter.com/i58oNHo99v

— PTI (@PTIofficial) October 4, 2022

Taylor’s Version out in early July…

Cool. I'll look forward to it partly just for refocusing attention on what I think is one of her best albums.

I would suggest John Mayer’s publicist should get ready

"Timeless," the final (vault) track on the new version, is a very nice Swift tune.

I'm a little Taylor-ed out these days; I feel like something's shifted slightly, no doubt due to the tour, where various folks you encounter on social media etc. are So Serious about their deep/committed Taylor fandom (and I mean lawyers, academics, etc.; not "stan accounts" or even ppl who seem to focus on music otherwise)... it's a little off-putting.

(no shade, it's good to see folks positive & passionate about what they love, but the scope of it feels a little bizarre to me lately)

I feel that a bit, but to me it’s more like I can kinda let go of being a Taylor stan, lord knows she doesn’t need boosters of any kind anymore. But as a Speak Now fan I’ll definitely listen to this.

this is the best taylor's version yet imo. the rerecordings sound good, much less of an uncanny effect than either fearless or red. there aren't as many devastating new classics in the vault tracks as red (tv) but god, "i can see you," can't believe she had that one in her pocket

I see she changed the mattress line in Better Than Revenge

oh yes, i don't approve (my friend said if swift really wanted to edit the misogyny out of this record she should've deleted the title track), but i figure she did it bc she anticipated how much shit she'd get if she didn't? idk

anyway this album fucking rules!!!!

i had the same thought about this sounding the best of the re-recordings… thought that might be the case given the sound of the record. one day i’ll go thru all the vault tracks from these records cuz i’ve been taylor’d out too… i need a guide from someone i trust

oh damn crafting a lost taylor album out of all the vault tracks sounds fun, brb

So do you guys listen to these new versions instead of the original ones? I see people on twitter calling the originals (Stolen Version) or (Scotter's Version). Seems a tenet of fandom to reject the old recordings.

It's interesting to me because there's a pretty long history in Country music of re-recordings. You'd often find them on the cheap tapes available at truck stops. But most people thought of them as inferior to the originals.

on the red re-recording the martin/shellback songs sound wrong and i can’t stand it. fearless is fine, but i agree with a point i’ve seen made elsewhere: it’s an album of youthful exuberance and i prefer hearing young taylor sing it. this one is the closest to an improvement and i’ve actually listened to the re-recordings twice through. every problem i have is a nitpick (strings on “haunted” sit too far back), but the overall sound is an upgrade. “innocent,” a song i did not really rate at the time, sounds fantastic to me now

swifties are extremely delusional and the less i know about their antics the more i like this artist

i've noticed the radio stations that would still play "i knew you were trouble" every now and again are recently quietly switching to the re-recording

morris i can understand the taylor exhaustion and how just... omnipresent the fandom seems to be. this very otherwise-prim-n-proper museum tour guide recently asked the ppl in my tour group if any of us were 'taylor swifties', apropos of nothing (well, i guess her ongoing tour is an 'event' basically everywhere) -____-

Yes, perfect example. I am coming to understand that for a certain segment of the population of US folks in their 30s, Taylor is a central figure in a way that I can't think of an immediate analogue for (in past decades), though I'm sure it exists.

Michael Jackson.

it’s an album of youthful exuberance and i prefer hearing young taylor sing it

feel the opposite on this point: a classic "almost infinitely richer" situation, tho it helped that i thought her current production impulses/standards sounded absolutely great all over it (agree that this is not true of red), so i've rly been looking forward to this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_WFhk4QH2g

Yeah, the re-recording is good, I don’t know that it particularly improves anything but it reminded me how much I love this album. It signaled some possible directions like punk-pop and gothy drama that she never really built on (or hasn’t yet) that I really like. And melodically one of her strongest collections imo. “Back to December” will always kill me. And yeah of the vault tracks “I Can See You” and “Timeless” are keepers for sure.

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 (twelve years ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was an amazing post from difficult listening hour back in the day, and very prescient in picking up very early on what in retrospect has become one of Taylor's defining qualities as a songwriter - her use of subtle wordplay to introduce nuance and a plurality of perspectives. There's a definite line you can trace from a song like "Back To December" to a song like "Cowboy Like Me".

One of the things about this album which I only really just cottoned onto in full now is that the title, and the conceit of the title track's chorus, carries through to so many songs here: so many of them are focused on a character plucking up the courage to give voice to their feelings and, in so doing, accept the consequences that flow from speaking out (or imagining doing so) - the conversation between the couple on the street in "Mine" which saves their relationship; the booty call chorus of "Sparks Fly"; "Back To December" staging an admission of regret; "Dear John" reciting an accusatory letter to the ex who wronged the singer; "Mean" hardly needs explaining in this regard; "Enchanted" regrets not having had the chance to say how she felt; I've always thought of "Better Than Revenge" as like sliding into a frenemy's DMs after a few too many glasses of wine.

