Taylor Swift Album Poll

"afterglow" is one of the best t. swift songs ever

so good in fact i thought it was an antonoff joint until this very moment, can't believe it's part of the "i forgot you existed"/"it's nice to have a friend" camp

it's her big amy grant ballad, a description that maybe accounts for why i love it and others are unmoved

I think "Afterglow" is an important part of the overarching narrative of Lover (the narrative being, essentially, "I always thought my relationship issues were someone else's fault, and didn't realize how many hurtful and controlling behaviors I had until I ended up in a good relationship that I care about and want to preserve, and now I'm slowly learning how to admit when I was wrong.") It matches up nicely with "The Archer" and "Cornelia Street."

i'm interested to see if Red wins this just barely, or if it's a blowout

Red was my favorite, until Evermore showed up.

I'm interested to see if anyone will vote for Reputation or Taylor Swift.

1989
fearless

speak now
red
reputation

lover
folklore/evermore

folklore is my favourite, but red edited to my liking would beat it

ranking taylor albums is hard because a lot of her albums have at least a few real duds or sequencing issues that make them not very listenable front-to-back, like i love red and 1989 but only with some significant tweaks to their tracklists, and lover is a very weak album as-is but it manages to be worthwhile if you cut out nearly half the tracks.

as-is:
folklore
evermore
fearless
1989
red
s/t
lover
speak now
reputation

edited tracklists:
red
folklore
1989
evermore
lover
fearless
s/t
speak now
reputation

this is impossible

Instead of a poll where you only get to choose one, can we do a proper Artist albums and tracks poll, or are those frowned upon while the artist is still in their prime? If so, I look forward to the 2045 ILM Taylor Swift poll.

I feel like the amount of material she's released since the start of her career has fairly warranted an albums/tracks poll! I'm here for it

Haven't heard any of these but this feels like a good opportunity to try. Starting with Speak Now as that's the one I found at the library (was also probably the one I had the most interest in hearing at the time).

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

That was fast. Speak Now by far the best of the ones I listened to, very fond of "Never Grow Up" and "Mine."

folklore

Instead of a poll where you only get to choose one, can we do a proper Artist albums and tracks poll, or are those frowned upon while the artist is still in their prime?

not at all. for instance i have done a Spoon poll a few years back and they are going to be releasing a new album this year. it will be the second since that poll closed.

I voted Fearless, but haven't really listened to her pop albums after 1989 due to her increasingly abhorrent lead singles. Even though I've grown to love Shake It Off and Bad Blood, I don't think I'll ever feel the same way about LWYMMD or Me! I did listen to folklore a few times - liked it at first but every subsequent listening got more bored. Never listened to the follow-up. I'd rectify my negligence if there was a ballot poll on the horizon.

As it stands, I'd probably rank them:

Fearless
1989
Speak Now
Red
Taylor Swift

Speak Now and Red are definitely fighting it out for 3rd because Red definitely has higher highs than Speak Now, but it's incredibly front loaded and I hate the dudes in the duets.

this is impossible

― josh az (2011nostalgia), Thursday, February 11, 2021 9:01 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah...I almost voted for Red and then revisited the second half. Everything through "Stay" is top-notch, but I think I'm going with Fearless. Evermore might be the best yet, but I used to think that about Lover, so I'm going to give it another couple years to brew.

Today, I would rank them:

Evermore
Reputation
Red
Fearless
Lover
1989
Folklore
debut
Speak Now

(that’s pure personal preference)

Red has a few amazing tracks in the final section ("Holy Ground" FFS, but also "Starlight" and "Begin Again", and I rep for "Sad Beautiful Tragic" as a nice game of dress-ups) and is long enough that you can skip the weaker tracks (which in truth are worse on paper than in reality - Gary Lightbody and Ed Sheeran are more useless than they are actively harmful) and still have a substantial album.

