Taylor Swift - Midnights

Taylor Swift made a Bill Callahan album.

"Out of the Woods" from 1989 is Taylor Swift sounding like Chvrches.

This is more subdued than that and closer in sound to "Blank Space". As I said earlier, the overall album feels very 2014-2017 Rolling Shambala thread, of which you have a lot of artists having at least a little bit of Chvrches in their DNA.

Contra many on this board I do like "Vigilante Shit," it has a little more snap to it.

This song is eye-rolling on one level, but also has lodged in my head more than anything else so far. She's the zillionth lyricist to say something like "I don't start shit but I can tell you how it ends," but she makes a good hook out of it.

Subsequent listens haven't much changed my feeling about the album, which is that it's fine and far from her best. That's also how I felt about Lover and Reputation, but of those three I like Lover's range. The one-producer/one-sound approach here is an idea that I support in theory, but in this case I think she'd have been better off with more/different collaborators.

The obvious producer to make the next great Taylor Swift album is Mutt Lange, but he seems retired. (Also I just recently found out his name is pronounced "Lahnj" or something, is that true? I've been saying "Lang" for years.)

Mutt produced/co-wrote half of the Bryan Adams album that came out this year, so you can still probably keep your dream alive for a bit.

C'mon Mutt!

all day long on the Tay's Lange

The obvious producer to make the next great Taylor Swift album is Mutt Lange

From your lips to god's ears, as they say.

lol at Tay's Lange

I think the Pitchfork review is fairly on target, and its matter-of-fact faint praise captures the sense (for me) of the album just not being much fun to listen to.

She's the zillionth lyricist to say something like "I don't start shit but I can tell you how it ends," but she makes a good hook out of it.

Heh, both that sentiment and also the drums-first sound of the first few songs remind of me of this summer's Drake album.

I have found “Sweet Nothings” running through my head a lot today… guess that’s a standout

lot of these songs remind me of St. Vincent (Cheerleader/Prince Johnny).

this is the first taylor swift album to leave me feeling nothing. aside from boredom i guess. it’s not only the production here that feels stale, but the songs just feel mapped along the contours of older, better songs. there’s several songs out of the first handful where i keep expecting her to break into the chorus melody of “i think he knows.” several songs have the same twinkle and swoop of “dress.” i should prob dig more into the lyrics but it doesn’t feel like there’s a big pot of gold at the end of this rainbow

ultimately i just think she doesn’t have a real aesthetic vision for pop production that is divorced from the guitar as the driving instrument. probably her one glaring weakness as a musician & pop star at this point. like, “i knew you were trouble” and “22” are amazing songs but even those were catching the very tail end of what was contemporary at the time. i love reputation & think it’s the most underrated album in her catalog (something this thread confirms) but the production on that album is generally fossilized. 1989 has some amazing songs that sound like haim. lover is actually the album where she kinda charts her own vision for pop production… it also contains her flat out most embarrassing songs ever.

she has just never really offered much of an idea of what pop music should sound like. her vision stops at “i can recreate pop music i like.” maybe that’s an unfair way to judge her, but she’s in very rarified air as a musician, up there with artists who had revolutionary ideas about pop. comparing what beyonce did on renaissance — not just how thrilling the production is on its face, but the way in which it converses with and rearranges the past and present — to this album is just laughable. i get that they’re very different musicians whose music has always had different aims, but it also feels fair to stack taylor up to the greats of her time, let alone the past. her range has a hard ceiling.

“would’ve could’ve should’ve” is dope tho

As far as conventional "songwriting" goes, Beyonce and Swift have nothing in common: she claims (and has established) a lineage while Beyonce is a product and an auteurist part of star-driven machinery behind the popular song. But I agree this album is the first one, after several listens, that leaves me with nothing. I just don't wanna listen to it again.

I'm not, I hope, setting up a hierarchy.

what do you mean by lineage in that context

Like, "I am a product of several generations of songwriters." She sold herself as a songwriter from the start.

My son, who is not a Taylor Swift fan but respects her and liked "Folklore," dismissed this album as dull and also said, "I mean, she's no Beyoncé."

Those are good points about the limits of her pop conception and capabilities. I had the thought that next time she and CRJ should just do an album together, because they have somewhat complementary strengths and weaknesses. Carly is a lot more comfortable with a Madonna groove than Taylor ever could be. But also I think Taylor should just lean into guitar music, she's good at it and "All Too Well" showed what she could do with a Midwestern rock beat.

j0rd's post does get at what i said about antonoff as a creative partner - neither of them have that much vision for pop so their arrangements are fairly unexciting (but i'm not anywhere near as frustrated by it idk, i'm just happy to have to have an album that's so solid even if she's had higher highs elsewhere). i'd love her to find someone who really pushes her in regard to vision for pop without like, awkwardly forcing it or exposing her sometimes terrible judgment like martin & little both did (pretty much always for little, only sometimes for martin).

