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

Same with the oh wah ohs in My Boy...these are extra melodic phrases that function as hooks. They aren't the song's core melody

that's still swift's melody, but whatever. "florida!!!" does actually have a couple memorable musical moments - the five-beat pattern during the chorus is one. the first verse reminds me of "i knew you were trouble" (which has lots of little musical moments that i could sing for you right now)

Same with the oh wah ohs in My Boy...these are extra melodic phrases that function as hooks. They aren't the song's core melody

― 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, April 22, 2024 12:38 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah the oh-whoa-ohs are absolutely part of the song's core melody

musical moment on the antonoff tracks i really love: that glittering little synthetic piano note on the chorus of "i can do it with a broken heart"

dolorous baritone guitar stuff on "fresh out the slammer," also when the drumbeat breaks down

oh man and the slide guitar in the background of the "guilty as sin" chorus

an underriff is an upper level enforcer, and reports to the riff

That baritone riff is my favorite instrumental moment.

this conversation is forcing me to hew even closer to the details in this record and and i continue to find it very rich actually

"guilty as sin" and "but daddy i love him" are my favorite of the antonoff tracks (also the countriest ones on the first disc, maybe a coincidence)

oh "but daddy" is a dessner co-write, go figure

Yeah I have the first line of the Guilty as Sin chorus pinging around my brain right now, unbidden. A hook!

"guilty as sin" and "but daddy i love him" are my favorite of the antonoff tracks (also the countriest ones on the first disc, maybe a coincidence)

― the defenestration of prog (voodoo chili), Monday, April 22, 2024 12:56 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Same! Those are keepers. And most of the Dessner tracks work really well, too. I don't mean to be all negative. About half this album is good to great, imo.

I didn't enjoy the Olivia Rodrigo song, but the repeating synth line was played on a guitar at one point. Did the guitarist make their instrument sing? Only Rick Beato can say.

― 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, April 22, 2024 12:05 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for giving it a listen. I probably should have used one of the many Taylor/Antonoff songs I like instead of an OR song -- GUTS was just fresh for me because I listened to it yesterday. (And I think Dan Nigro's production is far more exciting and varied than Antonoff's these days.)

otm about Nigro, after my most recent time through Tortured Poets, Spotify elected to follow it with Chappell Roan's "Red Wine Supernova" and it was a comparative blast of energy and color, sonically.

Think "But Daddy I Love Him" is one of her best tracks, ever. Obsessed with the chorus: "Screaming 'but daddy I love him! I'm having his baby! No, I'm not, but you should see your faces!'" is funny and relatable and charming. In her Pitchfork review, Olivia Horn says it's a "spiritual descendent of 'Love Story'" but musically it's the closest thing to "All Too Well" in Taylor's catalogue. It's also the perfect marriage between Swift/Dessner/Antonoff, and you can hear all of their fingerprints on it (including many lovely underlicks from Dessner). The spoken word bridge is a bit awkward ("Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies") but otherwise am completely enamored with it.

I felt like I heard an echo of Hamilton in there:

"Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see"

"What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see"

it feels really formally intentional to me that that bridge starts in this place of totally stomach-knotting resentment, like the syllables in "sanctimoniously performing soliloquies i'll never seen" dribble out one by one like drops of blood from her bitten lip, and you can feel her language loosen up at the other end of it, the less she gives a shit ("if all you want is gray for me, then it's just white noise, it's just my choice")

I always hear "they'll say I'm nazified taco bell"

Screaming 'but daddy I love him! I'm having his baby! No, I'm not, but you should see your faces!'" is funny and relatable and charming

it is?

Joe and Sal are back at HQ, watching the live feed and telling her what to say!

lol

One of the irritating aspects of the widespread insistence on analysing these songs autobiographically is how... unimaginative/unthoughtful the takes tend to be?

Like, obviously the title track is about Healy, but why do we stop thinking once we work that out?

For me the song's lyrics are interesting to me rather because they're about Taylor grappling with the difference and distance between artistic relatability and human relatability. "The Tortured Poets Department" has a population of two idiots, whose shared idiocy is both real and a mirage.