I feel like I've always vaguely been aware of this but hadn't really appreciate how close this is to being a concept album, and how deliberate the deployment of the above narrative device probably was.

It perhaps also explains why (as Lex observed at the time, upthread) this album can occasionaly feel more judgmental and black and white in its moral pronouncements than Fearless did - maybe it's because Taylor is inhabiting these characters who are speaking in a highly-charged moment, and hence are filled with passionate intensity - whereas they would lose their conviction if given time to think (such loss of conviction probably finding its fullest expression later on Evermore).

Funnily enough, Taylor sold an equivalent concept much more explicitly for Midnights, but the album itself feels like it wears its concept more loosely, perhaps because "things I have thought to myself at midnight" is a much more allusive and hence elusive framework.

literally cannot look at much of that quoted post like light is bending around it but thanks

context such as it is of the (fuck her) refrain there is this was the era of "love story" discourse about how she was ruining feminism by being grotesquely sexless

otm about the title! the only time i've read one of her cd-booklet A-student thesis statements and actually thought, fair enough.

(also i found the secret messages in it. i swear this is true. i didn't read about them on the internet or anything. it was the day the album came out and i was listening to it and reading the booklet and i saw the bolded letters and i got a pen and paper like the kid in a christmas story. i was in portland oregon at the time and the first secret message i decoded was in the lyrics for "sparks fly" and the secret message was PORTLAND OREGON. if i was ever a "swiftie" that was when.)

The elusiveness of that midnight state seeps into the songwriting too -- to my ears it's her most vaporous album (not a compliment) xpost

My favorite album of 2010; it remains so. I haven't listened to it much in the last few years, and I want to give this version a go. There's been so much fascinating music released in the last couple weeks, though.

"Timeless" is funny because its construct feels so overdetermined — I found this old photos of happy couples in different eras and they make me think we could be like that someday, do you see, with almost comically detailed imaginings of the scenarios in the vintage photos. It could almost feel like a sendup of her whole narrative bag of tricks — but then she hits you with the bridge, "Time breaks down your mind and body/ Don't you let it touch your soul," and it's like, oof, gut shot.

Fans seem particularly into this new one with a video ("I Can See You") – the sound was somewhat interesting the first time through, but I'm not feeling it otherwise.

I'm with the fans! It's a great track.

Yes it is ! Pretty crazy to keep it unreleased for years…

i thought her current production impulses/standards sounded absolutely great all over it (agree that this is not true of red), so i've rly been looking forward to this one

turns out i have mixed feelings but in a way that confirms what a "pop move" this album already was: the new tasteful pandemic spaciousness is imo a real problem on stuff like "sparks fly", in the original a beautiful collapsing star as reliant on density as any max martin track; agree w ivy re: haunted strings (dig the drums tho) and would add that the fiddle on mean has had its attack nerfed; also she seems embarrassed by better than revenge from beginning to end while simultaneously more exposed in its mix than ever. but the long ballads sound absolutely fantastic: "enchanted" suddenly has muscles, "innocent" sounds like big-budget carissa's wierd, etc.. she really knows how to manage the build on one of those things these days: spaces that tighten.

("etc" there means "last kiss sounds like a bang bang bar performance")

Justice is better than revenge. You may not be Superman, but you can help the #FBI protect the country. If you have information about a federal crime, speak now. Call 1-800-225-5324 or visit https://t.co/t8G7LO4hxu to submit a tip. pic.twitter.com/kn9QhlNhGx

— FBI Washington Field (@FBIWFO) July 10, 2023

civil rights (fbi's version) :(

Wire Tap At Home

https://exclaim.ca/music/article/taylor_swift_fan_discovers_cabaret_voltaire_thanks_to_speak_now_taylors_version_vinyl_mispress

amazing

holy shit

lol i was like “this one is for Ivy” when I saw this headline

it’s entirely possible i’m just hearing things, and i haven’t given every song this close a reading, but going back and forth between “back to december” old and new i feel like the strings are less fanciful & playful on the new version, they seem more mournful to me, letting out long sighs instead of darting around like fireflies. the guitars also sound more prominent in the mix, and heavier — the final chorus after the bridge in particular feels far less disney climax to me and more stadium rock. i don’t know if there is more drama exactly — it’s such a good final flurry regardless — but tonally the arrangement feels more mature & less childlike to me. which i think actually flatters the song! going back to december, as it were, carries even more weight when you’re older imo. it’s such a great song regardless

it also only dawned on me today that one of the key lyrics in "back to december" -- "it turns out freedom ain't nothin but missing you / wishing i realized what i had when you were mine" -- is in direct conversation with my favorite miranda lambert lyric, from "runnin just in case" (which of course came after), when she sings "happiness ain't prison / but there's freedom in a broken heart." playing w/ the same idea, and the same language, but from different sides of the coin