Taylor Swift - Folklore

I mean, in between those glam rock and pop albums, he did soul pastiche, ambient collaborations with Eno, art-rock with Fripp,... Do people really see a remotely comparable scope in Taylor Swift's work? Like crut, I am also baffled by "genre hopping" wrt TS.

The album she did with Wolfgang Voight was admittedly pretty unexpected.

I think "Peace" (on the new album) may have the most "soul" of any song Taylor has done?

(Great song, btw - probably should have ended the album? I still can't get into "Hoax," or ever really hear the melody.)

i see that this thread is gonna get to 1000 comments before i get a chance to listen

Yeah sund4r you're kinda right-- less in common with a Robert Palmer and more in common with "a rock band who had their disco moment". I hope that's the case, anyway! I have no taste for Taylor-the-pop-musician. I like her best when she sounds like Jann Arden

i'm two listens in, + tho i'm enjoying it i'm also not sure if my interest will sustain for much beyond that. it's very nice and a smart/refreshing departure for her, but it is also so ceaselessly subdued in mood that i do struggle to take it all in as an ~album~ at times. the instrumentation is polite and refined, for better and worse, + i enjoy the hypnotic electronic touches. i found myself wishing that the hazy instrumental opening to "epiphany" would just continue uninterrupted for awhile like a stars of the lid record or something but nope, had to jump right back into tay's vocals. unlikely to become my fav ts record, but pretty good!

i enthusiastically welcome her not releasing a tragic, labored attempt at a 'pop hit' prior to dropping the album

have personally been wondering if the subdued mood is a feature and not a bug. i look at what's working on streaming and i don't see a lot of big/bombastic/uptempo/maximalist pop music

i see sad ballads from the pop artists who do manage to fit through the bottleneck and reach the masses, and i see songs that are advance scouts from rap and r&b records that in a lot of ways, resemble folklore more than they resemble reputation or 1989. long, tonally melancholy/subdued, lyrically focused at least compared to the max martin school of "if it sounds good, who cares what it means?"

the single that worked from lover was the title track. the single that worked from reputation was delicate. either of those songs could show up on folklore and fit right in. what if this just is the sound of pop now? what if the smaller, more subtle gradient of moods this record displays from track to track are just more relatable and enticing to a generation of listeners that isn't interested in the traditional sugar rush of bubblegum because they literally have cut actual sugar out of their actual diets and therefore mistrust any product, cultural or otherwise, that's trying to give them too much too soon?

screaming at the thought of this album's tracks getting slotted into the popular 'peaceful piano' 'mood' playlists

sounding more depressed/pensive does not automatically make your music more sophisticated or subtle. imo that this is swift's best album is nothing to do with the (admittedly au courant) glumness or mood greydient and more to do with the fact that it feels less dead-eyed than usual & she (eventually) starts doing more interesting things with the instrumentals than before. it's reductive to say that pop music itself is becoming less maximalist. pop music is becoming more of everything and you can choose to listen to whatever bits of it you're told to you like

All fair, but this is also her first album in four albums not preceded by a particularly obnoxious, very not subtle lead single. Definitely a choice.

“Shake It Off” wasn’t obnoxious (and neither was “We Are Never...,” if you’re counting back that far). This is veering into “pop is bad” territory!

I mean, different strokes, I guess.

shake it off was foully obnoxious, we are never was iconic, rip terrace house

"we are never" was the last decent one, it was all sharply downhill from there leading to the unmitigated abomination that is "me!"

i assume "look what you made me do" hasn't come up bc it's the best lead single of those three albums and it's great

i fully admit i was not read for the taylor swift heel turn at the time and now i think it's so campy and arch and delightful

i was not ready*

arch(er)

Yeah, whatever you think LWYMMD was, laboured attempted at an obnoxious pop hit doesn’t seem like a good description.

“Shake It Off” and “Me!” are really the only two - in both cases they don’t even seem to fit in with the rest of the album that produced them.

