Taylor Swift Album Poll

Had to go with Speak Now

i think '89 w/ fearless a close second

can I choose 4

I will regret any choice

1989 (deluxe edition with the 3 bonus tracks)

evermore
red
folklore
reputation
speak now
fearless/lover (tie)
1989
s/t

everyone voting for 1989... why

1989 (deluxe edition with the 3 bonus tracks)

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Thursday, February 11, 2021 11:22 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

"You Are in Love" <3

Evermore
Folklore
Speak Now
1989
Reputation
Red
Lover
Fearless
s/t

but the s/t is still 8/10 & I could exchange the order of everything after Folklore except the s/t

it's still red for me... her most exciting album, the one where it feels like anything might be possible

the one i would stump for as underrated is reputation ... the singles were so bad and it's where her public persona started to curdle a bit but the songwriting is really strong throughout, even if the production choices felt dated even at the time. i think it's the album where i most enjoy her engagement w/ her own celebrity. w/ distance i've come to feel like it's her best post-red and/or pure pop album.

1989... i never loved this album, particularly a few of the singles and the final three songs, but the rest of the album is pretty incredible, half a dozen knockouts on that record to me. it's a pretty tight album too which after this would become a rarity for her

i think the one that moves me the least is lover... there's def some really good songs on that, prob like 3-4 i'd put onto a "best of" mix, but i listened to it recently and it just left me pretty cold. emotionally i couldn't connect w/ it & tho there are a few of her best pop songs on there it just feels like she's spinning her wheels creatively for me

fearless sounded about as good as ever to me when i re-listened recently... there's a lightness of touch, a certain sparkle, w/ that album that i don't think exists anywhere else in her discography.

speak now is the one that i never really think about but whenever i listen to it i'm like, damn there's a lot of amazing songs on this record. i think it's just that red is very similar to it in scope but more adventurous so speak now gets overshadowed to some degree

honestly have not listened to evermore more than a few times, it was just too much taylor and the national for me by the end of last year. i'll go back eventually but i'm leaving it off my list

red
fearless
speak now
reputation
1989
folklore
s/t
lover

reputation def the best pop taylor album and surprisingly enough the production aged really well imo

Yeah it's still really fun to listen to.

Speak Now and Red are excellent albums, but Fearless is the album o' my heart and still makes me sob tbh.

I love 1989, too

it's between fearless and folklore but yeah, there's a magic sparkle to fearless that puts it on top

In general every time I try to do this I find I overrate whatever the more recent Swift albums are, which is weird because it's the opposite of what I do with every other artist.

Speak Now > Fearless > Folklore > Red > Evermore > 1989 > Reputation > Taylor Swift > Lover

I'd have to think about this a little more, but it feels like Lover is being underestimated here. It's definitely better than Reputation.

Reputation has higher highs and lower lows than Lover. I at least give it credit for going for something. Lover is just boring IMO.

Don't get me wrong, Lover wouldn't likely make my top 4, but it's a much better record than the singles would indicate.

Lover is my favorite; I love the juxtaposition of the fun pop sound with the self-awareness and anxiety in the lyrics. And it has "The Archer" which is probably my favorite Taylor Swift song.

When "Cruel Summer" is on, it sounds like the best song ever written, particularly the middle eight.

I would also argue that we wouldn't get Folklore/Evermore without some of the tentative steps on Lover.

Mine:

Speak Now
Red
folklore
1989
evermore
Fearless
Lover
Taylor Swift
Reputation

It's obv now that Lover represented the End of a Method or approach begun with Red.

When "Cruel Summer" is on, it sounds like the best song ever written, particularly the middle eight.

― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:50 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ot fucking m

I think Lover is really poorly served by having "I Forgot That You Existed" as the first track; if you skip that one and start with "Cruel Summer," it instantly becomes a much better album imo. I always do that, to the point where I think of Cruel Summer as the first track. (I guess you could say that I forgot that I Forgot That You Existed existed.)