"Who's gonna know you if you not me?"

The narrator concludes that the only person who could possibly tolerate - let alone valorise - her lover's counter-productive pose as as a tortured artist, their compulsive habit of acting like each chapter of their life is a secret further verse of "Chelsea Hotel #2", is the narrator herself, for the precise reason that she does the exact same thing.

The Taylor of this song knows all this is a mirage - that she and he are modern idiots - but that doesn't necessarily empower her to step outside of it.

Our relationship to reality is reflected not in what we say but in how we act. Does it matter a jot that I can acknowledge "this ain't the Chelsea Hotel" if I then go ahead and act and write as if it is anyway?

You Won’t Believe Which Celeb Gave Leonard Cohen Head At the Chelsea Hotel

it is?

have you ever fallen for someone everyone in your life disapproved of

in love w someone u shouldnt have fallen in love with

great post tim. i love the way that song deals with projections and reality and where the two meet, layer over each other until you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. our shared life is a movie projected on a blank wall in brooklyn. no one really got the sound going so it looks like we’re saying important things about art. really we are just talking about how underrated charlie puth is

everyone's gonna think this is stupid except for us. we know what's really passing between us. they're gonna publish our letters to each other one day. actually they won't because they're boring

100% OTM.

I saw a tweet that was like "It's so funny that Taylor wrote a song called "The Tortured Poets Department" in which she talks about Charlie Puth being an underrated artist".

And I was like: it is funny, and she's in on the joke.

maybe this is too early to do this, but wtv:

Red > Fearless > Folklore/Evermore > Speak Now > Lover (with the correct tracklist) > The Tortured Poets Department > 1989 > Midnights > Taylor Swift > Reputation

Reputation hate always saddens my heart :(

Love that post, Tim F. Thanks for that.

I like your post Tim, even if the song itself doesn’t (to me) warrant such a level of scrutiny, I’ve found my brain puzzling in awe over others of Swift’s lyrics in a similar way. “Anti-Hero” never once overstayed its welcome in my airspace because every line is beautiful

"Anti-Hero" benefited for me in being a genuine radio hit down here, her first since "Lover."

i.e. I learned to appreciate it over several months

That title track also feels pretty intentionally self-aware/meta in that she resurrects the "White Horse" structure of "I'm not a princess/This ain't a fairytale" in the chorus, and she deploys her (old) familiar trick of changing the main lyric up throughout the song: "Whose going to know/hold/troll/decode you?" She also references The 1975's "Chocolate," which, as the first of their songs I fell for, is one of the only lyrical easter eggs I happily picked out.

Kind of wondering what the lyrics will be like when she starts writing Travis Kelce songs. "You're not Mike Ditka, I'm not Gisele."

Locker Room Towel Fight

each stop is one of the blacksites where she tortures the poets pic.twitter.com/1EMxKrXhtJ

— Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) April 23, 2024

it's a cruel summer

Damon Krukowski has gone long on his critique of the production in his latest newsletter:

There have been so many disappointed reviews of the new Taylor Swift album, it’s starting to feel a bit like a backlash – “Taylor Swift Has Given Fans a Lot. Is It Finally Too Much?” ran the headline of a New York Times piece this week. On the other hand, as the Times noted in that same piece, Spotify declared The Tortured Poets Department its “most-streamed album in a single day.”

These two facts may not be opposed. Many writers have complained that the Swift album is simply too long (two hours), with too many tracks. But too many tracks is precisely what leads to too many streams. As Laura Snapes wrote in the Guardian, “The inessential 31-track sprawl of TTPD just feels as though it feeds a streaming machine where volume is everything.”

