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

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?

For different reasons, both critics and fans tend to act as though Taylor is always utterly serious.

Beauty is a beast that roars
Down on all fours
Demanding "more"
Only when your girlish glow
Flickers just so
Do they let you know
It's hell on earth to be heavenly
Them's the breaks
They don't come gently

Florida!!! is a sequel to Wrecking Ball

Florida!!! has grown on me more than any song here — I recoiled from it the first time through, but all its hooks and one-liners have sunk in and I more or less love it now.

Though it's pretty funny that she buried Lana on her actual Lana feature on the last album, and now gives Florence a huge role in a Lana pastiche here.

She should do a remix with Luke Campbell.

Neil Tennant weighs in:

‘To have a successful pop career now you have to have a series of relationships which are amazing and then break up tragically.

‘I wonder what the other half of the relationship feels about this.

‘People don’t write songs like Karma Chameleon any more.’

Full interview here (more for a different thread than this one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um3o8CUgHRc

That's a shame. Tenant usually Gets It.

This allmusic review is like a parody of all the other disappointed reviews so far, especially the out-of-nowhere final line:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-tortured-poets-department-mw0004210541

I'm more confused by the penultimate sentence. An album that the critic finds to be a "tedious" "missed opportunity" also contains "much of the best pop music ever made"?

Sorry yeah that is the sentence I meant

It was the best of pop, it was the worst of pop.

she's always been more interested in songwriting than the craft of pop itself, tennant's correct to find her hits underwhelming as hits

Reviewer is demonstrating the "incoherence" that arises from "lack of a solid narrative".

!!!!!

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/taylor-swift-songs-ranked-rob-sheffield-201800/

she's always been more interested in songwriting than the craft of pop itself,

I'm not following you.

I think Tennant's conception of pop and Swift's conception of it come from different places. Him via disco, her via confessional singer-songwriter. It doesn't surprise me that she's not his speed.

But one of his all-time favorite sons is Joni Mitchell's "Coyote." And uh Sting's "Fragile."

*songs

Whenever I read these geezers' criticisms of Swift, it always seems rather clear they've spent little to no time listening to her. Of all the songs you could cite, "Karma Chameleon" has lyrics that look pretty similar to what Taylor was writing in her Fearless/Speak Now era:

Didn't hear your wicked words every day
And you used to be so sweet I heard you say
That my love was an addiction
When we cling our love is strong
When you go you're gone forever
You string along, you string along

(Not to mention she has a huge song called "Karma" and prominently features colors in her lyrics.)

I wouldn't call him a geezer. His comment's more of an observation -- classic PSB, really -- than cattiness.

The problem -- Tennant the former pop critic should know better -- is that American radio isn't what it was in 1983. Songs are streamable units.

Maybe his point was that we don’t know the identity of the Karma Chameleon?

Taylor is - or was - interested in writing capital P pop songs, but only as one chapter in what is very clearly her chief obsession which is to craft a body of work.

(Some of the most telling lyrics on the new album imagine her songs being played in the future; “Whose Afraid of Little Old Me” and “Clara Bow” dwell on the flipside fear of encroaching irrelevance.)

One of the interesting aspects of complaints about her not being enough of a pop star is that I feel like her most explicit attempts to chase that dream (“Me!”, “You Need To Calm Down”) also felt like the point of lowest ebb in her cultural importance. People ironically observing that her biggest radio hit this year is “Cruel Summer” overlook the fact that the conditions that made the song’s success possible were created by Folklore etc.

Also that most people who have an imperial pop phase watch it end with 10 years in the public eye (it’s now 18 for Swift)

xxp he's more than double her age. Obviously the ubiquity of a "Billie Jean" is harder to achieve in a post-radio landscape, and I agree he was making observational statements about the state of popular music, but he also criticized her songwriting: "She's got a great voice by the way, and the production is beautiful...But melodically it's almost restive...It's all sung on one or two notes going up and down...I like the fact that it brings all these people together, even multi-generational, but I think the one disappointing thing is the music, not the lyrics, the music."

It's all sung on one or two notes going up and down

Didn't posters make a similar comment last week?

I think part of the reason Taylor doesn't have a "Billie Jean" is that she was infantilized and looked down on -- by men, especially -- for so long. It wasn't until relatively recently (~Folklore) that my peers began to engage with her music seriously. I still regularly talk to men in their 40s who dismiss her music out of hand as unserious.

Whereas Please and Obviously were real feats of vocal gymnastics

Also that most people who have an imperial pop phase watch it end with 10 years in the public eye (it’s now 18 for Swift)

Wouldn’t you really start counting from 1989 (the album, not the year)? Obv she was very much in the public eye prior to that, but that’s when her pop era really kicked into gear.