Red
folklore
Fearless
evermore
Lover (with the edited tracklist)
Speak Now
1989
Reputation
Taylor Swift

I regret this already.

Mine was Speak Now for years, but I think Red has edged it. Red has a couple of songs I actively dislike, which is not true of Speak Now, but I like the range and musical variety. So at the moment, I think I'd go:

Red
Speak Now
Fearless
folklore
1989
Lover
s/t
evermore
Reputation

Red
Fearless
folklore
Speak Now
Lover
1989
S/T
reputation

I can't place evermore yet. It's exhausting and several songs actively chafe but it contains moments of full artistic flower even beyond folklore ("happiness", "cowboy like me") and closes with her best run ever ("ivy" through "evermore")

It's obv now that Lover represented the End of a Method or approach begun with Red.

― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:52 PM (two hours ago)

i think it also makes it clear that the aesthetic pivot that followed was necessary ... there's a nice frothy sorta pop album somewhere in lover (from "cruel summer" to "false god", with "london boy" being lit on fire) but the joel little songs on there are for me the very bottom rung of her entire discography. she went in the studio w/ louis bell & adam feeney -- the biggest pop producers of that moment -- and came out w/ one of her worst ever singles + 2 songs ("afterglow" and "it's nice to have a friend") that are... nice albums tracks, at best. even the dixie chicks collab was kind of fumbled. creatively she was wheezing a bit to me by this point... the idea of her going pop had lost its novelty, her interactions w/ contemporary pop of the time were awkward (the katy perry reveal video, christ), and just generally that kind of production is not the best delivery vehicle for her songwriting to begin with

"afterglow" is one of the best t. swift songs ever

so good in fact i thought it was an antonoff joint until this very moment, can't believe it's part of the "i forgot you existed"/"it's nice to have a friend" camp

it's her big amy grant ballad, a description that maybe accounts for why i love it and others are unmoved

I think "Afterglow" is an important part of the overarching narrative of Lover (the narrative being, essentially, "I always thought my relationship issues were someone else's fault, and didn't realize how many hurtful and controlling behaviors I had until I ended up in a good relationship that I care about and want to preserve, and now I'm slowly learning how to admit when I was wrong.") It matches up nicely with "The Archer" and "Cornelia Street."

i'm interested to see if Red wins this just barely, or if it's a blowout

Red was my favorite, until Evermore showed up.

I'm interested to see if anyone will vote for Reputation or Taylor Swift.

1989
fearless

speak now
red
reputation

lover
folklore/evermore

folklore is my favourite, but red edited to my liking would beat it

ranking taylor albums is hard because a lot of her albums have at least a few real duds or sequencing issues that make them not very listenable front-to-back, like i love red and 1989 but only with some significant tweaks to their tracklists, and lover is a very weak album as-is but it manages to be worthwhile if you cut out nearly half the tracks.

as-is:
folklore
evermore
fearless
1989
red
s/t
lover
speak now
reputation

edited tracklists:
red
folklore
1989
evermore
lover
fearless
s/t
speak now
reputation

this is impossible

Instead of a poll where you only get to choose one, can we do a proper Artist albums and tracks poll, or are those frowned upon while the artist is still in their prime? If so, I look forward to the 2045 ILM Taylor Swift poll.

I feel like the amount of material she's released since the start of her career has fairly warranted an albums/tracks poll! I'm here for it

Haven't heard any of these but this feels like a good opportunity to try. Starting with Speak Now as that's the one I found at the library (was also probably the one I had the most interest in hearing at the time).

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

That was fast. Speak Now by far the best of the ones I listened to, very fond of "Never Grow Up" and "Mine."

folklore

Instead of a poll where you only get to choose one, can we do a proper Artist albums and tracks poll, or are those frowned upon while the artist is still in their prime?

not at all. for instance i have done a Spoon poll a few years back and they are going to be releasing a new album this year. it will be the second since that poll closed.