My own problem with the release is less the number of songs than the paucity of musicians, given the resources and ambition behind the project. Many of the tracks feature Taylor Swift on vocals, and a single producer on most everything else – either Jack Antonoff, or Aaron Dessner. For example, here are the performer credits for the opening track and lead single “Fortnight,” featuring a (barely audible) Post Malone:

Drums, Synthesizer, Percussion, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Programming: Jack Antonoff
Vocals: Taylor Swift
Vocals: Post Malone

Dessner’s tracks tend to be more piano-and-strings based, but some are equally producer-centric. Here are the performer credits for “So Long London”:

Drum Programming, Electric Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer: Aaron Dessner
Vocals: Taylor Swift

This wouldn’t be an issue for a straight-up singer songwriter record, and may not have been a problem for this pop album were the productions more varied. Antonoff’s style, in particular, is sonically so predictable that there’s a popular video stunt by an engineer who can identify his tracks based on less than a full bar of music.

I’m not sure what the tell is precisely for Caleb Gamman, but for me it’s a lack of space. Antonoff’s tracks lean toward a flat, featureless soundscape with one lone figure, singing words. There is no sonic space for instrumental solos, not even from one of his own many, many instrumental contributions (according to the credits, he also plays cello on this album, although so vaguely I cannot tell if he knows how to fret the thing or it’s just an open string).

Dessner’s productions on the album generally include more musicians, and more space in the mix – but not much, anyway not enough to feature the musicians’ individual contributions. No less a drummer than the excellent Glenn Kotche is on a number of Dessner’s tracks, but mixed so low you cannot feel his hands or the shape of the always varied sounds he makes. On some, a 20-odd string section is credited - but Dessner has kept them so far back in the mix, it sums to what might as well have been a DX7 pad.

Making folky, singer-songwriter albums, I’m no stranger to some of these strategies. Naomi and I recorded our first two albums essentially as a trio in the studio with a producer credited on “Electric guitar, mellotron, emulator, clarinet, tapes, bass and backing vocals.” And our self-produced albums ever since are not exactly known for their eclecticism. But maybe it takes one to know one? I can hear the missing space in these Antonoff and Dessner recordings – a space that exists by default around every instrument in every studio, no matter how DIY or pro, and that it takes deliberate action to eliminate from audio. These aren’t lazy productions in that regard – you need a lot of DAW skill to limit, compress and squeeze musical sounds into a featureless background. But it is lazy the way this trick has been used over and over on the album - the source, I think, of the tedium that many reviewers have identified but possibly misattributed to the songwriting. Those lyrics, after all, are what everyone is discussing in detail.

He then moves on to discuss another two-hour album, by Cindy Lee, as a counterpoint. Here's the link to the whole thing.

HAHA glad I'm not the only one who can't hear Jack's cello! I pretty much agree completely with his take. Interesting commentary on Glenn Kotche's contributions. I've listened to "Clara Bow" a bunch and would never have known it was Glenn drumming if the credits didn't say so.

the only session drummers i can reliably recognize are steve gadd and bernard purdie. people talk about not being able to detect glenn kotche on wilco records, ffs

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.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 21 April 2024 21:26 (two days ago) link

Beyonce feat JPEGMAFIA & Metallica "I'll Be Your Sister", you can just send the producer of the year Grammy to my PO box

xp they do? admittedly when I think of his drumming I think of albums made more than a decade ago, but it's much different than the role Justin Vernon played on Evermore.

there definitely are some songs about kelce on here too

I don’t exactly disagree with the general commentary on the production but I think it’s difficult to separate a lot of the complaints from listener (and in particular reviewer) exhaustion with the sheer amount of material that Taylor has released with production from Antonoff or Dessner.

Dessner has a comment on his IG which refers to something like 60 songs he has worked on with Taylor now having been released. That’s the equivalent of about 5 albums in less than 4 years. And even just limiting to stuff not associated with the re-recording of old albums, Taylor has released close to 90 songs in that period working with one or both of Dessner or Antonoff (that I could add up quickly).

I tend to agree that Taylor should probably strike out in a new direction or two next (with or without taking a bit of a break - we survived three years with no new product between 1989 and Reputation after all) - but I’d be surprised if that same recommendation wouldn’t apply to any artist who had out that much product in the same timeframe.

In a lot of the reviews meanwhile I sense an undercurrent of resentment: “this is the one album review I’ve been told I simply have to turn around in four hours, and I had to spend half of that just listening to the thing.”

Tortured Critics Department

It happens xpost