Taylor Swift - 1989

(if Taylor ever did write a song premised on The Second Coming it would finally justify all the lazy Joni Mitchell critical comparisons)

The Pitchfork review, exploring how the vault tracks differ from the album cuts, makes an interesting observation (which may help explain why I like them so much):

On “Suburban Legends,” Swift writes in the dense, largely rhymeless run-on style that defines later records like Folklore and Midnights. The second verse builds to the lines, “I am standing in a 1950s gymnasium/And I can still see it now”—an unwieldy contrast to the appealingly quantized bounce of 1989 cuts like “How You Get the Girl” and “Style.”

I’m surprised that “Slut!” seems to be generally disfavored… I think it’s such a good song (and with a great refrain—“If I’m gonna be drunk / I might as well be drunk in love”)

See, Beyonce, this is what happens when you don't trademark your phrases

If I’m gonna be crazy, I may as may be…

We played TS in the car yesterday and a few of the redone 1989 songs came up. "Style" was the one I noticed was particularly lacking for the reasons some of you mentioned: guitar and mixing were weaker, less emotion in the vocal. But I've also listened to that song many more times than the others so the differences jump out

Finally got around to listening to the new vault songs, they're really good! The best batch of vault tracks of any of the do-overs? She's taking the imperial phase to kind of ridiculous extremes here.

On par with the Fearless vault tracks IMO (though there is one track more of those)

It's interesting that Midnights was received rather poorly here yet there seems to be universal approval of the Vault tracks. There's a lot of "Mastermind" and "Labyrinth" in "Suburban Legends" and "Is It Over Now."

Well as J0rdan and I discussed above, they’re in a similar mode but so much better!