Taylor Swift - Folklore

tbh She's in the movie version of "The Giver," so there's a bit of what's good for the goose in there. And to go full tin-hat, that was at the end of the promotional cycle for "Red," and seeing her in a bright red dress with bright red lipstick next to the word "READ" kills a few more birds with one stone too. She's a clever one, that Taylor Swift.

i cannOT stop crying to "mirrorball"

think a key thing I like about this album was that it *isn't* a "Taylor Nebraska" thing

Yeah, it's not really a Taylor Nebraska! But it checks all the marks Healy seemed to suggest when he mentioned the concept.

I'd be interested in seeing more of those pop star library posters. I know the one with Bowie is totally classic.

I had the R.E.M. one for a while:

https://www.hakes.com/Image/MediumRes/96585/1/image.jpg

(mine was not signed, it was taped slightly askew on my door room wall)

xp I remember seeing that Healy comment at the time and thinking, "You can't really produce a Nebraska for someone else; if you want Taylor to make a Nebraska you'll just have to find some way to lock her in her house for a year with a guitar and a harmonica."

Just ordered the vinyl and they were like "this ships in 16 fucking weeks", which is kinda perfect because although yes, this is a melancholy summer album, it will slot in really nicely with my fall and winter and winter favorites as well.

just saw a headline declaring this "the perfect quar album," and now I have a new abbreviation to loathe

idk I think it's kinda cool

weren't Quar the worst band of all time at one point

This Taylort Earth

'fraid of the 'rona, gotta quar

james is totally a girl btw

pretty good album but man, it's kind of a bummer, isn't it? like i'm trying to get ready for the weekend and now i'm kind of sad.

Yeah - it's both very good, and not the kind of territory that I think I will want to revisit too often.

(btw - the vocal melody at the beginning of "Seven" reminds me of Big Thief's "Cattails.")

It's not outright depressing, it's more like sweetly melancholic, which of course makes it even worse.

I hadn't looked up which tracks Antonoff worked on, but when that final section of "August" hits - like, he may as well have signed it in Sharpie.

xp: I listened to it twice this morning and it inspired me to listen to more sad albums. So I reached for Get Lonely and this is kinda a rough way to usher in the weekend.

Definitely overshot my target.

Once you get deep into the stretch starting with Track 9, it feels like any sense of momentum has been lost.

idk "invisible string" is track 11, it's pretty buoyant

but also it's a sustained mood, the momentum is by nature unhurried throughout, patient and observational in a way that a late injection of energy would absolutely undermine

the sequencing makes me feel like i'm wandering through some feverish cloudy interzone that connects all the regions of these songs, her best sequencing ever incidentally

I do like "Invisible String" a lot. But the 2nd half of the album hits me as a bunch of slow, pretty songs strung together, without enough variation; maybe I'm just not in the right headspace for that mood.

(or it worked better on a Thursday night than a Friday morning)

"it's obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together" - lyric of the decade

i get it, part of me keeps starting the record over again after i hit "august," mostly because i want to hear "the 1" all the time. but i really value how much of this album takes place in a unified sonic world because hybrid-country-pop and post-country taylor swift only made one other album like that and it's reputation xp

long suite of slow atmospheric songs is a feature it shares with the last national record too so it's possible i prepared myself for this by falling really hard for i am easy to find. but though they're the same length taylor's record feels shorter

Sounds like this is her Sea Change.

oh dear lord no

The last National album is the only one in their storied catalog I loved, in part because of crucial female support.

i'm enjoying this v much. if i was going thru a breakup this album would be a real kick in the nuts

So apparently “Cardigan”, “August” and “Betty” are all about the same situation from the different perspectives of the people involved?

That's what I learned from Wilson and Rosen's reviews

So, how many sleeves did Led Zeppelin have for "In through the out door"?

gonna listen to this now and record my feelings here rather than that 'dis hyped' thread

to this end i am only going to record positive feelings

One more "sounds-like" note – that poster of R.E.M. c. 1990 was serendipitous, as the orchestral stretch of "August" from around 3:30 - 3:45 has a few totally Out of Time touches.

At the very beginning of March, Justin Vernon and I had gone to Texas to work on the new Big Red Machine album. I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated. So we got tickets, and my kids and wife flew to [the family’s home in] Upstate New York and I flew to Texas. I was there for a week, and by the time I got back Upstate, the borders were being shut and we got stuck. I have the Long Pond studio here, so in a way it was lucky.

I hunkered down here and started to write a ton of music—more than I ever have. I thought maybe they were National or Big Red Machine ideas or maybe something totally different. Things were happening.

So when (Taylor) reached out, I had this large folder of ideas that were pretty well on their way. She was very clear that she didn’t want me to edit any of my ideas; she wanted to hear everything that was interesting to me at this moment, including really odd, experimental noise. So I made a folder of stuff, including some pretty out-there sketches. A few hours later, she sent “Cardigan,” fully written in a voice memo. That’s when I realized that this was unusual—just the focus and clarity of her ideas. It was pretty astonishing. Over the next couple months, this would just happen; all of a sudden, I’d get a voice memo. And then another. Eventually, it was so inspiring that I wrote more ideas that were specifically in response to what she was writing.

https://pitchfork.com/news/the-nationals-aaron-dessner-talks-taylor-swifts-new-album-folklore/

is it positive to say that my problems with this so far aren't really to do with swift herself so much as her producers

that is v much my feeling as well fwiw

That's funny, her past few albums I blamed the producers for bringing out the stuff I liked least about Swift herself.

Lover was kind of engagingly knockabout at least imo!

literally do not understand anyone's issues with the production

unless they're bored

i am already pre-annoyed from the rym discussion tho

The guitar in “The Last Great American Dynasty” is so beautiful.

I can't think offhand of a time someone upped their game by getting The National or Bon Iver involved. certainly it didn't improve Kathleen Edwards or Sharon van Etten's tunes, just made them more pointlessly "atmospheric" to their detriment

that said if she stays pals with Vernon I hope he passes on BJ Burton's deets at some point

I said to Brad to that i hope the Vernon link leads to some work with Jenn Wasner.

yeah don't let these boring men write your music, listen to your critic friends and recruit weyes blood lol