Taylor Swift - Midnights

new album out october 21

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch1Ed_Su6Qw/

lol at her listing "Track One" "Track Two" etc. like it's the actual tracklist in the graphic

Ha ha, just came here to post this (ya beat me)

I'm here for it...

oh it's the album cover & she just doesn't want to reveal the track titles yet that's such a goofy move lol

She was at the (awful) VMAs tonight, and I figured it was just b/c they gave her an award – but I also wondered if something was up, cuz it kind of seemed beneath her to show up in person

that Taylor, never without an agenda

anyway glad she's been so prolific through this pandemic, jeez

if this is a return to pop taylor i hope it doesn't mean she's abandoning the quality control too

She's entering her Helvetica Era

I get a Blue meets How I'm Feeling Now vibe from the cover (assuming it is the cover) - so I'm imagining this will be somewhat more pop (and perhaps more straightforward) than the last two but also kinda dark-confessional? The title and the "stories of sleepless nights" description are quite equivocal in this regard.

damn, she'll have four albums worth of material that she hasn't toured on

but yeah, based on her not touring in years, I bet this will def be poppier since folklore/evermore aren't exactly filled with stadium bops

it's confirmed to be the cover yeah, it's on the pre-order page. though obviously it'll be updated with the real titles eventually

i think you're otm re: the expected vibe tim

but idk if that's something she'll be able to pull off well

y'all thought reputation was bad? wait until her album with AG Cook

if she announced the whole album was produced by cook my confidence would go significantly up!

lol pls

I'd be here for hyperpop Swift tbh

in that vein if she happened to be working with bj burton (who co-produced one track on evermore) that'd be about as exciting as possible

you guys it's an aesthetic fakeout and she's going full country again

Two months is a long wait. Maybe we'll get new albums from Sky Ferreira and MBV before then.

poor CRJ, gotta share a release date with the pop juggernaut

Are Taylor semioticians catching any clues from the promo photo? (e.g., the odds and ends on the desk)

This longer description makes it sound VERY dark / confessional:

Midnights, the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, will be out October 21. Meet me at midnight.

Pre-order now: https://t.co/jjqUNkphuG pic.twitter.com/Fh96zK8vro

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 29, 2022

The longer description is in one of the pics in the tweet

Like I said on twitter, I absolutely LOVE the concept she's developed for this album. What a rich place to take inspiration from. However, I expect I still won't like it very much because of the way she writes lyrics and melodies. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Oh, she actually announced the album at the end of her VMA speech! I totally missed that, lol

During her acceptance speech for video of the year at the #VMAs, Taylor Swift announces a new album out October 21. https://t.co/K3f4GrgiuJ pic.twitter.com/9q2jGVDoPl

— Variety (@Variety) August 29, 2022

poor CRJ, gotta share a release date with the pop juggernaut

― Murgatroid

Midnights, The Loneliest Time. Some kind of zeitgeist perhaps?

Exciting news

glad she's putting out new music - when she announced she was re-recording her old albums, I was a bit worried that it would occupy all her time and we wouldn't get any new material from her for awhile but clearly my worries were unfounded

I guess she just lives in recording studios now

i'm not really sure what's happening with the remakes because she already put out a few tracks from 1989, i would have thought she'd want to get them out quicker idk

Carly Rae Jepsen, Arctic Monkeys and this all on the same day, going to be a good day to be alive

Huh, didn't even know Arctic Monkeys were still around.

I'll check out Taylor and CRJ but will def skip AM.

I looked it up. Tegan and Sara and Dry Cleaning too

Huh, didn't even know Arctic Monkeys were still around

They're better than ever

I’m trying to imagine what this will sound like based off the destruction/album cover and the first band that comes to mind is Chromatics. Like I can’t picture this being a full blown pop return but I can’t imagine it being very guitar based?

Is it confirmed those track titles will be renamed? Because that would be cool if they were all just named “Track One,” Track Two” etc

Is it confirmed those track titles will be renamed? Because that would be cool if they were all just named “Track One,” Track Two” etc

Yeah my probably way-off-base prediction is that this could be a good opportunity to be explore a more moody noir version of the synth pop ballad vibes Taylor explored on stuff like “You Are In Love” and “Delicate” and the live version of “Love Story” she was performing on the 1989 tour.