I voted Fearless, but haven't really listened to her pop albums after 1989 due to her increasingly abhorrent lead singles. Even though I've grown to love Shake It Off and Bad Blood, I don't think I'll ever feel the same way about LWYMMD or Me! I did listen to folklore a few times - liked it at first but every subsequent listening got more bored. Never listened to the follow-up. I'd rectify my negligence if there was a ballot poll on the horizon.

As it stands, I'd probably rank them:

Fearless
1989
Speak Now
Red
Taylor Swift

Speak Now and Red are definitely fighting it out for 3rd because Red definitely has higher highs than Speak Now, but it's incredibly front loaded and I hate the dudes in the duets.

Personally I wouldn't consider him talented... just famous.

I think if Damon Albarn was in a Who's The More Talented Songwriter? poll with anyone I wouldn't vote for him. Even Eric Clapton.

I think about 99% of his songwriting is embarrassingly awful tbh, but I haven't heard any of imago's deep cuts yet - only really the hits!

honestly I think Coxon was extremely responsible for Blur being any good, but Albarn's written some decent songs, even if I'm much more a Suede guy these days

I enjoyed The Good, The Bad and The Queen mostly because it was really fucking good to hear Paul Simonon playing bass again.

This fucking idiot is still digging:

If you can find a way to say "professional songwriters helped Taylor Swift write a lot of those songs" on the Internet without getting the response I got today, I'd love to see it.

— Tyler Mahan Coe (@TylerMahanCoe) January 25, 2022

Apparently Taylor Swift is not a "professional songwriter."

who is that guy? I never even knew him by his name

He's David Allen Coe's son, who has a very successful and very well made podcast about country music called "Cocaine and Rhinestones."

So dumb. She had a publishing deal at 13, yes she had some grown-ups work with her.

lol i thought I never even knew him by his name hinted that i actually did know who he is :)

Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Famous Racists

More solo Writer credits on here than co-writes, fwiw

I think the Coe argument is that if she doesn't need other writers, then ... why does she need other writers? But that's still pretty dumb, because of course countless singers and songwriters have had collaborators over the years. Big deal? If anything, her solo writing credits and such prove Swift is *not* just some pop star puppet, so ... yeah, I don't know what Coe is getting at. He might be right that some fans overlook proven hitmaker Max Martin's conspicuous presence, but Coe's at the same time stubbornly overlooking the fact that (whether he or I or anyone likes it or not) she's tellingly the only constant in this increasingly expansive and singular body of popular work, so, like, suck it, Coe.

just reads like he's being deliberately provocative and then digging a hole trying to find a position he can actually defend. he does not have any sort of meaningful point and is likely just trying to promote his other podcast ("your favourite band sucks") which has an episode on swift coming soon.

"Damon's right and I don't give a fuck." watered down to "Damon was obvs incorrect to flatout state she's not a songwriter. She's just not the songwriter her fans pretend she is." to claiming his point was only that "we should acknowledge the importance of Taylor Swift's co-writers"

"your favourite band sucks" is soooooo stupid.

i can only assume it's totally insufferable

I tried listening to one episode of C&R and he was yammering on about the Miss America pageant, and his voice made me want to saw my own ears off. (Yes, I am aware that my own voice is horrifying to listen to. That's why I let guests do 90% of the talking on my podcast.) I never even got to when he reached the actual subject of the episode and can't remember what the subject was now. And the title of his other show alone makes me perfectly comfortable in saying fuck that guy and everything he's involved with.

oh wow I heard of that podcast but I didn't know it was DAC's kid....does he ever acknowledge or talk about the Rated XXX cuz that is some of the most vile racist shit

I think he's defended it as satire. Here's something I found from 2016:

https://m.facebook.com/tylermahancoe/posts/487555224762620

Good TMC profile here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/04/15/tyler-coe-country-podcast-season-two/

ugh that Facebook response is so fucking annoying

I feel like he suppresses some of that attitude on Cocaine & Rhinestones, he's better in storytelling mode.

