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

I listened to 3/4s of the first disc and gave up. Somebody should give Antonoff six months off to R&D some new tricks. The production feels like a serving tray, Swift's lyrics feel unedited. I like that Paste said this was Rupi Kaur and not Sylvia Plath and I agree with that. It does feel like the ur-Taylor album, in a kind of "NYC as defined in My Dinner With Andre" fashion, that the conventions and methods are so clearly defined that any deviations, although desired, feel unwelcome when they arrive; we are both inmates and wardens, here. I got the sensation that I was listening to some people doing Sudoku puzzles rather than making music and I gave up on it

this album has been painted by its detractors as an indifferent haze and in particular with critics it feels like they're reacting to midnights one album too late, just imo!!!

Yeah that's how I break it down to an extent. All I can say is that the songs here — most of them anyway — have already sunk in for me more than most of Midnights did. Several of them do sound like bits and pieces of other Taylor Swift songs, sure, because she has her shticks and tics and gimmicks and shorthands. But overall I find it an enjoyable listen, and for every cringey line there's one that hits. (Still have not messed with the bonus album, I want to just listen to the main one for a bit.)

All that said, I would be as happy as anyone for this to be her last Antonoff record.

paste also accused her of appropriating poetry which has always been aligned with climate justice, it is a completely unserious review, come on

https://notebook.substack.com/p/is-that-a-bad-thing-to-say-in-a-song

this is pretty good, lands largely where i'm at with the album and my closer readings of it

one of these days tho i'll write the definitive piece on this album that doesn't mention her exes at all (i won't)

The production feels like a serving tray, Swift's lyrics feel unedited.

In addition to this, the melodies just aren’t there (for me, anyway). There’s not a single melody that grabs me or makes me want to listen to the song again. It’s very difficult for me to square with her years of output. How is this the same songwriter?

not even "but daddy i love him"? idgi

i think everyone is ready to be tired of her and that's ok

Yeah given my big problem with the album is how similar it is to previous things she's done, I think I'm just tired of her. she's had an enormous amount of output in the last five years

also really tickled by dave moore's observations on taylor swift as a rapper: https://theotherdave.substack.com/p/how-you-get-the-world-reflections-654

Taylor Swift seems to come up with lyrics like a rapper might, in disconnected bits of inspired wordplay or the perfect one-line evocation of an idea, which is then sometimes backfilled with other words to make it scan or, just as frequently, left stranded with other one-liners like a confetti of fortune cookie slips. This style is immediately noticeable on Poets, where those one-liners have never been sharper (even if they’re perhaps “sharp” in the way someone elbowing you in the ribs is sharp). Meanwhile the songs qua songs have never cohered less.

But I don’t mind this time. The album reminds me of the deluge of mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtapes; I was totally unsurprised that she immediately dropped an additional album’s worth of material two hours after midnight of the album’s release. (She’s figured out how to make money on her mixtapes: replace unauthorized samples with wallpaper.) Swift isn’t a preternatural genius of wordplay like Wayne is, but she has been pushing the limits of her rhyme schemes for a decade to incorporate hip-hop’s expansive use of assonance, accommodating endless slant rhymes. My friend Isabel points out a representative chain in “So High School”: bottles, Aristotle, full throttle, Grand Theft Auto, scout’s honor, got her.1 My favorite audacious move is on “Clara Bow,” where out of the literally thousands of rhyming possibilities with “oh” she decides instead to use “remarkable.”

Every Taylor Swift line is another bathroom tile, mirror shard, or empty wine bottle in a sprawling Magic Garden blown up to the absurd proportions of the city-within-a-soundstage of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York. (On-lookers feel trapped on the set, but this has never bothered me. You can leave!) On this album, some of her mirror’s edges stick out a bit more than usual—you wouldn’t want your kids to climb on them. There’s more “fuck,” sure, but also more blood. My favorite line so far is in “So Long, London” when she invents the tag line to a gruesome spaghetti western of a breakup: “Two graves. One gun.”

I've pitched Swift albums (I haven't reviewed her yet for a major publication), but the last couple days have reminded me: is writing about her ex's required? Like, must I spend three paragraphs plotting how autobiography and art intersect? Rereading on a whim reviews of Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Street-Legal, I noted a similar obsession with how many tunes were "about" or nodded to Sara and I just couldn't.