I also thought “Renegade” was excellent and that that and “Long Story Short” suggested a pathway for merging the directions taken on the last two albums with a more propulsion pop sound - almost both tunes are very upbeat in presentation, which may not be the vibe she goes for here.

*albeit both tunes…

reading tea leaves here but getting “false god”: the
album from the cover

no complaints if we get an album of sophisti-taylor

i just hope she hasn't like, been listening to the weeknd too much or something lol

"all too well (10 minute version)" did have a bunch of tasteful sax in the background, if we get a vibe anything like that i'll be quite happy

any word on whether Dessner is involved again?

No word on collaborators so far.

I get late 90s indie vibes from the album cover. Not that I necessarily think this is going to be Taylor's Modest Mouse album or whatever.

Analyzing the cover art reminds me of the (traumatic) whiplash that was "Lover" cover reveal -> "ME!" released as lead single

Ha ha. Yeah, ouch, important warning. Anyway, I think what I was thinking was that it might fit in The Great Millennial Colour Drought

"... and when I'm up all night, I call Max and say, 'Let's make a banger about how boys are poopyheads!'"

"me!" came before the album cover, iirc the whiplash was just from the teasers for it?

I don’t predict anything like synthpop, but we’ll see…

a three hour Broadway style revue/spectacular

sounds like a children's play

let's call the whole thing off

"and I find it most on display in songs like "Anti-Hero" and "We Are Never Getting Back Together," in which she never changes the chord pattern the entire song - never shifts keys, never changes the order, etc. Just the same four chords for the entire song, verse - pre-chorus - chorus - bridge, yet stitches together often three or four, ahem, indelible melodies."

This is not only true for her Midnights material, but also for most contemporary pop/hip-hop/r&b music full stop, and not, notably, country or Olivia Rodrigo's pop-punk. In the first three idioms, it seems like producers make tracks, shop it around to artists (or in Antonoff's case, make it just for TS), the artists add melodies or come up with verses, and thus the chord patterns repeat for three or four minutes, deviating only for 3 or 4 second breaks/full stops. I wonder if the thinking is that changing up a song's structure into distinct verse/choruses/bridges etc as most previous pop music did (in the West, at least) breaks the mood?

When Joni ran out of stock chord progressions, she started inventing new ones

When Taylor ran out, she started liberally using the word “haters” in her lyrics

(I kid, I respect anyone who can make a hundred unique cakes from the same base dough)

British director Sam Wrench - a rock-video pro, having done concert films for Billie Eilish, Luke Bryan, Lizzo, and The Weeknd - transcribes the 20-city Eras tour. But he's no Leni Riefenstahl able to turn the event into an impressive aesthetic spectacle (even though he collapses favorite angles from three shows at the Los Angeles SoFi Arena).

From Armond White's review of The Eras Tour concert film.

Alas, Swift is not bringing the sweeping grandeur of literal Nazi propaganda to her audience.

You can tell some of these songs started out as loops that Antanoff or Dessner wrote and sent to her.

the impression i've gotten is this is how nearly all of her dessner collabs started but a reasonable amount of the antonoff collabs have come from him helping to flesh out her piano/guitar demos, he seems to be her preferred collaborator for when she's already started a song

Xpost what do you think "Bad Blood" is about

Saw it last night! As someone who knows the 1989 album and maybe 6 other Swift songs, the movie was pretty good for being nearly three hours long. Although my ass was ready to leave before it was done. She’s a very good performer and I was impressed by how she balances the “acting” required to sell the songs while still letting the Taylor “aw shucks” thing slip out.

The smiling wasn’t constant or inappropriate to the songs imho. There was certainly a LOT of smiling, and everyone seemed to be in character constantly which made sense, especially if they know it’s being filmed.

I would never watch it again and i’m not sold on the greatness of Taylor, but it was charming and i’m happy my kid likes her. I’m glad that Taylor is huge while pushing for diversity and seemingly being true to herself.