Fearless or Lover

xp I like the duets! I like all her duets. (I do sometimes skip "Sad Beautiful Tragic.")

red has no skips! gary lightbody does his best to suck all life out of "the last time", and the deluge of "this is the last time"s towards the end start to sound like a cruel tease, but taylor just about keeps things on track. love the way she sings 'you wear your best apologies - but i was there to watch you leave'.

also "i almost do" > "we are never" > "stay stay stay" > "the last time" is really good sequencing

evermore
red
folklore
speak now
1989
reputation
lover
fearless
taylor swift

the middle 3 especially could all swap around on any given day

clearly I'm missing something about Evermore, which came across as Folklore-lite to me last time I tried

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

bizarre

this is why we can't have nice things!

I think I'd like "The Last Time" more if it was more meta, and Taylor had never written a song again about an ex turning up and asking to be taken back.

As time passes, 1989 is moving past Fearless to settle itself as the most successful album in Taylor Swift‘s career.

her weakest record outside of the s/t won. interesting

1989 is her best Pop album but idk those results are bizarre. it's great if you cut "welcome to new york" and "bad blood" and maybe "shake it off" depending on how you're feeling and throw in "you are in love" and "new romantics" into the album proper but those duds on the official tracklist are truly dreadful

tbf, “I Know Places” is the only true dud. It’s a good album!

Lover 1
reputation 0

^^^ correct, at least

reputation with 0? this board needs more contrarians

i should've voted for reputation

It's so good, and so much fun

I can't even remember if I voted (lmao), but if I did, I should've voted for reputation

would any 1989 voters like to explain themselves?

I voted for Red, but 1989 is probably my second favorite because sequenced synths inna 80s style.

1989 is still really good except for those few duds though

red's weaker tracks aren't anywhere near as bad but i still hate the sequencing jumping all over the place stylistically, my preferred version cuts the three max martin pop hits (which are all underwritten imo), the duets (which aren't terrible but still relatively weak), and "stay stay stay" which is horrible twee grocery store commercial music. that leaves it at a very tight & perfect 10 tracks.

folk-more combined wins tho

“Stay Stay Stay” is amazing though?

otm

would any 1989 voters like to explain themselves?

― winters (josh),

really amused at the total inability of this board to process that her most overall-popular album won for good reasons. it's also obviously her best, the only one I even momentarily considered voting for instead was Folklore. It also has the largest cultural footprint imo, and it has "Style".

i.e. people who aren't fanatics (like me) find 1989 to be the best

I really like 1989 now - even Welcome to New York!

oh totally, good opener

every time i revisit 1989 i like it less... and the transition from "i wish you would" to "bad blood" still makes me want to shut it off. obv i'm a fanatic though, and have come to think of reputation as the better and more interesting pop record (also profoundly misunderstood, which makes me like it more... beneath the "i live 4 the drama" exterior it's almost all love songs)

1989 also def her best ever set of bonus tracks which is also one of my problems with the album lol

I *think* something Coe was ultimately getting at (from the complete wrong angle) is that Swift didn't need someone like Max Martin to come up with songs, she needed him to become a pop superstar.

And the main thing I added that I don't think Damon was saying at all is that it's really annoying to me how fans of an artist need to make a bigger deal out of an artist being in the room with Martin than why Martin is there.

— Tyler Mahan Coe (@TylerMahanCoe) January 25, 2022

But he (and Albarn) picked the wrong fight, because *clearly* Swift can write, and *clearly* she can sell millions of copies of songs she wrote. But if his argument is "yeah, but she needed Max Martin to get on pop radio and sell even more," ... join the club, you know? Who gives a shit? Even Coe seems to understand he fucked up and commenced moving the goal posts. Like, just about every singer/songwriter from Dylan and the Beatles on up has producers and musicians to make what they wrote sound better.

Btw, I found a nice clip of her in the studio with Martin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwJ_hHT5vw8

She had two number 1 albums before Max Martin and one of them sold better than the albums that had Max Martin, though. I don't know that there's any amount of divining his point that doesn't resolve to "he's as much of a dumbass as Albarn."

I suppose the triangulated position is that Taylor's own insistence on being respected as a songwriter who writes her own material (a decent chunk of it by herself), and in particular her own lyrics, inadvertently feeds into a kind of rockist-about-pop mindset which has been very prominent in general for the past five years or so.