or really just make a focused singer-songwriter thing continuing on from folklore/evermore - just take swift & her guitar as the starting point (even the good songs on lover sounded generally so much better in the solo acoustic versions) and go from there, even antonoff would be a good choice for something like that

j0rdan otm

Ann Powers was on Sam Sanders' Into It podcast the other day, and they talked about how Taylor and Beyonce are both interested in legacies but Taylor is preoccupied with her individual legacy as a Great Artist (who taps into cultural moods but is fundamentally a self-portraitist), while Beyonce is more concerned with familial and cultural legacies. I have to think more about what that might say about their aesthetic tendencies.

i think there’s prob broad truth there. i haven’t listened to the podcast so i won’t quibble too much but taylor is (or has at points in her career been) concerned with cultural legacy — it’s just white middle class culture. she cares deeply about the lineage of white singer-songwriters i.e. james taylor (bragged in song about how many albums of his that she owns) and carole king (did her rock & roll hall of fame induction speech). even when she’s making electronic pop records i think you can see her carrying that legacy in the rate with which she produces… by the standards of the modern pop star she’s in her own class in that regard. the act of churning out music bcuz the songs are just pouring out of you is pretty foreign nowadays but i think taylor pointedly views herself in the lineage of 60s and 70s singer-songwriters who would put out an album per year w/o fail... i think this comes out whenever she talks about her songwriting process. and then from an aesthetic POV obv it’s a useful & even necessary framing for lots of her music… just not as interesting a text for contemporary pop as the cultural history beyonce is pulling from

She should do a track with Sleaford Mods.

Beyonce is more concerned with familial and cultural legacies.

I have to think about what this means.

taylor is (or has at points in her career been) concerned with cultural legacy — it’s just white middle class culture. she cares deeply about the lineage of white singer-songwriters i.e. james taylor (bragged in song about how many albums of his that she owns) and carole king (did her rock & roll hall of fame induction speech).

This is true (and the podcast did invoke Carole King, along with Joni Mitchell) but one of the hallmarks of this '70s singer-songwriter tradition, besides a certain formalized approach to songwriting, is a sustained focus on the Self. She clearly valorizes this lineage but is less interested in upholding "white middle-class culture" per se than that culture's individualistic notions of artistry and success.

Carole King and Joni Mitchell are conveniently two very different singer-songwriter extremes. King and Mitchell did release nearly annual albums in the '70s, but the latter displayed a restless creativity, changing and evolving, whereas the former ... I don't know, I assume Carole King played it safe, though honestly I barely know anything from the dozens of solo albums she's released. Swift seems much more interested in chasing commercial success or validation, which I suspect sands off the rough edges of risk and is maybe why she comes off more an imitator or replicator than trend setter or innovator. It's like the hypothesis made in the KLF's "Manual" (however generalized) that many great artists don't necessarily fall off so much as grow bored of the formulas. I'm no Beyonce expert, but she's seemed more the creatively restless sort herself, aware of the charts but not necessarily beholden to them. She sets her own standards.

I disagree about Swift not taking risks – it’s just that her risks have largely been so successful, it has seemed she could pull off anything. I also disagree she hasn’t set trends; she’s been a huge influence on younger artists. Obviously, she’s not Beyoncé… or Joni Mitchell, for that matter.

Yeah, jumping from country to post-EDM pop in 2012, then working with The National dude strikes me as risks -- and the audience went along.

I think working with the National guy was totally a risk, but then she retrenched. I think working with proven huge hitmakers is much less of a risk. At this point would she risk writing an entire album herself again, like she did with "Speak Now"?

What makes you think this album's a retrenchment? Those Dessner albums were huge hits.

Maybe retrenchment was the wrong word. I'm mostly going by some of your ho hum responses to it, tbh, especially given the praise of the last two albums.

I think she’s genuinely tight with Antonoff and enjoys working with him (isn’t just looking to him as a hitmaker); and she also worked with Dessner on the bonus tracks, but they’re particularly not very good

Every artist seems to like Antonoff as a person/hang. Afaict the 1975 are the only to use him but downplay his creative input.

im able to instantly detect if jack antonoff worked on a song due to a visceral hatred of his production style pic.twitter.com/qebe0nugXS

— caleb gamman (@calebgamman) October 21, 2022

I just read an interview with this guy who has a weird visceral reaction to Antonoff's production style. I kinda feel it too. There's this ASMR-ness to most everything he does which I really do not like.

among several other habits, it's that he doesn't like voices that sound like voices, voices aren't enough for him. it's clear in the dessner tracks that he's willing to have the singer sound like themselves. jack's not down w/that.

Antonoff's production style is far too bland for me to pick it out from a lineup. Kudos to that astute listener, although I'm glad I'm not similarly afflicted.

to me it's just that woozy, underwater synth sound I hear everywhere

Jack piped her vocal into a mic'd lavender biscuit tin on lavender haze because the song is about lavender biscuits.

seems easy enough to pick out jack antonoff songs on an album where you already know he produced songs and any other producer would indeed be used to do something different from what he does

The most recent TapeOp has an interview with Suzy Shinn, who does a lot of stuff for Weezer, Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, largely stuff like that. They ask:

I read that you love Jack Antonoff and Butch Walker because it’s easy to hear their production thumbprint on a record. Which of their signatures are exciting to you?