As someone who hasn’t seen a BIG show in…. well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that big. But I had no idea the stage-as-screen technology had come so far. I’m pretty excited about the Beynce concert movie, which is more my thing.

Yeah, there's something to be said for the spectacle of some of these big shows. I saw a Madonna tour once, maybe behind American Life, that was so cool and literally so many moving parts that the music was almost ancillary.

Swift has released demos in at least some fore before, right? I'm always fascinated when artists give a glimpse of the whole start to finish process, but there are probably contractual/legal restrictions to doing that at this level. Like, what does Max Martin play an act to get their attention? How far along is it? There's that story of all the permutations of Rihanna's "Umbrella," I'd love to hear its step-by-step evolution. The closest I can think is that clip of Timbaland playing Jay-Z a bunch of loops, and seeing him light up when he hears what becomes "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" for the first time. But of course, that essentially *is* a loop, and musically what he hears is not that different from the final track.

Iirc there are some good glimpses of Swift's process in the "Miss Americana" doc. But the story Dessner has told of sending her some some fragments and getting back a completed song, I'd love to hear just what he sent her and just what she sent back.

i think the thing about most songs not moving very much beneath her vocal (beyond some textural stuff) is why "betty" is so clearly the best song from folklore & evermore, it really stands out because it's so much more dynamic. i want a whole album like that!

I bought my daughter a couple of the Taylor Swift official piano books, but she says they're really not much help, since in terms of chords and whatnot they're pretty simple, and even the melodies are often pretty static. I know my guitar teacher is not a big fan of her songwriting for the same reason; when kids bring her songs in there's just not much for him to teach. And that Rick Beato dude, he wasn't talking about Swift specifically, but he's one of many to point out the near-complete lack of key changes (and often dynamics) on the pop charts for years at this point, which restricts melody. To my ears the fact that Swift is so successful (artistically) *despite* this is a selling point and a sign of her talent/vision and some kind of minor miracle, but it's probably also why her music has never really clicked for me, or why I get tired of a lot of her tropes (which seemed less prominent on the most recent records); the big held note at the end of the final chorus of many of her songs is the musical equivalent of the choreographed smile, or, before that, the "surprise face" she kept making at awards shows.

"The 1" was the one song that was new to me that made me pay close attention. I liked that one.

yes that is a very impressively arranged tune

Does she perform many “Evermore” songs in the film? Those are so so good.

Swift isn't Joni Mitchell, but she's also not writing drone music. Which is to say, her chord progressions don't strike me as any less complex than most other songwriters working in a pop idiom. What does it mean that the sheet music isn't much help or that there's not much to teach? If you want to learn how to play a Swift song, you learn the 3-5 chords you need and the order they go in, just as you would if you were playing something by Bob Dylan or Phoebe Bridgers or Olivia Rodrigo.

most of the songs on folklore and evermore don't strike me as static loops, they're all pretty dynamic, e.g. the song-bursts-open codas of "ivy" and "august", the shapeshifting emphasis in "cowboy like me"

whereas if most of the songs on midnights develop at all, i'm not aware of it

What does it mean that the sheet music isn't much help or that there's not much to teach?

Just because, as you said, they're no less complex than most pop music, so you don't really need a piano book or teacher at all, you just need to know those handful of chords and you're more or less all set. You don't really need either for, say, the Ramones, either. But books and lessons are for sure more helpful for, I dunno, the Beatles, or the Stones, or ABBA or whatever, which can be more complex or involved without going full Joni.

ivy OTM

also

If you want to learn how to play a Swift song, you learn the 3-5 chords you need and the order they go in, just as you would if you were playing something by Bob Dylan or Phoebe Bridgers or Olivia Rodrigo.

or bruce springsteen!!!

i've probably brought him up as a point of comparison before but that's the main guy i think of in terms of being able to spin new songs out of the same old chord progressions

i'm not surprised a taylor swift piano book doesn't have much chordal intrigue bc i can't think of a single song of hers that's anchored by a sick piano part, the ones that come to mind are "cardigan," "exile," and "champagne problems," all of which do not seem complex at all, though "exile" sounds fun to play, idk

Yeah I was thinking the same thing (and wondered if it’s disfavored for being a duet).