He never fails to mention what a liar he thinks Tammy Wynette is though.

unperson OTM, absolutely unlistenable show

I really, truly enjoyed the first season of C&R, but when the long-awaited second season finally dropped, I couldn't get into it. Just haven't been in a country mood lately and I think you kinda have to at least be open to it before you're hammered with the immense amount of information that he drops into an episode. Say what you want about the dude and his voice or attitude, but he does a ton of research for the show.

having seen a bunch of shit head racist at a party laughing and dancing to Rated XXX with a loaded hand gun on the coffee table, i can safely say that no one who listens to it sees it as satire

Coe is right that Neil Strauss absolutely found a mislabeled Johnny Rebel song on Napster and then got it published in the New York Times

Hey there's room to find both Coe and Strauss obnoxious as fuck.

And, yep, can absolutely confirm growing up in the middle of Illinois cornfields that absolutely none of the lunkheads playing DAC in their pickups were appreciating the biting satire of those X-rated albums.

Is it also true that none of the material is "homophobic," as Strauss and the Times allege?

lol I would not say that the lyrics to "Fuck Anita Bryant" are not homophobic

I remember liking the C&R ep on the Dixie Chicks and the broader history of females being censured in country and am surprised to see his regressive hot takes on Swift's songwriting.

I suppose the triangulated position is that Taylor's own insistence on being respected as a songwriter who writes her own material (a decent chunk of it by herself), and in particular her own lyrics, inadvertently feeds into a kind of rockist-about-pop mindset which has been very prominent in general for the past five years or so.

My suspicion is that Coe (in a very ham-fisted manner) was suggesting that Taylor is setting up a false dichotomy as between herself and other pop artists whose reliance on professional songwriters is more acknowledged - this might be particularly salient in the context of modern country, where reliance on professional songwriters is much less likely (as far as I can tell) to count as a strike against an artist.

(I don't think she was actually doing that, of course - or certainly not intentionally)

It's interesting to compare the fan/critic treatment of Taylor in this regard with someone like Miranda Lambert, who writes amazing material, sometimes by herself and sometimes in collaboration, and also performs material written by others, and the dividing line between those various categories is basically non-existent from a reception POV (like, it would seem odd to me to distinguish between "We Should Be Friends", which is a solo Lambert credit, and "Pink Sunglasses", on which she doesn't have a writing credit). The idea that Taylor is personally responsible for at least the words of her songs seems like a big part of the swift-enjoyment-machine, whereas with Miranda it seems less directly relevant.

It seems relevant to this discussion that Swift was signed to a songwriting contract at 13, years before she was signed as a performer. She was literally a professional songwriter first.

I *think* something Coe was ultimately getting at (from the complete wrong angle) is that Swift didn't need someone like Max Martin to come up with songs, she needed him to become a pop superstar.

And the main thing I added that I don't think Damon was saying at all is that it's really annoying to me how fans of an artist need to make a bigger deal out of an artist being in the room with Martin than why Martin is there.

— Tyler Mahan Coe (@TylerMahanCoe) January 25, 2022

But he (and Albarn) picked the wrong fight, because *clearly* Swift can write, and *clearly* she can sell millions of copies of songs she wrote. But if his argument is "yeah, but she needed Max Martin to get on pop radio and sell even more," ... join the club, you know? Who gives a shit? Even Coe seems to understand he fucked up and commenced moving the goal posts. Like, just about every singer/songwriter from Dylan and the Beatles on up has producers and musicians to make what they wrote sound better.

Btw, I found a nice clip of her in the studio with Martin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwJ_hHT5vw8

She had two number 1 albums before Max Martin and one of them sold better than the albums that had Max Martin, though. I don't know that there's any amount of divining his point that doesn't resolve to "he's as much of a dumbass as Albarn."

I suppose the triangulated position is that Taylor's own insistence on being respected as a songwriter who writes her own material (a decent chunk of it by herself), and in particular her own lyrics, inadvertently feeds into a kind of rockist-about-pop mindset which has been very prominent in general for the past five years or so.