It's interesting to compare the fan/critic treatment of Taylor in this regard with someone like Miranda Lambert, who writes amazing material, sometimes by herself and sometimes in collaboration, and also performs material written by others, and the dividing line between those various categories is basically non-existent from a reception POV (like, it would seem odd to me to distinguish between "We Should Be Friends", which is a solo Lambert credit, and "Pink Sunglasses", on which she doesn't have a writing credit). The idea that Taylor is personally responsible for at least the words of her songs seems like a big part of the swift-enjoyment-machine, whereas with Miranda it seems less directly relevant.

But there's no counterexample to "Pink Sunglasses" in Swift's catalog (as she writes or co-writes everything)... i.e., she literally is partially responsible for at least the words of her songs, so is it "rockist" for that to be a factor in fan reception of her work?

Not that this should matter, but ... David Allan Coe only had two top 10 country hits. He didn't write or co-write either of them. Taylor Swift has had 25 country top 10s, and wrote or co-wrote all of them.

xpost No I don't think it is, though of course it depends on how the issue is framed. Is Taylor a better artist than Miranda (or whoever) because she at least co-writes everything she sings? No. Should the fact that Taylor writes or at least co-writes all her own material (and is probably 95% responsible for the lyrics) be a precondition to her being taken seriously as an artist? No. I don't think Taylor argues either of those things, though whether her fans do or don't will of course be a case by case question, and at least some of the fan responses to the Albarn quote kinda imply those viewpoints.

Of course I've separately made the case before for the importance of Taylor's lyrics (and her lyrical approach and her growth as a lyricist) to her music both assessed on a song by song basis and as a body of work.

I hear you (though I also wonder how Albarn would have replied if the interviewer had said: "She may not be to your taste, but Miranda Lambert is an excellent songwriter.")

"I don't know her."

xxxpost

in fairness, David Allen Coe was a writer for other artists, including "Would You Lay With Me a Field of Stone" for Tanya Tucker which is a gorgeous song and Take This Job and Shove It for Johnny Paycheck

I think Johnny Cash did a few of his songs

I was talking to my daughter this morning, wondering how Taylor Swift is going to handle her next tour. Her last tour was back in 2018, a big stadium outing. But since then she's released three entirely new albums, and two newly re-recorded versions of her old stuff, which means some 50 or so songs she's never performed, plus new versions of old songs like that 10 minute song, plus I assume at least another new album/re-recorded album by the time she hits stadiums again, assuming summer 2023 at the earliest, at least in America. Multi-night stands with different setlists?

thought this bump would be about the crawdads song coming out tomorrow

mandy moore had the problem of touring for two records at once and her solution was to play songs from both records, i'm sure taylor will figure it out

Medleys...lots and lots of Medleys

Don't know if Mandy Moore is a good comparison.

I guess the Weeknd is essentially touring behind two hit albums for the first time this summer, his first tour since 2016. Let's see how he handles it, though I have no idea if has the deep cut stans that Swift does.

I was thinking about this recently, too. I've never seen her live and certainly wouldn't mind more of a theater tour.

But she can't, can she? I mean, Olivia Rodrigo just did a (large) theatre tour, and Lil Nas X is doing that, too, iirc, but of course even though iirc neither has/had toured before they could have just started at arenas if they wanted to. But someone as popular as Swift, if she played small(er) places I think there would be a huge backlash, unless she did, like, 20 nights in every city.

I tried listening to the new song, but I think I wasn’t in the right headspace for that vibe.

Getting a vaguely mid-90s Tori Amos vibe (specifically stuff like "Bells For Her" or "Sister Named Desire") off "Carolina", though I would be very surprised if that was what Taylor shooting for. Something about the way her voice slides between notes and the lyrics forsake narrative coherence for quasi-coherent allusion - it feels like it wanders down the pathway that "Seven" gestured towards.

It makes me think most of "Safe and Sound" tbh, but that may just be the Southern Goth Lite vibe.