taylor swift 1989 poll

who knows though. would love for her to surprise me with the power pop record red hinted at for instance

anyway this is either "new romantics" or "you are in love" or, surprisingly, "i wish you would"

Yeah I can imagine her drifting back towards (a more crit friendly version of) country but it feels too soon? Like she needs a New Jersey before that would start to seem like the best option.

would love for her to surprise me with the power pop record red hinted at for instance

Can we get Bhaskar and Antonoff to be the creative directors for the next project?

I really enjoy this record. Hard choice between Welcome to New York, Style, Bad Blood, Out of the Woods, Wildest Dreams, and I Know Places.

Yeah who could possibly say which of those six songs is better

'out of the woods' is. duh

i would be surprised if she didn't do one more hyper-pop album. "shake it off"+ "blank space" + "bad blood" were just too successful i think for her not to take one more whack at the piñata. i hope i'm wrong tho, this one lost a lot of the emotional intimacy of her previous records which i would pin on this album almost feeling like an experiment in how popular she could push her music to be.

Agree with that.

glad that the consensus is coming round to this being her worst album

also have no idea where she goes immediately from here - in terms of her persona as well as sound. agree that it's too soon for the Return To Country (more's the pity)

hmm consensus? it's at least her 2nd best album, after Speak Now! or is this non-ILM consensus?

i mean the couple of posts above mine!

non-ILM pop fans probably think this is her best, unfortch

y"all think Speak Now is the best? i think Red.

agreed there'll likely be another hearty whack at the pop piñata.

not her best ('Fearless' always), but probably 2nd or 3rd best (I'm still divided between '1989' and 'Red' for the 2nd place). But it's better than 'Speak Now' and 'Taylor Swift' , for sure.

But I would prefer if she didn't continue this pop path.

imo Red's her worst album, too many compromises between different sounds, the big singles are her most superficial ("Bad Blood" doesn't really exist, it's just 4 minutes of silence on the better pressed cds). she has no perfect albums ("Better Than Revenge") but Red's the most bloated, by unnecessary duets; and I dare anyone on this thread to try to hum "I Almost Do" from memory.

can def hum that! :)

I think Red's still her worst but y'all know that already. 1989 is better realized but almost as uneven; I can't remember the last time I head the album tracks.

I don't know what are the 1989 singles after "Bad Blood" but I listen to "This Love", "Clean", and "How You Get the Girl" all the time.

I hope in 2016 she changes her name to Taylor Shithead and just releases an ep of punk covers.

it's the singles that handicap 1989, not the album tracks

she's had filler and missteps before but none of the bad songs on previous albums are as awful as the worst on 1989

I guess you're forgetting songs like 'the last time' and 'everything has changed'. The duets with Ed Sheeran and the guy from snow patrol are clearly the worst thing she has made.

Yeah who could possibly say which of those six songs is better

there are several songs on 1989 worse than "everything has changed" (which prob wouldn't be nearly as reviled as it is here if ed sheeran didn't contribute)

"New Romantics" is the greatest song she will ever write.

feelin like this poll is one of those ones where erryone is like "it's style so I'm voting for my pet favorite"

Yeah I almost voted Clean on that count, but decided to be honest and went with Style. (But somebody else please vote for Clean.)

In re her future, I think another big pop album with a few piano ballads, and then a piano ballad album with a few misleading pop singles, then a full-album collaboration with Kendrick, then the country comeback (which will be either post-divorce or post-maternity, maybe both).

new romantics.

I guess you're forgetting songs like 'the last time' and 'everything has changed'.

"everything has changed" is a good song! "the last time" would be a all right if someone had written a bridge

I was agreeing with Jordan's comment about emotional intimacy, rather than any implicit suggestion that 1989 is her worst album (it might be! but I go back and forth on the relative greatness of her albums quite a lot). I think she gains as well as loses things in the exchange. There's a kind of monumentality to "Style" and "Wish You Would" and some of the other tracks that benefits from the diamond-like hardness. Funnily enough the path these songs follow was laid down not by the previous Max Martin collabs but "Treacherous", which I would say in some ways is her most polished song before 1989 (give or take "Tim McGraw" obv). But "Treacherous" wouldn't make sense as a Martin co-write because it still covers too much vocal/emotional range, whereas all the Martin tunes operate within a fairly narrow field of declamatory vocal intensity - like you could imagine a Martin co-write capturing the bridge of "Treacherous" (which is the best part!) but not the verses, he'd think they were too tentative. On all of 1989 I'd say only "Clean" bucks that trend; even the Antanoff tracks start at 8 and then push forward relentlessly to 10.