Maybe Swift should release an instrumental album -- Taylor Swift Composes Tone Poems of Color, say.

ha -- Dave and I are often on the same tip. I said to a friend last year when she released the last re-recording that she's become a mid '00s mix tape rapper except that she occupies a bigger cultural space than Wayne did pre-2008.

i don't think so!!! i wish it happened less often!!! that substack piece i posted upthread (not the dave moore one) suggests that not knowing or thinking about swift's public life actually makes the album more enjoyable, and i agree!!! and then that piece discusses her public life and who the songs are about lol

xp

I've realized I'm a gay writer so attuned to subtexts that limning a text (i.e. who's fucking or dating whom) holds no interest, lol

i have actually been compelled to write about enjoying her music as a queer person lately, largely bc she is finally horny again on this album and even though she is an extremely awkward heterosexual i always feel the fluid queerness of desire in her songs devoted to the subject (i am once again especially referring to "dress"). also i don't even know why i did this but i wrote a small thing on my tumblr yesterday about "fifteen" and my many years of confusion and trauma before coming out as a trans woman https://www.tumblr.com/unbornwhiskeyy/748211375167389696/i-listened-to-fifteen-today-and-as-usual-i-burst

I've pitched Swift albums (I haven't reviewed her yet for a major publication), but the last couple days have reminded me: is writing about her ex's required? Like, must I spend three paragraphs plotting how autobiography and art intersect?

Taylor's easter-egg ex-pop, Beyonce's bibliographic R&B, Genius dot com and the MCU have more or less conditioned an entire generation of music fans to hear lyrics as clues and cheer for the billionaire business plan

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) April 19, 2024

I just see so many reviews that are like, "here's all the references what do I win"

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) April 19, 2024

Last night I played some of the new album for my oldest (9yo), whose favorites are Speak Now and the s/t, and she said, "It's so much less fun. It's all kind of...sad."

Later, we played Lover front-to-back, and well, she has a point. Not just a more upbeat album, but MUCH broader range and palette of sounds. It was produced by Antonoff, too, but is more dynamic in production, composition, and style. Vocal samples ("Cruel Summer," "False God") and piano ("I Forgot that You Existed") and horns ("False God") and acoustic guitar ballads ("Lover," "Soon You'll Get Better") and handclapped girl-group throwbacks ("Paper Rings"). Even the ungodly "ME!" sounded fresh after a trip through the gauzy murk of TTPD.

I think it's why "But Daddy I Love Him" is an early consensus favorite here; it's the first hard shift since "Lavender Haze," brightening the palette with non-electronic instruments.

Harvey otm

an extremely awkward heterosexual

lol that is definitely her sexual orientation.

Great Tumblr post, ivy. I think that line about "I didn't know who I was supposed to be" is a key example of how/why she works as a writer. It's very specific song, right down to the real name of her best friend, but she almost instinctively locates the universal in her own experience. (Every bit as much as say Westerberg on "Sixteen Blue.")

Seems awfully improbable now but I'd love to hear a Taylor Swift album produced by George Daniel.

Paul Westerberg being an extremely awkward heterosexual

"It's so much less fun. It's all kind of...sad."

it sure is!!! that's what being a woman in your mid-to-late-30s is all about

Any time I try to write something extended and serious about Taylor I ask myself “is this bit about Taylor the songwriter or Taylor the public persona” and usually remove anything in the second category - basically the same thing I do with usage of passive tense in any work writing.

Those tweets seem unfair; it’s not like Taylor is the first songwriter with biographical lyrics (or like fans of Dylan or the Beatles never engaged in strained, exhaustive exegesis).

Anyway, I thought the truly unhinged fringe fan thing was to interpret every line of a Taylor song as referring to her release roadmap – like insisting “I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve” (in “Cowboy Like Me”) is about her Instagram Easter eggs, etc.

just coming here to say that ivy has been otm itt and i’m into the Album songs as they stand - haven’t dug into the rest of the anthology songs yet

My favourite tweet about this album so far was “this album is tolerate it on crystal meth” which is correct on several levels (paranoid intensity, horniness, still going way past the point it probably should have gone to bed) and I’m here for that vibe TBH.

I'd say coke tbh -- not much difference!

True but “Tolerate It” already implied a certain amount of coke consumption

ivy. your enthusiasm is wonderful and your posts about this record, I enjoy them v much (more than the actual record)

Yes seconded!

