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 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

that's why they used to send promos I think

Taylor clearly doesn't care about her AOTY score if she's going make critics stay up late and get crabby

that's why they used to send promos I think

This would absolutely be a sit-in-the-label-office-and-listen-while-the-publicist-gives-you-the-stink-eye situation.

the weird thing about all the criticisms of the production is that her albums have had largely pretty mediocre production & arrangements since reputation (with i guess folklore/evermore as a bit of an exception) but this album's a notable improvement there - it's got the best-sounding synth swirls that antonoff's ever done for her. even "down bad" is like 'what if a reputation song was good'.

i do still want more from the arrangements/production on her albums but like "the tortured poets department" sounds so rich which is not something i would have said about many of her songs

I think it sounds a lot better than Midnights, which for me is the real Antonoff nadir. But also yeah it's just exhaustion. She's operating at '90s Prince levels of output while somehow maintaining '80s Prince levels of pop prominence and relevance.

I'm not saying this is a perfect album, but I think a certain amount of what's going on is just "WILL YOU FALL OFF THE GODDAM TIGHTROPE ALREADY." We have built-in expectations of rises and falls and comebacks, we don't know how to handle somebody just like setting up permanent residence in the top pop echelon for like 15 straight years.

The Damon Krukowski review is what I was looking for. I also prefer it to MIdnights but the homogeneity of the arrangements, despite the number of instruments Antonoff's credited playing, suggests midlevel synth glaze -- CHVRCHES with acerbic lyrics.

I was reflecting on this while looking back at everything Antonoff has done over the last decade, and I actually still really like his production! Totally forgot that he did CRJ's "Want You In My Room," Lorde's Melodrama, and his work with LDR beginning with NFR... Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd was one of my favorite albums of 2023. Rather, I think she needs to diversify her songwriting partners and stop using his "backdrops" to write to. She used to work with Ryan Tedder, Liz Rose, Dan Wilson, etc. Would honestly be fine with another Antonoff produced album that didn't rely so heavily on these arpeggiated synth tracks.

antonoff is just very inconsistent as a producer and seems to give people what they want, basically

"people" being the artist or audience?

the artist - it seems like he's easy to work with but doesn't really challenge anyone and is happy with mediocre results if the artist likes them

What really struck me from the Miss Americana doco is how it laid bare the extent to which Taylor leans into her collaborations, for better or worse - “I Forgot That You Existed” is not a song that she would have written by herself or with other collaborators, though obviously she is more than capable of writing songs without any collaborators at all, and to the extent that collaborator choice matters, it’s a deliberate choice.

But I think even before that question, there is an anterior question of “what kind of song do you want to make?”

My favourite TS songs from her “modern” era - “August”, “‘Tis The Damn Season”, “Ivy”, “Cowboy Like Me”) have all been songs in character (of somebody else), and I don’t think it’s coincidental that they feel “constructed”, gleaming edifices with dramatic transitions (musically certainly - each of these songs has at least one amazing bridge - and also narratively) and lots of internal musical variation: rather than tone down the background interference from the arrangements in order to focus on relaying her truth, Taylor ramps it up, because it’s part of the story she’s telling - the short guitar solo that arrives less than two minutes into “Cowboy Like Me” (with a chorus clustered closely on either side) is like one of the pivot-point ellipses in a play: the characters grow older and sadly wiser in the interim offstage, and the same truths once delivered with startled realisation take on a layer of knowing resignation when they reappear.

Needless to say, a song like “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” doesn’t even want to engage with that approach; it’s not that kind of song. If these new songs mostly feel less trapped inside Taylor’s own head than did a lot of the songs on Midnight, they’re still very much zoom in rather than zoom out songs, trying to render the specifics of a certain feeling or interaction as finely as the writer can.

Another thing that Taylor often does (and does more often) when writing in character - see “Tis The Damn’ Season”, “Cowboy Like Me”, “The 1” - is to enter the song almost obliquely or from an angle, late in the bar musically and late into a story narratively: “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit”; “if I wanted to know who you were hanging with, I would have gone ahead and asked you”; “and the tennis court was covered up with some tent-like thing”.

It helps to create this vibe that the song is a clipped snapshot from a much larger tale, but also tends to underscore the distance between the narrator and the songwriter, and the fact that the former is, if not necessarily unreliable, then still someone whose interior world is not entirely knowable from the outside.

Here, Taylor also tries to set herself up as an unreliable narrator, but the lyrics consistently get to the point almost immediately, which is perhaps why fans and critics both tend to take them all absolutely literally and as if Taylor doesn’t understand irony.

idk I assumed every song she writes is in character or at least "Taylor Swift"

Well yes but I think there’s a difference between how she tends to approach songs where the character is Taylor Swift in scare quotes and songs where the character is someone else.

I know you concentrated on the last few albums, but I'm not seeing how the In Character songs have any more or less filigrees than the others. I guess what I'm saying is, it becomes a parlor game to guess which songs are In Character, therefore are grander edifices, and which are not. I'm just not hearing the tell-tale signs that distinguish one from the other.

You can’t hear it in the song construction? It’s not about knowing the biographical details of her life.

I dunno it just seems patently obvious that a song like “So Long, London” and a song like “Ivy” are in very different modes.

(Obvious to me, that is)

The most clearly "in-character" Swift song I can think of – "No Body, No Crime" – also has a unique construction (for her)? It's a perfectly contained little story, with a "kicker" at the end...

To be clear, I'm not saying that some songs grander edifices because they're "in character". I'm saying that they tend to feel like grander edifices and they tend to clearly be written from the viewpoint of a narrator who is not "taylor swift": there is a correlation here which I infer derives from differences in the type of story that taylor wants to tell.

Earlier in her career there wasn't as obvious a distinction between these two modes, but it's grown over time as taylor has accumulated songwriting tics that she deploys to let the listener know she is writing as "taylor swift" - one telling example of this is how "All Too Well" is, in its originally released form, a "perfectly contained little story with a kicker at the end", and everything that was added back in for the long version tended to pull the song away from that.

Also "grander edifice" might mislead - obviously a song like "But Daddy I Love Him" feels grand and imposing.

My point is more how the songs feel more deliberated.

a differing opinion from the initial 'instant classic' review:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/taylor-swift-jack-antonoff-partnership-limit-1235007767/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLmtT49s/

love this dude rapping t swift lyrics like mf doom

Popcast goes in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLK-cfULZ10

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

I keep thinking about that line "But you told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave/and I had said that to Jack about you so I felt seen," and how clever, and also how very Taylor Swift, it is that she doesn't say "that's how I feel about you." It's not that they feel this way about each other, it's that they both talk the same way about each other, and those are very much not the same thing. And then to end with "so I felt seen," which is essentially a meme: how can people think that isn't a joke with a punchline?