I remember being on a date the first time I heard "Shake it Off" and immediately knowing I'd hear it several hundred more times whether I liked it or not

i still don't think lwymmd was good but it's at least entertaining and the video really helped sell it

"shake it off" isn't bad but also not at all good either. "me!" on the other hand is one of the worst things she's ever done

imo "cardigan" is a bad choice for first single and it would have been a massive error to drop it in advance of the album rather than on the same day

we live in a world where the post-LDR sadcore continuum is producing monster chart hits like "someone you loved", and "cardigan" to me feels just as targeted towards mainstream trends as "me!" felt targeted at pop radio playlists during the era of "high hopes" and the jonas brothers

ah the "look what you made me do" video........ cinema

what would have been a better lead single from it though, "exile"? "cardigan" seems like as good as it gets as far as lead single choices go here

yes it really had to be a choice between two of the worst songs on the album

"cardigan" is great and "exile" at least has a fantastic bridge

Yeah, actually, "We are Never ..." has grown on me.

I really like Exile and I say that as someone who has been deeply allergic to Bon Iver for virtually his entire career. Would love to hear an entire album of duets, in that vein (as opposed to the godawful Brendon Urie vein).

I don't care for that song or like the Bon Iver records much, but he has a good voice and I'm not mad when he shows up in things (eg the Hadestown studio album, Bonny Light Horseman, Yeezus)

surely monsieur iver will be duetting with tay at whichever grammy ceremony this album will be competing in

grammy wouldn't be the same without albums like taylor or bomb ivor in them

bon (h)iver? more like mauvais été, amirite?

c'est vrai

I don't care for that song or like the Bon Iver records much, but he has a good voice and I'm not mad when he shows up in things (eg the Hadestown studio album, Bonny Light Horseman, Yeezus)

― the quar on drugs (Simon H.), Sunday, 26 July 2020 23:31 (yesterday) link

One of the upshots of Hadestown is that I wasn't at all surprised to hear him sing in baritone.

I bet Taylor would just love that album if she heard it.

I still listen to it more than the Broadway cast album tbh. "If It's True", fuck.

that does also make me wonder if she likes/has heard Anais Mitchell actually

Oh yeah it's much better IMO, even if the Broadway cast album adds a lot of good songs. I think there's an interconnection of the personal and the mythical on a lot of the songs ("If It's True" yeah, but also stuff like "Wedding Song" and "Flowers") that really chimes in with some of the songwriting on Folklore - which the duet on "Exile" drives home, but it's not the only example.

Re Anais more generally, songs like "Your Fonder Heart" or "Any Way The Wind Blows" are very Taylor-esque in parts.

Actually the (non-Hadestown) song that really underscores the connection is "Namesake".

I believe Lover and Reputation would've been received much better as albums if she'd released them suddenly and all at once like she has with this one. She bungled the release of those ones with terrible first single choices and cringy marketing campaigns, and this ultimately impacted how they were received as projects. I do think this album is better than both of those, but the fact that it has pretty much forced people to accept it as a complete project helps it. It's interesting, it really does feel like Taylor is really still pulling for the idea of the ALBUM as the ultimate unit of musical consumption when the rest of the music culture feels like it's pulling strongly against it. It seems somewhat conservative or traditional in the present environment, but I like that. I think this album, which feels like a collection of thematically linked short stories to me, is a good example of being able to do things over the course of a record that can't be just done in one song.

Taylor's pretty lucky that official greatest hits compilations are no longer a thing - if she had one it would be a total mess.

This album is as boring as a Bon Iver album.

CTRL+F Paysage D'Hiver

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Taylor's pretty lucky that official greatest hits compilations are no longer a thing - if she had one it would be a total mess.

Wait that's why I would like it.

Anyway Jill Mapes wrote a positive review for Pitchfork that wasn't 10.0 and so logically she's been trashed by stans for hours.

Yeah it's kinda being discussed in the stan thread

Been through the album a few times now and even though I quite like some of the Dessner tunes, the Antonoff songs (My Tears, Mirrorball, Seven, August, This is Me Trying, Illicit Affairs, Betty) are so much more thrilling, and sure feels like the two could have made something really really special together.

Also, fans have noticed some parallel images with the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire:

Taylor really said “that film has a very sad ending but it’s art, I think I will put references about it” #folklore pic.twitter.com/5Cepig4gWY

— ELIZA(betty) (@YeeHawSwiftie) July 26, 2020

Seven is a Dessner one I think

You're right - was thinking Antonoff did that whole middle block.

I like how “the 1” keeps basically the same repetitive piano figure through the whole song, and the entire melody and structure comes just through the vocal lines. It’s a nice stripped down illustration of her writing style.