Seems awfully improbable now but I'd love to hear a Taylor Swift album produced by George Daniel.

i'm pretty sad that she & healy broke up before they had the chance to make music together, (beyond some scrapped attempts from the midnights sessions?) that should have produced excellent results

Don't want to contribute to a "backlash," cause artists need space to fail - but - production seems fair game. And the album sounds like demos to me till the very last track (Clara Bow), when a group of musicians finally get a crack at one tune...

— Damon K 🎤 (@dada_drummer) April 20, 2024

thread

it sure is!!! that's what being a woman in your mid-to-late-30s is all about

― ivy., Saturday, April 20, 2024 2:39 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

In retrospect Lover does seem to be a solid black demarcating line between both her 20s and 30s (literally) and the type of art she was motivated to make in those stages of her life. Covid lockdowns probably accelerated the transition. I wonder if we'll ever get another effervescent smash like "Cruel Summer" again? It must be thrilling as an artist to see your fans, the critical community (mostly), and the public broadly embrace you after taking such dramatic artistic shifts in just a few years' time.

xp I don't know how a person could hear some of these songs before Clara Bow and say they sound like demos.

Loved «  so high school » immediately.

I thought it was silly that ppl predicted a link w the movie Dead Poets Society, but apparently two of its stars appear in the video (so joke’s on me).

ok so i think i understand why i’ve always been underwhelmed by antonoff’s production for taylor in the past: there is a lot of swelling and pulsating, but not a lot of unique and memorable underlicks or melodic instrumental moments that you can sing. no riffs, licks, fills, or other moments of musical personality (this is also prob why damon k thinks these songs “feel like demos”). i also think that’s why some taylor fans like it—it puts the focus entirely on her voice and lyrics, sets the mood and doesn’t get in the way. but to a listener like me, who is not invested in her personal life or the grand narrative of her career, everything just washes over me and all that stands out are the show-offy lyrical moments, which clunk more than they connect. it puts an undue pressure on taylor to deliver an “anti-hero”-level melody, which she can obviously not do every time!

there were a few songs on this one that grabbed me with musical moments: the plaintive piano intro on “loml,” the chamber choir of “so long, london,” the mournful acoustic guitar figure from “clara bow.” guess what? those are all dessner’s!

still haven’t listened to evermore, maybe i should check that one

I hear so many production touches in these songs. I understand fatigue with this set of producers and things not catching ones ear, but "like demos" is a provably bad label for why that might be.

there are plenty of interesting textural and percussive touches in the production, but nearly all of the melody comes from her voice

Yeah that’s a great observation, vc. There’s a definite contrast with Jack A’s work for, say, LDR.

i understand the complaint bc antonoff's whole approach to producing a taylor swift song is primarily rhythmic, been the case since 1989, the drums are usually the lead and the synths are usually oscillating arpeggios. i also think... almost all of her arrangements are musical echoes and deconstructions of the melody she's providing? martin would occasionally interrupt her with some kind of subatomic drop i guess, and i was listening to "enchanted" the other day and missing when her music was allowed to have guitar solos. but dessner really broke open the formula

a song can have a guitar solo or 1 million words in it - it can't have both!

they made their choice. "Demos" implies choices left unmade.

can't engage with damon k's point bc i don't think i've ever agreed with him about music. i support his tirades against spotify

xpost Or the common people of Ancient Greece

i don’t agree with damon that they sound like demos, but his criticism of the lack of space left for instruments besides her voice is otm to me

vc otm about the lack of riffs in the music itself. "Fortnight" is a prime example, with the album beginning on a mere three ascending softly played notes before the pulsing synths and Taylor enter. There are little musical flourishes added throughout and Post Malone's vocals add some depth but truly the entire song hangs on her vocal melodies. "The Tortured Poet's Department" similarly begins simply, 4 bars of the beat, with a meager synth swell before Taylor comes in. Thinking back on Lover and Midnights it's very much the same, with only "You Need to Calm Down" and "Bejeweled" coming to mind as Antonoff tunes with an instrumental identity that stands shoulder to shoulder with Taylor.

And that's fine! She should be the feature, after all. But I think that's exactly what Damon means by: "The insularity of the Antonoff tracks is stifling, the sound of one man with DAW keyboard shortcuts. I mean, cello too? Let someone besides the vocalist make an instrument sing once in a while..."

I have decided that my fantasy next-Taylor-album is with someone like Jack White producing, bringing in some alt-Nashville cowriters like Maren Morris or Brandy Clark or Allison Russell. I want her to make a rock-ish Americana album, something like that.