Everyone has their style. With Jack, his melodies, chord changes, and even his synth sounds – I can just tell. The same with Butch, with the more guitar-driven, live feeling. But both of these guys produce emotionally-driven records. They have heart, each in their own specific way. That’s what I try, in my own way, to emulate.

And I thought, really? I mean, good for you, he just sounds kind of blandly big budget indie-adjacent to me, even the stuff I like (and I generally don't have a problem with his stuff). Though to be fair Antonoff's own TapeOp feature was great, the dude really likes what he does and puts a lot of thought into it. But to me he's like a big, soft body pillow. Maybe that's why so many people like working with him.

xp I think the last few tracks on Reputation are sort of an outlier in that regard – they've never sounded particularly Antonoff-y to me (in fact I mistakenly thought for a while that "...Nice Things" was once of the Martin/Shellback tracks). Maybe also "False God" and the Chicks duet on Lover?

"getaway car", "out of the woods", "i wish you would" and "sweeter than fiction" are all pretty distinctively antonoff, they all sound reminiscent of his solo work. he doesn't have that much in the way of trademarks though because he's generally more about helping realise someone else's vision than bringing his own to the table.

"i wish you would" is one of the very best pop taylor tracks though, wish she'd do more like that

being good at a supporting role is surely why people like working with him so much though, there's not many big pop producers who really do what he does in that way

"Getaway Car" and "Woods" are absolutely the prototypical Swift/Antonoff tracks in my mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBlmTMMl7zg

IDK, I love this album I think - even though objectively I can see that the production is kinda boring.

I think perhaps the root cause is that I really feel very close to TS's songwriting at this point, and so it's really that which I focus on more than the production or whether a song works as pop or whatever (for example, yeah some of these songs might work better if they were guitar driven but I think my increased enjoyment would only be incremental). In saying that, I should emphasise that I don't really care about whether and to what extent the songs are autobiographical or confessional (e.g. I feel like Evermore is simultaneously her least autobiographical album (give or take the debut I guess) and the album which is the most focused expression of Taylor's songwriting craft). But there's a different layer of character which is conveyed by the craft of her approach, and if I think about my relative appreciation for Taylor songs they can probably be plotted on a line with songs that feel "like Taylor" being better and songs that feel like she's writing to someone else's formula at the other end of the spectrum (the

One thing I noticed on my most recent listen to Midnights is how few archetypal Taylor bridges there are, and how few of those that are there are very exciting or memorable in and of themselves a la "August" or "Ivy" (in fact they tend to be more like archetypal bridges in pop songs, pauses for breath rather than escalations in the drama). That sounds like a criticism but it's not, there's a certain vibe to a lot of these songs where they feel very much stuck in a particular thought pattern, or alternatively tunnelling very directly by way of accumulation of detail with no detours.

An example of the "stuck" style being "Midnight Rain" where the recursive pitch-shifted chorus vocal kind of mocks the rest of the song, or rather the character of the singer and her inability to break out of the duality she's constructed; an example of the latter "tunnelling" style being "You're On Your Own, Kid" which has a fantastic sense of build and momentum even though it sort of deliberately doesn't try to take it anywhere, it just piles on more nuance and accreted meaning to the realisation captured by the refrain.

Taylor tends to use bridges to open up perspectives or document narrative milestones within her songs' stories, but these songs mostly avoid both perspective shifts and milestones - even songs like "You're On Your Own, Kid" or (another example of that style) "Mastermind" don't so much change their narrators' perspectives as expand or deepen them (the fact that the "you" in "Mastermind" is revealed to be fully aware of what is going on doesn't actually change anything - which is sort of the point!).

I think Taylor has deliberately adopted a kind of structural straightforwardness to her songwriting here (this is not to say the songs are simpler: they're as wordy as ever, and there's a notable emphasis on internal rhyme schemes) in part to give expression to the kind of vibe she wants these songs to convey, which is one aspect of what strikes me as distinct and interesting about this album, as opposed to it just being a return to previous stylistic approaches. But those angles to the album mostly sit outside of discussions about e.g Antonoff's synth and drum sounds.

I was noticing the lack of classic Taylor bridges as well, and wondering if this was what I was missing in the album. Often I'll be meh on a Taylor Swift song and then it gets to the bridge and I decide I like it after all.

There's this ASMR-ness to most everything he does which I really do not like

Omg you're right! This explains so much. I'm one of those people who hates ASMR, like whatever it's supposed to do to people, it does the opposite to me.

Beautifully put, as always. And this hits on my feelings for the album as well, i def respond to it on the songwriting level

and in light of folklore/evermore these feel very much somehow in that zone, without being the same or even referential