Taylor Swift - Folklore

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

re: other folk from this year
I loved the Christian Lee Hutson record (produced by Phoebe Bridgers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lg1-xTV4xk

this gonna be rep stans listening to folklore pic.twitter.com/9jbFxLwuJQ

— george (@ursogeorgeous) July 23, 2020

also if you're going to do a big major-label melodramatic response to strange times then do it like The 1975 imo: crazed, desperate, ambitious, bursting with nonsense and barely logical. when is taytay gonna lose it properly i ask? when will she release her 'piece of me'? (no, 'look what you made me do' was not it)

this album feels safe, just in a way we haven't really seen from her before, and i think the fault is this studied, my-first-echoey-sad-indie production

positivity! 'august' is actually p good. 'this is me trying' is also decent. i think in future i will listen to this album from track 8 onward haha

The 1975 album is pretty much a logical extension of their previous work though? The extra fragmented-ness is just a question of degree.

i have actually really rather liked it from 'august' onward, 'invisible string' probably best track so far, absolutely no accounting for why

u horrible lot will say it took me 8 tracks to acclimatise but i genuinely think the melodies & sonics have got better

Leaving aside the inevitable critical framing, this album doesn’t feel like it’s even trying to be bold or dangerous or risky except from a “what does this mean career wise” perspective (and even then it could easily be framed as a pandemic one-off), and if that’s specifically what a listener is hoping for from Taylor then I suspect they will be disappointed.

In this regard, the point of comparison I keep coming back to is Tori Amos’s ‘Scarlet’s Walk’ - another superficially “safe” album where the ‘sharper’ piano attack referred to above softened but also the lyrical approach became less elliptical and more attuned to working up and examining the crevices of recognisable metaphors. But even more than that, the opening up of the viewpoints so that the songs feel part of a dialogue with (sometimes heard, sometimes unheard) other voices and viewpoints. They’re coming to the same space from opposite directions but the end result - songs bursting with specific imagery and detail but relatively straightforward to unpack lyrically, because they’re part of conversations - feels very similar.

Feel a strong simpatico between these songs and stuff like “Amber Waves”, “A Sorta Fairytale”, “Strange”, “Your Cloud” etc.

my crackpot theory about this album: frontloaded the more 'immediate' stuff, kept the slower, sadder stuff for later, but actually, the slower sadder stuff was more interesting (to me at least), if we're getting sad taylor i want truly-desolate taylor, not sad-indie taylor

lol sorry to ride roughshod over your much-more-thoughtful and probably accurate theory tho tim

Happy to hear an album from her that isn’t suited for stadiums/choreography — which is why Alfred’s Tunnel of Love comparison fits so well. An artist who plays Wembley not writing for Wembley.

cardigan sounds awfully Lana Del Rey-ish.

But, like, good.

brb gonna find a support group for ppl who strongly disliked the first 7 tracks and rly quite liked the last 9, this is too weird

So AOTY ?

yes i am sure we are all agreed this is aoty

"peace" is sick as hell isn't it lj

Poll it this fall vs. Fetch The Bolt Cutters.

yeah i was surprised 'peace' was rated so low on rym, it makes good use of that weird little alarm tone

second half of this album's production moves away from bon iver and towards...foxing? thinking aloud here haha

Foxing do seem destined for pop star collaborator status

maybe it just made me want to hear 'nearer my god' again haha, now there's an album we can all agree on. yeah christ they NEED to work with some stars

Uh

Jessie Ware recorded the album of the year

This isn on par with Lover and just as overstuffed. I love the songs I love, but I just can't with Long Albums anymore .

so based on that clip up there - and perhaps there are exceptions - but it sounds like he made tracks and she wrote melodies and lyrics to those tracks? am i reading that wrong?

this album is really good and a bit boring and too long. if it were 11 tracks instead of 16, the boring part would fade away.