Tag: Taylor Swift

Liked https://view.nl.npr.org/?qs=846f1d32e26db39cdc87701fc441d7993c5a748abd3e2a2099765933e9277be56d19033940a2dc1228d6eb2da1ac4aa35b9993fb0205caf99bf701a89d7e8e06d757eda5fdb83a8817899bc93566865f8ec8be49ae09d015 (view.nl.npr.org)

It was Swift who threw out the “we” for the “I.” She didn’t do it with her words, mostly. Swift is ever-gracious in her awards acceptance speeches, always enthusiastically crediting her collaborators and acknowledging her competition. But as she stands in the eye of a hurricane of popular fetishization and media hype, Swift can’t help but block out everything and everyone around her. She knows it, or at least the attack of the 50-foot Tay in the “Anti-Hero” video suggests she does. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. She wants to continue to present herself as an ordinary musician who loves the studio more than the spotlight, but crowd hunger – for a distraction from the world’s horrors, a hero who doesn’t wield weapons, a boost to the economy, a symbolic antidote to the shrinking of women’s rights – has turned her into the strangest kind of star: a mutli-dimensional monolith. In popular culture right now, Taylor Swift stands for everything, yet she also stands firmly for the center, unmoving, unable to share the light.

Source: February 18th 2024 by Ann Powers

Listened Midnights by Contributors to Wikimedia projects from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift’s first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore. Midnights is a concept album about nocturnal contemplation, written and produced by Swift with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.

Inspired by the “sleepless nights” of Swift’s life, Midnights contains confessional yet cryptic lyrics, ruminating themes such as anxiety, insecurity, self-criticism, self-awareness, insomnia, and self-confidence. Musically, Swift experimented with electronica, dream pop, bedroom pop and chill-out music styles in the album, eschewing the alternative folk sound of her 2020 releases for a return to synth-pop. It is characterized by subtle grooves, vintage synthesizers, drum machine, and hip hop/R&B rhythms.

Midnights is a concept album about late night contemplation. With this in mind, it is as much about setting an atmosphere. Spencer Kornhaber has described the album as ‘aggressively and aggravatingly normal’:

Midnights is not different. It is normal. Aggressively normal, aggravatingly normal, and, in its way, excellently normal. She has found the cultural status quo, and it sounds like that Glass Animals song that was in everyone’s TikToks last summer. What’s distinct about her return to synth pop is just the flavors she stirs in: oozing bass, surmountable melancholia, and the same type of confession and awkwardness that appears 45 minutes into an office happy hour. Transcending expectations is its own expectation, and Midnights makes clear, with modest poignance, that Swift has burned out on her own hype.

Alternatively, Ann Powers suggests that it offers a rethink of Swift’s habits.

Swift uses Midnights as a way to rethink the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shake off habits that have served her artistically and commercially for more than a decade. Sometimes she succeeds; sometimes she hangs on to her old habits. But the attempt intrigues throughout.

Charlie Harding, Nate Sloan, and Reanna Cruz touch on the seeming return of the T-drop, but they also explore some of the newer ingredients that help set the scene, such as Reese bass.

NS: I think Reese bass is sort of equivalent to the sandworms in Dune. It’s under the surface; you almost don’t really hear it clearly, you only see the sand moving. You only get a sort of hint of what that creature — that sound — might look like. You get the sense that if you turn up your speakers to hear the bass more clearly, you still wouldn’t be able to. It’s always a little bit out of reach. Maybe it’s something about the way it’s filtered or side-chained … I don’t know. But something about it is untouchable; it’s unreachable.

Tom Breihan continues the vibe on atmosphere suggesting that the album “fills the room and makes the air taste better.”

My colleague Chris DeVille described the album as “just folklore with synthesizers instead of acoustic guitars.”

…

These songs are not anthems or earworms, but they fill up a room and make the air taste better. I would love to hear some more immediate top-down endorphin-rush Taylor Swift jams, but her downbeat burbles can be just as effective, and there are some really, really good downbeat burbles on Midnights.

One of the intriguing questions that seems to be addressed throughout the commentary is what is actually wanted or expected from Taylor Swift in regards to her evolution over time? Ann Powers discusses how, unlike Adele and Beyonce, Swift does not have a child and in our patriarchal society, this seems to matter.

Sam Sanders – I don’t see Beyoncé as 17 and in Destiny’s Child anymore. I don’t see Adele as being 18, doing those first small songs and albums. Different people, right? But we still do this thing where Taylor is 15. It’s a Taylor thing, and I can’t put my finger on it, so I want you to.

