Taylor Swift - Folklore

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.

but it sounds like he made tracks and she wrote melodies and lyrics to those tracks

yes she's been writing this way with producers since 1989

I wonder how much that process has then influenced the overall output of her last few albums, including her lyrical approach.

I mean, if someone gives you the bones of the arrangement for “I Forgot That You Existed” or “You Need To Calm Down”, you’re hardly going to turn that into a “Cardigan” or “Epiphany” lyrically.

So in that sense, Taylor’s output may well be strongly contingent on her collaborators, but not in the way people traditionally mean: rather, because her own creative process seems to strongly involve following the lines of possibility afforded by the material she gets from them.

i do tire of dessner's approach a little by the end of this, but i have that same problem with nearly every national album (except i am easy to find but that's still longer than it needed to be)

there's nothing even close to a bad track though which is the first in a long time for her. so much better than lover for that alone

she had production credits on all of lover so i'd assume she was more involved in the arrangements on that than with the dessner tracks on this & her past martin/shellback collaborations

wish he'd aaron lessner am I right

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?

worth noting that this is an overwhelmingly common arrangement

"betty" is the track that's closest to being from her nebraska and i would love a whole album of it

xpost I know. Wasn't saying it isn't.

anyway, it must be totally wild to send off a folder of tracks to Taylor Swift and then weeks later they start coming back with a bunch of words and melodies you never could've expected.

not to mention sending off a folder of things you think of as yours and then when they come back, they're really no longer yours ... they are now Taylor Swift songs. I mean, I know he has collaborated with many people, but in most cases his name makes the headline.

This album sent me back to Lover, which I haven't listened to in a long time, and is sounding really good.

xpost None of this feels much like Nebraska to me at all, but if I had to choose the song that comes closest, it would probably be Seven. This dark story told from the perspective of a child who doesn't understand what she's seeing - seems like new ground for Taylor and I like it. The rest of this seems lyrically like pretty generic TSwift to me. Seven, Illicit Affairs, Invisible String, August and Peace are songs I'll probably listen to again, but to me it feels like a step back from Lover. There's nothing on here that grabs me the way The Archer did.

My problem with Betty and August and Cardigan - the whole high school trio - is that I find Taylor Swift's version of high school really boring. Like a Sarah Dessen YA novel. I really don't care whether Betty and James get back together or not; they'll both be fine, and they'll break up next year when they go to college anyway.

I have never thought the subject matter per se of Taylor’s songs was particularly interesting - the topics are primarily useful as a framework for her to stretch herself as a songwriter and performer.

Like, nothing about the relationship story in “All Too Well” is interesting except what the songwriting details (e.g. the Chekhov’s gun device) and the execution/delivery bring to the table.

Which is not to say that “Seven” isn’t a stretch for Taylor - but less, I think, because of the story it tells than because that story then demands a different approach to the storytelling given the narrator’s position necessitates a very specific and oblique approach to the subject matter.

the high school trio is made far more interesting by the queer reading, which i absolutely buy into now

Also re album of the year Beyoncé hasn’t done her Afro-futurist thing yet so I will wait for that

"Cold was the steel of my ax to grind for the boys who broke my heart / Now I send their babies presents"
― Ned Raggett

this line is so good, and also the followup:

"Gold was the color of the leaves when I showed you around Centennial Park / Hell was the journey but it brought me heaven"

Feeling this on a rainy pandemic day.

This album is just insanely good