taylor swift red poll

I still can’t get over the clarity & presence of the mix/production… not to get all Hoffman Forums scum, but – somebody else with the CD, tell me I’m not crazy… doesn’t it sound really fuckin’ good??

my feeling about the 10-minute "all too well" is: yes, of course, the choices she made for the final version were correct in terms of delivering a song that works as a song, but: all the lines she cut totally slap. like, the first difference is a way-overextended death metaphor in true taylor swift fashion, and the dad interlude is devastating, and and and it just keeps mounting and mounting like a torrent, like different rivers of resentment feeding into a tidal wave of heartbreak. it's fucking... exhilarating(?) to listen to and truer to the feeling that produced the song than the final product, even if i prefer the edit. final "all too well": "i was there." 10-minute draft: "you were there too motherfucker"

oh also i am super whatever on the uncanny valley rerecording of "all too well" but all the little arrangement changes they made to the 10-minute version are exquisite

I can't tell if it's a matter of production or performance or both, but something's off about "Trouble" and "Never Getting Back Together" - like she can't quite call up the required insouciance. "Holy Ground" is maybe an improvement though? That and "Red" suggest she might make a solid hard rock record.

Red definitely left open the possibility of a Rock Taylor, which she has mostly not explored. She could do an E Street Band kind of album.

Get rid of Dessner and Antonoff (please) and hire idk Sturgill Simpson and Joan Jett

xxxpost i felt similarly about "22" ... she sounds like her heart's just not in it, like she feels silly singing that song at 31. idk, maybe i was hearing what i thought i should be hearing or something.

i felt similarly about "22" ... she sounds like her heart's just not in it, like she feels silly singing that song at 31. idk, maybe i was hearing what i thought i should be hearing or something.

I think I had the opposite reaction to "22" - I liked it but I think that's because I like the idea of someone significantly older than 22 singing it.

I thought "Red" sounded great. I would like to hear more Rock Taylor for sure.

all the little arrangement changes they made to the 10-minute version are exquisite

yeah i love the different arrangement on it & it's fascinating because it's the one time she's really re-interpreting an old song rather than just imitating the old recording as much as possible

yes! and it sounds so good and gives you a sense of how cool this project could be if she'd let herself re-interpret all the songs. The vault tracks are nice and all, and she's doing as good a job with this as she possibly could, but ultimately this whole revenge karaoke thing still seems like a very weird choice to me. Like, I get the business angle, but I can't imagine there's much artistic satisfaction in redoing your work if you can't allow yourself to change it.

yeah the re-recordings are not at all an interesting project but she's made up for that with the new material attached to them at least

oh wow she really changed up "girl at home", that's the only re-recording that's anywhere near this different, right? new version is great but what's the story there

I've embarrassed myself here praising "Starlight" over the years, but, my god, it sounds grander than ever.

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.