Ann Powers – I do have an answer for this, and it goes into a sensitive place. I think about the great song by the Pretenders, written by Chrissie Hynde, “Middle of the Road,” where there’s a line in that song where she says, “I’m not the cat I used to be / I’ve got a kid. I’m 33.”

Taylor doesn’t have a child. And in our patriarchal society, when does a woman change? When she becomes a mother. All the women you mentioned became mothers, and maybe one of the main reasons why we don’t accept Taylor as an adult is because the childless woman remains a strange figure in our society. We don’t know how to accept childless women as adults. I’m gonna thank you, Taylor, for not having kids yet because we really need more childless women out there showing their path.

Some criticism has also taken aim at Jack Antonoff. Kornhaber makes the case that although Antonoff co-wrote 12 of the albums 13 songs and co-produced all of them is it is misleading to suggest that the album is the way it is simply because of Antonoff. Kornhaber describes Antonoff as a ‘therapists-slash-craftspeople’, someone who provides the conditions to flourish:

The term producer can refer to a whole range of activities. Some producers mostly just capture the sound of artists playing their own music in the studio. Some, by contrast, are like one-person bands who whip up accompaniment for a vocalist. Some producers are beatmakers who deliver their contributions by email. Some are tyrants who use the singer as a mere ingredient for their own creation (and, in many cases historically, exploit or abuse the singer in the process). And some are therapists-slash-craftspeople, coaxing an artist to pour out their soul and then helping shape the results.

By all accounts, Antonoff falls into that last category.

For me, what I like about the album is how contained it feels. I wonder if this is what Antonoff brings?

Place between Lorde and Halsey.

Bookmarked Taylor Swift Explains Her Three Types Of Lyrics In Nashville Songwriters Association Awards Speech by Tom BreihanTom Breihan (stereogum.com)
In an acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriters Association International award for Songwriter-Artist Of The Decade, Taylor Swift shares her three genres associated with her lyrics.

I categorize certain songs of mine in the “Quill” style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets.

…

Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references, with a poetic twist.

…

Frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat. Glitter Gel Pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously.

Listened 2021 studio album by Taylor Swift from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the first re-recorded album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on April 9, 2021, through Republic Records. It is a re-recording of Swift’s second studio album, Fearless (2008), and the first of six re-recorded albums Swift plans to release, following the dispute regarding ownership of the masters to her first six studio albums.

Fearless is the first installment of Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her first six albums. With bonus tracks and previously unrecorded material, it is a lengthy album, perfectly designed to maximise streaming services.

In some respects the new tracks, produced by Antonoff and Dessner, feel like a continuation of the work done on Folklore and Evermore.

Dessner and Antonoff’s production believably reframes these Fearless outtakes as folklore deep cuts. It’s proof of how thin the line between a twilit country radio ballad and shimmery indie-tinged folk-rock can be.

Ben Thompson compares the exercise with what Dave Chappelle did when he asked them to not wqtch his show. Thompson wonders if she will or even needs to remake any more of her albums.

It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”

Bookmarked Why Taylor Swift’s Nostalgia Play Works by Shirley Li (theatlantic.com)

The re-recording, which has already topped the U.S. iTunes chart, certainly marks another instance of pop culture’s obsession with nostalgia paying off. Many similar industry efforts—TV reboots, extensions of film franchises, covers of childhood favorites—service fans through cameos and casual references without meaningfully considering the original work’s impact. But Swift, through her stronger vocals, engages with her younger self, scrutinizing her lyrics. She joins in on the act of being a Taylor Swift fan.

Shirley Li reflects upon Taylor Swift’s rerecording of Taylor Swift’s Love Story. She explains that this is more than just a like for like recreation, but instead it is an ode to a past self.
Listened 2020 studio album by Taylor Swift from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Evermore has been described as the sister album to Folklore, with the majority of the album produced by Aaron Dessner.

On “evermore,” she sounds loose and unburdened—free, finally, from the debilitating squeeze of other people’s expectations. It’s a lush, tender, and beautiful album, steadier if less varied than “folklore,” and infused with backward-looking wisdom.

On evermore, she’s gone even smaller. It’s a soft, meditative, consciously quiet album. This time around, she’s not really writing pop songs and presenting them in the clothing of NPR-style indie. Instead, she’s just straight-up writing NPR-indie songs. It’s a small but crucial distinction.

The folklore–evermore era has been one marked by a spirit of artistic freedom. Unbound by pop convention, and perhaps with newfound commercial flexibility – with the success of folklore as proof of surprise-release viability – Swift is able to both explore abstract turns of phrase (“gold rush”) and unfurl narratives (“champagne problems”). On both albums, she’s been permitted to play with sound and texture in a way that feels uncharacteristic of contemporary radio pop.

