Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a tight end playing in the Super Bowl -- The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift, April 19

It's true. 18 years since her debut album now.

Well Post Malone is mostly a ghostly presence so I take that as a positive.

i'm so depressed i act like it's my birthday!!!
every day!!!

i'm so obsessed with him but he avoids me!!!
like the plague!!!

i take back what i said about the title track’s lyrics, reflexively cringed at the dylan thomas and patti smith name drops and that line about charlie puth, but im embracing my cringe, and by extension taylor swift’s, but it also does the “white horse” thing, where they fail to live up to these images they’ve romanticized, they’re just two idiots. i never found love in the city. i just sat in self-pity and cried in the car

― ivy., Thursday, 18 April 2024 03:00 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I think these lyrics actually work okay for this reason. The vibe reminds me of "Gold Rush" and "At dinner parties I call you out on your contrarian shit", TS implicitly poking fun at the song's narrator even as she is explicitly poking fun at the song's object.

All that chat about the Blue Nile reference a lot today but the truth is it actually SOUNDS a lot like Hats in certain ways out of the gate. (Also, so far, this is an ultimate 'iron fist/velvet glove' experience in terms of lyrics-vs-music.)

yeah, that's why i was like 'oh this is her best album' immediately

In terms of her generational appeal, she's a core Millennial. Which means she reaches easily to Zoomers (who grew up with her) and over time built a sizable Xer fanbase and even to a limited degree Boomers. (My parents have mostly ignored her but they really liked "You Need to Calm Down.") But for younger kids, she's their parents' music. So some will like her and some will think she's lame.

My very short reaction to a few listens is that I think this is good. I like the vibe a lot more than Midnights, but I need to listen more to figure out why. A few songs jumped out but I feel like more will.

who's gonna hooooooooooooooold you

But Daddy I Love Him might be the first time she’s really addressed the shitty behaviour of some of her fans? Honestly, it’s satisfying.

but you should see your faces!

Sophistipop!

"My friends all smell like weed or little babies" lol

so real

i'm glad everyone here will get to experience "guilty as sin?"

which i am thinking of as part of a triptych with "treacherous" and "dress"; barely-contained desire, in fact the act of attempting to contain it is a pretense, a performance that falls apart immediately. also just a great song about masturbation

i keep recalling things
we nev
er did
messy top lip kiss
how i long for our tryst

my bedsheets are ablaze
i screamed
his name
building up like waves
crashing over my grave

Amazing comparison from Molly Knight on Bluesky:

The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor Swift’s Boys for Pele and Matty Healy is her Trent Reznor and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is her “Caught a Lite Sneeze.”

if this was her boys for pele it'd be even better though

Gotta say I really like “loml”

lol glenn kotche is on this?

Holy shit @ "But Daddy I Love Him".

The very last lines of the album brought me up short.

it’s early but if there’s something i don’t completely love about the album it’s that the hardcore breakup songs feel so personal and full of pointed invective that i find it hard to find my own place in them. musically they’re two of the best songs on the record, “so long, london”’s quick low key panic attack pulse really makes it the ideal portrait of feeling abandoned in a relationship you’ve devoted years of your life to, and “smallest man”’s late-song power ballad explosion/collapse does make it feel like a less patient “all too well” but it’s still kinda fun to listen her totally murder whoever she’s talking about. it must feel so weird to be in this relationship that is theoretically a break from your fucked up crazy life and then it ends up being exactly like your fucked up crazy life, a performance under glass

i think “loml” is almost of a piece with these songs but it’s got just a little more dimension to it, probably because it’s living as much in the dream of the relationship as in the raw reality of its end. and she sort of does the thing in where in the chorus she’ll turn a phrase around as if it were an object in her hands so the light hits it from different angles, in this case it’s “the love of my life” converting into “the loss of my life”… makes u think…..

…and now there’s a 31-track version online too.

oh fuck there’s a deluxe version of this with fifteen additional tracks. taylor swift i need sleep in order to not experience mood disorders

Just got done listening to the first one w my daughter trying to decide if I should tell her or not.

the second album rumour was real???

and “smallest man”’s late-song power ballad explosion/collapse does make it feel like a less patient “all too well” but it’s still kinda fun to listen her totally murder whoever she’s talking about

It's almost certainly about Matty Healy, right?

how did she have time for this

uh there are so many sexy songs about matty healy on this album that i don’t think “smallest man” is about him but whatever i don’t really want to know

there's a few references on it that make me think it's very much about healy

yeah i’m rethinking my assumptions. regardless i will defend to the death taylor swift’s right to lust after a disaster of a man and bury his freshly dead body on the same album

We’ve all been there.

i was right that "the black dog" was too good to be a bonus track!

One distinguishing feature of this album compared to Midnights is that the songs tend to be filled with more internal variation - e.g. the way that "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" speeds up and slows down. Or the general sense during "I Can Fix Him" of "I don't know where this is going".

The songs on Midnights tended to feel kind of... dogged? Very trapped within a single thought? Which worked really well I felt on "You're On Your Own, Kid" especially where the vibe becomes self-conscious, but otherwise (esp. due to lack of bridges generally) could make the songs feel more claustrophobic than a lot of her other work.

These songs feel a lot roomier generally.

Anyway I approve of her just going ahead and releasing her own Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, all two hours of it.

second disc turns into folklore pt. 3 pretty quickly

so far i’m only obsessed with “so high school”

i’m not going to be able to stay awake through all these bonus tracks but general impression is she picked the right songs for the album

i'm so depressed i act like it's my birthday!!!
every day!!!

i'm so obsessed with him but he avoids me!!!
like the plague!!!

― ivy., Friday, 19 April 2024 04:03 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

massive lol at this bit

first disc is mostly synthpop with antonoff, second disc is mostly folk songs with dessner

“second disc” ennobles what really sounds like a bunch of cast-offs to me. sadly a completely dessner-led swift album would kinda bore me, turns out!!!

it doesn't live up to folklore yeah and the highlights so far are the ones where she isn't really working in that mode or reaching beyond it - "the black dog", "so high school", "thank you aimee"

"I'm not trying to exaggerate but I think I might die if it happened to me"

"the prophecy" is alright too but the second disc is not great. it's very much a separate thing though

i really hate to be the one to say this, but isn't hats like matty healy's favourite album, so any reference lyrically or musically to it is some sort of guarded tribute to his taste, even if he cops it bad

yeah that feels pretty deliberate to me

I thought Midnights was ok, just a major letdown after Folklore/Evermore/the ten minute All Too Well. But this is Be Here Now levels of over the top badness. Two hours of plodding rhythms and boring synths, every now and then livened up by a funny line/rhyme or a 'oh I wonder who that is about' reference. A few good songs, but they drown in the sameness.

the best songs on here are way better than anything on midnights

Probably true, but even the longest version of Midnights was 40 minutes shorter.