It's interesting to compare the fan/critic treatment of Taylor in this regard with someone like Miranda Lambert, who writes amazing material, sometimes by herself and sometimes in collaboration, and also performs material written by others, and the dividing line between those various categories is basically non-existent from a reception POV (like, it would seem odd to me to distinguish between "We Should Be Friends", which is a solo Lambert credit, and "Pink Sunglasses", on which she doesn't have a writing credit). The idea that Taylor is personally responsible for at least the words of her songs seems like a big part of the swift-enjoyment-machine, whereas with Miranda it seems less directly relevant.

But there's no counterexample to "Pink Sunglasses" in Swift's catalog (as she writes or co-writes everything)... i.e., she literally is partially responsible for at least the words of her songs, so is it "rockist" for that to be a factor in fan reception of her work?

Not that this should matter, but ... David Allan Coe only had two top 10 country hits. He didn't write or co-write either of them. Taylor Swift has had 25 country top 10s, and wrote or co-wrote all of them.

xpost No I don't think it is, though of course it depends on how the issue is framed. Is Taylor a better artist than Miranda (or whoever) because she at least co-writes everything she sings? No. Should the fact that Taylor writes or at least co-writes all her own material (and is probably 95% responsible for the lyrics) be a precondition to her being taken seriously as an artist? No. I don't think Taylor argues either of those things, though whether her fans do or don't will of course be a case by case question, and at least some of the fan responses to the Albarn quote kinda imply those viewpoints.

Of course I've separately made the case before for the importance of Taylor's lyrics (and her lyrical approach and her growth as a lyricist) to her music both assessed on a song by song basis and as a body of work.

I hear you (though I also wonder how Albarn would have replied if the interviewer had said: "She may not be to your taste, but Miranda Lambert is an excellent songwriter.")

"I don't know her."

xxxpost

in fairness, David Allen Coe was a writer for other artists, including "Would You Lay With Me a Field of Stone" for Tanya Tucker which is a gorgeous song and Take This Job and Shove It for Johnny Paycheck

I think Johnny Cash did a few of his songs

I was talking to my daughter this morning, wondering how Taylor Swift is going to handle her next tour. Her last tour was back in 2018, a big stadium outing. But since then she's released three entirely new albums, and two newly re-recorded versions of her old stuff, which means some 50 or so songs she's never performed, plus new versions of old songs like that 10 minute song, plus I assume at least another new album/re-recorded album by the time she hits stadiums again, assuming summer 2023 at the earliest, at least in America. Multi-night stands with different setlists?

thought this bump would be about the crawdads song coming out tomorrow

mandy moore had the problem of touring for two records at once and her solution was to play songs from both records, i'm sure taylor will figure it out

Medleys...lots and lots of Medleys

Don't know if Mandy Moore is a good comparison.

I guess the Weeknd is essentially touring behind two hit albums for the first time this summer, his first tour since 2016. Let's see how he handles it, though I have no idea if has the deep cut stans that Swift does.

I was thinking about this recently, too. I've never seen her live and certainly wouldn't mind more of a theater tour.

But she can't, can she? I mean, Olivia Rodrigo just did a (large) theatre tour, and Lil Nas X is doing that, too, iirc, but of course even though iirc neither has/had toured before they could have just started at arenas if they wanted to. But someone as popular as Swift, if she played small(er) places I think there would be a huge backlash, unless she did, like, 20 nights in every city.

I tried listening to the new song, but I think I wasn’t in the right headspace for that vibe.

Getting a vaguely mid-90s Tori Amos vibe (specifically stuff like "Bells For Her" or "Sister Named Desire") off "Carolina", though I would be very surprised if that was what Taylor shooting for. Something about the way her voice slides between notes and the lyrics forsake narrative coherence for quasi-coherent allusion - it feels like it wanders down the pathway that "Seven" gestured towards.

It makes me think most of "Safe and Sound" tbh, but that may just be the Southern Goth Lite vibe.