Listened Taylor Swift Releases Surprise folklore Live Album – Stereogum,Taylor Swift Releases Surprise folklore Live Album from Stereogum

Yesterday, Taylor Swift pulled another surprise attack. This past summer, Swift released her quarantine album folklore with only a day of advance notice. Yesterday — the same day that folklore was nominated for a buttload of Grammys — Swift announced the impending release of Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a new live-concert movie that Swift made with her folklore collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon. That film is up on Disney+ today, and Swift also went ahead and made a whole live album out of it.

Continuing the reimagining of live music, Taylor Swift released an intimate ‘live’ performance which strips back folklore even more, while at the same time presenting to the world. Rather than ‘three ingredients’, each of the songs was limited to Swift, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.

Given that folklore was already basically an acoustic album, it’s still striking to hear Swift and her collaborators stripping those songs down even further, giving them a different level of intimacy.

The conversations between Swift, Antonoff and Dessner were insightful and worth the watch.

Liked The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift (daily.jstor.org)

Taylor Swift isn’t alone in being accused of faking an accent. American pop-punk bands like Green Day have been accused of faking British accents in imitation of the Sex Pistols, just as non-American groups (such as the French band Phoenix) put on their best-dressed American accents during performances. Code switching in genres is not uncommon and generally passes unnoticed, especially if listeners never get a chance to hear an artist’s normal speaking voice—unless that voice sings in a new genre where a different accent might be the norm.

Listened 2020 studio album by Taylor Swift from Wikipedia

Folklore (stylized in all lowercase) is the eighth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on July 24, 2020, through Republic Records. A surprise album announced without pre-release promotional campaigns, Folklore was written and recorded while in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Musically, the album marks a departure from the upbeat pop sound of Swift’s preceding studio albums to stripped-down tunes driven by piano and guitar, with production from Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff and Swift herself. Categorized as an indie folk, alternative rock, electro-folk, and chamber pop record, Folklore portrays what Swift called “a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness” rising out of her imagination. It manifests vivid storytelling from largely third-person narratives that detail heartbreak and retrospection.

Folklore is a surprise in so many ways. Not what I expected from Taylor Swift. Not actually what I expected from Aaron Dessner. What I find most interesting is that it feels like something of a departure for all parties. For me this continues with some of the sounds explored with The National’s I am Easy to Find, while it also captures some of Antonoff’s nuances.

More Lana Del Rey and less Carly Rae Jepsen.

Marginalia

Lyndsey McKenna

Folklore applies Swift’s signature lyrical style — richly and carefully detailed, rife with knowing callbacks — to a new palette informed by Dessner’s work. Skittering instrumentation proves a match for Swift’s use of speak-song cadence; meditative piano and horns offer a cinematic soundscape for explorations of character that move beyond autobiography.(source)

Beth Garrabrant

“Folklore” isn’t a folk record—it feels mostly genre-less, though it drifts toward gauzy, atmospheric pop—nor is it particularly autobiographical. Instead, Swift is interested in the idea of storytelling—of folklore, writ large—as a kind of sense-making process, a real and useful chance to order the world. How do we find meaning in the absurd or banal things that happen to us? Which narratives float us, which hobble us, and which are we totally free to reconstruct?(source)

Tom Breihan

With folklore, Swift has made a self-consciously minor transitional album, a grand readjustment. She’s nailed it. Swift, it turns out, is one of the few great pop chameleons to come along in recent years. She was great at gleaming Walmart country. She was great at bright-plastic global-domination ultra-pop. She was a bit less great at quasi-trap club music, but she made do. And now she’s great at lightly challenging soft-thrum dinner party music.(source)

Spencer Kornhaber

With its woodsy black-and-white art, not to mention its title, Folklore advertises itself as an expected pop-star maneuver: the “back to basics” or “stripped down” revelation. But the album’s more complex than that, and does not conjure the image of Swift slumped over a guitar for an acoustic set. With the producers Aaron Dessner (of the indie band The National) and Jack Antonoff (the rock singer turned pop-star whisperer), she swims through intricate classical and folk instrumentation largely organized by the gridded logic of electronic music. Melancholy singers of ’90s rock radio such as Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan seem to guide Swift’s choices, as do contemporaries such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde. The overall effect is eerie, gutting, and nostalgic. If Folklore is not apt for summer fun, it is apt for a year in which rambunctious cheer and mass sing-alongs have few venues in which to thrive.(source)

Taylor Swift has stated that,

My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world.

