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

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.

A Tom Petty album! She should co-write with Mike Campbell.

I nominate Frank Liddell.

She needs to quadruple down, remove more melodies and other people. Make her Ricky Music.

ha i was actually thinking about the petty listening thread and how there was always a little hook from campbell or tench to latch onto even in the weaker tracks.

maybe she should get a heartbreakers for her next era? or at least a 400 unit

Why can't she keep a man (to play riffs and underlicks)?

the smallest man who ever riffed

a tattooed golden riff player

Even my Swiftie friend said that he thinks a “loud rock album” would be great. It seems like such a no-brainer move… cycle back to that Red sound… triangulate the Swiftie dads (or whatever)…

She can rock pretty well! "All Too Well" is basically a heartland rock song, and it's her epic.

Roffle

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5_q6PGu4Vl/

Even my Swiftie friend said that he thinks a “loud rock album” would be great.

I keep saying Beyonce's third album in her trilogy needs to be hard rock or metal so there you go -- joint album, three hours long.

duetting on a cover of "Station to Station"

The return of the thin black tie white noise duke
Throwing tweets
In pathetic eyes

“Strangers When We Meet” is basically a Taylor song

but not in her current mode

(Tim F, I know what you're doing and it won't work!)

Oh yeah it wouldn’t fit on this album!

Actually the combination of this album dropping and finalising my ballot for the NIN poll makes me want TS to follow Halsey and get Reznor and Ross on production.

https://www.tmz.com/2024/04/21/taylor-swift-writer-name-removed-article-threats-violence-ttpd/

I really wanted to buy a subscription to "Taylor Swift Magazine" until I finally parsed the headline

I figured it reviewed boyfriends

The Paste review is pretty badly written for a review about how badly written the album is. I wouldn't put my name on it either!

Tim F that is an inspired thought tbh

No byline fear at Pitchfork (I like the review, fwiw… I think it’s measured).

Her melodies feel staid, like they are made to fit the music, rather than the other way around.

I thought we all agreed the music was built entirely around her dominant vocal melodies to a fault

we fucking wished the vocals played off a riff or underlick 5 minutes ago

Well the music is also "staid," that's part of the problem (IMO). But it's the lyrics that feel "dominant" to me, served up on lukewarm beds of production, without her typical attention to (knockout) melodies.

Perhaps she’s after a sort of text painting—an effort to reflect the all-consuming, uncontainable nature of her sordid affair in the shape of the music itself.

^like, this is another line that connects w/me – and again, it can be read as not necessarily (wholly) negative, but as an interesting thing for an artist to try.

I don’t know what I expected from that review, but … this is just a day I never thought would come. A 6.6!

Is this a New Jersey?

Midnights would probably be the New Jersey in this scenario?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5_q6PGu4Vl

GQ's never getting that Taylor cover now!

i like that the score is 6.6.6

Must be exhausting always rating the Antichrist

"Execute order 6.6!"

Hopefully the swifties wont be sending ancient curses to the reviewer this time

They sure are on Twitter.

Doesn't matter how many editorial staffs you lay off, you will still be held to0 account for Beyonce reviews from 2008.

This feels concisely OTM (and doesn’t even necessarily have to be a criticism if you don’t want it to be)…
― rendered nugatory (morrisp), Sunday, April 21, 2024 11:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I thought we all agreed the music was built entirely around her dominant vocal melodies to a fault

― 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, April 22, 2024 12:07 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

we fucking wished the vocals played off a riff or underlick 5 minutes ago

― 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, April 22, 2024 12:10 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The music can be devoid of riffs and "underlicks," and she can still have written the vocal melodies to the music. In particular, her vocal phrasings (the "clipped, staccato" thing Zoladz noted) are obviously influenced by and written around Antonoff's synth patterns.

And I think this gets at the big change that's occurred in her songwriting in the last few years: she used to write the songs on guitar first, even the ones that she'd work with producers to turn into electro-pop smashes (see: 1989 demos); now it seems almost certain that Antonoff and Dessner are bringing her backdrops -- unadorned ones, in the case of Antonoff -- and she's writing the melodies second. I don't think it's a coincidence that one of the most earwormy tracks on the album for me is "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys," one of the two Swift solo writes.