Now Springsteen, there's a piano book for you. The guitar is the easy part!

My fav quote from a one man show I saw once

"What's wrong with G? Just play G! If your chord has a number in it, you're an asshole!"

Ha. I think I saw somebody joke once that nothing good ever happened above the 7th fret. Might have just been talking about bass, though.

Just because, as you said, they're no less complex than most pop music, so you don't really need a piano book or teacher at all, you just need to know those handful of chords and you're more or less all set. You don't really need either for, say, the Ramones, either. But books and lessons are for sure more helpful for, I dunno, the Beatles, or the Stones, or ABBA or whatever, which can be more complex or involved without going full Joni.

Gotcha. I play piano but am mostly self-taught and rarely do much more than plunk out chords and melodies. I can play melodies by ear, so I usually just need to figure out or track daown chord progressions, and then I can play something that's sort of rudimentary but nonetheless satisfying to me. So I forget that people use sheet music for more than just fake-book chord symbols.

lol I was just listening to LP5 by Autechre, and my daughter came in and asked what year the track was from. I said 1998, why? And she said it reminded her of "Midnights." And ... I didn't know what to say.

Xp “going full Joni”

Once you learn the open tunings Joni uses, the songs aren’t too hard to play on guitar.

But there are like 30 tunings, right?

I've often wondered about people trying to play Stones songs in the '70s, not knowing they're often open G, sometimes with a capo, too. Once you know, the songs aren't that bad, but you need to know!

Joni puts the number at 51.

High enough to play a dumbass looking guitar synth.

I’ve already seen kids dressed as S/T, Red, and Midnights (…and trick-or-treating hasn’t even officially started yet).

I saw a Speak Now purple dress/hat and multiple Red costumes (block letter tees w/black hats). What other musicians have recently inspired Halloween costumes?

Too cold out for someone dressing like a lot of other pop stars, lol ...

Put on a cardigan

xxpost https://www.vogue.com/article/doja-cat-transformation-halloween

omg. Also, this is wild!

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/meet-the-argentine-taylor-swift-fans-who-have-been-camping-out-for-the-eras-tour-since-june/

you know it smell crazy in there, etc.

Was listening to the Wedding Present and it struck me how funny it would have been had Taylor Swift not collaborated with Aaron Dessner but with David Gedge. And then I kept thinking of other people she could collaborate with, from Johnny Marr to Dave Mustaine, and I found it really amusing. For about two minutes.

There should be a general Taylor Swift thread. But anyway, this is very important:

Gannett’s Taylor Swift Reporter, Revealed: Meet Bryan West, the First Full-Time Swiftie Journalist (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/tRxld7ySjs via @variety

— Nick Penzenstadler (@npenzenstadler) November 6, 2023

How many days until a Swiftie murders this guy?

https://apnews.com/article/taylor-swift-rio-fan-dies-water-b69ad355301a7ae6edebd3255c94a167

Taylor's instagram post says the fan died before the show, which is untrue (maybe she didn't have all the info when she wrote it)

and people are asking for the 2nd concert to be postponed, as today has also a huge heatwave affecting temperatures in Rio, higher than yesterday even

https://gshow.globo.com/tudo-mais/pop/noticia/fas-pedem-adiamento-do-segundo-dia-de-show-da-taylor-swift-no-rio-de-janeiro.ghtml

Swift is handling the tragedy right. And Christ the Redeemer is wearing a Swift shirt for charity.

"Cristo Redentor (Taylor's Version)"

She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
She's Cheer Captain, and I'm the Redeemer

"You're Losing Me" is a pretty good song; probably better than anything else on Midnights. But it still has that dull, flat sound and vocal affectations (which I don't care for) that are typical of the album...

chubble chubble chubble

'state of grace' is such an incredible opener, honestly. discovered the acoustic version this week. those bass notes, god damn.