There's also other lines of possibility that are open for her to pick up on: the irrepressible rush of "State of Grace" and "Holy Ground", for instance. But again, I think the closest she can come to capturing the feel of that material while working with Max Martin is something like "New Romantics", which captures that sense of gallop but never feels at risk of stumbling (which is one of the more endearing qualities of the earlier tunes).

If I had to guess I'd say the next album will sound more soundscapey - more 1975 lolwave basically - at least outside the singles. When I saw her in December the middle section where she performed on a high platform with a keyboard, and it was both the best part of the show and the part that she seemed most into - especially the new version of "Love Story" which was a lot like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glx_kpo3wAI

the synth version of love story is better than nearly all of 1989

surely calvin harris will have a hand in some of the new stuff

uuughhyyhhghhhhhhh

"Calvin Harris will have a hand in this": most chilling phrase since "Ed Sheeran duet"

Let's just hope that whatever she does next, it isn't a Bubblegum Bass album.

"Calvin Harris will have a hand in this": most chilling phrase since "Ed Sheeran duet"

― dc, Saturday, March 26, 2016 11:43 PM (

"ft. The Weeknd"

i mean...yeah, but the last time calvin made music with his gf we got "i will never let you down" sooooooo

clinging to those tabloid reports a few weeks ago about harris refusing to work with her

do i want to know what "1975 lolwave" is :/

imo 'style' could perfectly be a 1975 song, so...

i do not like that synthy vers of lvoe story

I find things to enjoy in every album of hers, even in S/T, but to me Speak Now > Fearless >> Red >> 1989 > S/T.

I voted for "You are in love", which is, to me, clearly the one single track in 1989 that builds upon the songwriting she's been developing since Fearless (the intimacy, the attention to detail, the level of care shown for her characters, the surprising shifts in POVs, etc).

I'd rather see her going in a different direction for her next album; maybe going back to the Speak Now country-pop or improving the Red-era arena rock. I liked 1989; I find intriguing that she's learned to work more with sound and less with words (as Ann Powers said, I think), and the fact that she managed to pull this experiment off so well, considering it pushed her far, far away from where her real strenghts are, is an achievement on itself. But still, nothing in it was as dazzling as "Fifteen", "Never grow up" or "All too well"; that, to me, is where the meat of her songwriting is. Nobody else can write songs quite like those.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This is obv her worst single to date.

Alfred, do you like “Reputation”?

In toto? No.

Style still rips

I love "I Wish You Would". It has always reminded me of "Dancing in the dark" with all that late-night pent-up angst.

I listened this SO much in the year or so after it came out, it's kind of hard to revisit it... but the songs that still sound fresh (and slap) for me are "All You Had to Do Is Stay," "Out of the Woods" (surprisingly!), and "How You Get the Girl." Also, I'll always love "Shake It Off" - but when the movie Sing! has screened in your house a dozen or so times, you don't need to hear that again for a while.

Btw, "Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version)" is featured in a trailer for a new animated horse movie.

“style” is rather silly but I really love the palm muted guitar chugging, it reminds me of Lindsey buckingham for some reason.

Amusing to see all of our predictions from 2016 as to what Taylor might do next, none of which really were on point - though it's possible that the direction for Reputation didn't really start to coalesce until later (Kim Kardashian posted the conversation with Taylor in... July 2016 I think?) .

you at least raised the possibility of a new jersey, which i guess maybe not quite but close enough

no one would have really expected or wanted "bad blood" to be the 1989 track she tripled down on - it was a hit but not the biggest from the album and certainly not the best

Arguably Midnights is her "1975 lolwave" album I guess.

I don't think anyone really anticipated the Folklore/Evermore switch, though in fairness her trajectory had been leaning into harder/sharper for so long (and Lover was less a reversal of that than a pause in place) that it was difficult for anyone to anticipate that she would hard turn into moody singer-songwriter material.

It's weird to think that (say) "Me!" and (say) "Happiness" are the work of the same artist and were released within 2 years of each other.

some sort of return to more stripped down singer-songwriter material was definitely anticipated (though in this thread it was mostly speculation about a return to country) though i don't anyone quite expected 'piano-driven indie folk with aaron dessner'

Yeah that is what I meant - a leftfield turn rather than a reversion to a previous style.