 

One of the interesting changes to music has been the space where it is created and recorded. On hold is Nils Frahm travelling to Spain to record in a well or Taylor Swift flying to New York because she woke up with an idea, instead most artists have been restricted to those resources they have at hand, something of a DIY approach. For some, this is fine, because this is the way it has always been. Take Jacob Collier for example, who seemingly has all he needs in his room, while for those artists he collaborates with, he connects remotely using Source Connect and captures their part that way.  For some the focus is about developing a space to flourish.
Liked Taylor Swift, Man (NPR.org)

In classic Swift fashion, the visual treatment is full of not-so-subtle nods. A prominent “No Scooters” sign on the 13th Street Station, with previous album titles and scrawled on the subway tile wall near a “Missing: If Found Return to Taylor Swift” sign, points directly to her latest object of ire, Scooter Braun, manager of Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen and Ariana Grande, among others. There’s also the closing credits — “Directed by,” “Written by,” “Owned by,” and “Starring,” all attributed to Swift.

Liked Why Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun’s bad blood may reshape the industry (the Guardian)

Swift is not the first to threaten to re-record her works. Prince and Def Leppard did so after arguing they were being unfairly compensated by their original labels. But it is unheard of move for an artists at her zenith. “You are essentially splitting dollars,” said Sammataro. “You don’t know how the streaming service, the radio station or even your fans are going to consume it. Will they listen to the master or the re-recorded version?”

In the past artists might not have taken this route because marketing and distributing the new versions themselves would have been prohibitively expensive. In the digital age, and with her fanbase, no such issues will hold Swift back. Re-recording a couple of hits might once have satisfied Swift but with relations so strained she may feel like dealing Big Machine a bigger blow.

Replied to

I too agreed Taylor Swift’s performance was good and that the banter provided by the medium is always insightful.

Some other great series are: La Blogothèque’s Take Away Shows and Triple J’s Like a Version.

Replied to Total Request Live! Taylor, Lana, Kim, and More (with Sam Sanders) (Switched on Pop)

NPR’s Sam Sanders stops by to break down the tracks that Switched On listeners have been loving. Swedish dancefloor confessionals, songs that stop time, the specificity of Lana Del Ray, and the awkwardness of descending fourths: it’s all on the table in this freewheeling conversation of deep musical nerdiness.

Sam Sanders discussed Taylor Swift’s vocal up tick in Cruel Summer. This is something she does in Getaway Car. Both tracks feature collaboration with Jack Antonoff. Interestingly, this is a technique used in Antonoff’s own music with The Bleachers on tracks Everybody Loves Somebody and Don’t Take the Money. I therefore wonder if it is something that he has introduced to Swift or even vice versa?
Listened Lover (album) – Wikipedia from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Lover is the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on August 23, 2019, by Republic Records. As executive producer, Swift worked with producers Jack Antonoff, Joel Little, Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, and Sounwave on the album. Described by Swift as a “love letter to love”, Lover celebrates the ups and downs of love and incorporates brighter, more cheerful tones, departing from the dark sounds of its predecessor, Reputation (2017). Musically, it is a pop, pop rock, electropop and synth-pop record that contains influences of country, dream pop, pop punk, funk and R&B.

I find Lover an intriguing album. What does one expect from a Taylor Swift album? How much can it really break ‘new’ ground? I think Nick Catucci captures the feeling best by describing it as an “evolutionary rather than revolutionary.” There are moments when it feels like a cover of Ryan Adam’s covering Taylor Swift, other times it feels like continuation of the pop journey of 1989. I am not sure if the album is ‘good enough’ to paper over the cracks in her persona. However, I feel that how one responds to music is somewhat personal. Overall, I think Kitty Empire sums the album up best when she suggests that, “an album so long is bound to be a mixed bag.”
Bookmarked Look What They Made Her Do: Taylor Swift To Re-Record Her Catalog (npr.org)

For artists, master recordings — the original recordings of musicians’ work — are vital musically, historically and financially. In most situations, labels own those masters. But many musicians, both prominent and independent ones, have tried to hang on to their masters. As Prince famously told Rolling Stone back in 1996, “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”

This is such an intriguing state of affairs, what is involved in ‘re-recording’ a record? Are there limits to what can be reproduced? What does this all say about the ‘masters’?
Liked Taylor Swift’s Music Ownership Controversy With Scooter Braun: What It Means and Why It Matters (Pitchfork)

With her open letter and the high-profile back-and-forth, Swift is bringing visibility to one of the music industry’s longest standing issues. And while it’s not a new problem, Swift’s discussion of it was enough to encourage artists including Sky Ferreira and Halsey to come forward about their own difficulties with label deals and ownership.