Taylor Swift - 1989*

The 11 minute version of All Too Well and the 20 minute version of Helter Skelter.....I want them both.

 

'All Too Well' is also I-V-vi-IV all the way through, save for a brief change in the bridge, like 'Clean'. They share the same repeated quaver root-note bass line which sounds like 'With Or Without You'!

 

State of Grace sounds like U2 as well - at least the beginning.

 

The imagery is a little different but it's very much a song of the heroic type to use your characterization. It's a rebirth song with a hint of baptismal imagery and it's just about the only song on the album that I think does what she does best as a writer -- tell a story by introducing us to a character or narrator at the beginning who undergoes a change through the course of a story told in dramatic scenes and images. Frankly I'm a bit underwhelmed by the rest of the album.

 

Well, I'd like to hear her make an entire album of songs like "Clean," with or without the odd middle eights. That record isn't going to sell a million copies in week one, obviously. That's the tightrope that she walks.

 

I saw someone on another board state that, on her last few albums, the good songs keep getting better, and the weak songs keep getting worse. I'd tend to agree with that. "Shake It Off" and "All You Had To Do Was Stay" are career lows, in my opinion, but "Style," "Clean," "Wildest Dreams," and "New Romantics," and "You Are In Love" are career peaks. But this time around, two of the best five songs got shunted off to the Target bonus disc.

Anyone who misses her Speak Now sound should seek out "You Are In Love" if they haven't heard it already.

 

I think 'Shake It Off' has the most creative melodic hook on the album.

 

I don't hold the same opinion myself. I like "Shake It Off" and especially in the context of the album where the tempo and horn type arrangement and subject matter (I thought this wasn't going to be another relationship album) are like a breath of fresh air giving the proceedings a variation that to my ears is otherwise lacking. I find the album kinda monotonous. Nor has "Style" made much of an impression on me. Seems like she's literally dressed up the color scheme romantic trope of "Red" into something about the color of clothes and makeup but it feels warmed over to me and pedestrian. The song hassn't ring any bells for me. Haven't heard the non standard cuts but at the moment the only keeper tunes for me are Clean and Shake It Off.

 

I nearly just fell out of my chair. Target is advertising their deluxe CD of 1989 on TV. A CD advertised on TV in 2014?

 

funnily enough I link Shake it Off and Style in my head as the most Eat To The Beat songs on the record. They both make me think of that line from Dreaming "people stop and stare at me, we just walk on by". I think that's what "we never go out of style" means in context. And the record madly features the IV6 chord in a real Blondie way - just play Shake It Off slow on the piano.

 

I think i might agree with that Opinion ................ that seems to be the way it's going & i can only imagine the wealth of Unreleased stuff she has that is Probably amazing .

 

Here is where i saw 2nd week on the Elusive site ...Dec. 9th

http://www.elusivedisc.com/Taylor-S...ILP13548/&utm_source=email&utm_medium=special

someone must have typed it in wrong ? make more sense as mentioned to get some Xmas sales .............. time will tell .

 

As someone put it on another board, the ruefulness in her voice kills me when she says "I've been there too, a few times," at the end of the following exchange:

As she notes in this interview, this song, and "Wildest Dreams," too, I think, are a complete 180 from her previous sort of wounded bird songwriting like "Dear John," where she asks "don't you think I was too young to be messed with?"



Key quote, beginning around 4:30 into the clip: "I would never have said anything like that [i.e., "I've been there too, a few times"] on a previous album: my previous albums were all like 'I was right, you were wrong, you did this, it made me feel like this, a kind of sense of righteous - right and wrong in a relationship - and what happens when you grow up is that the rules of a relationship get blurred, it gets more complicated, and it's not always a case of one person is right and one person is wrong."

I think "Holy Ground" from the last album is the only other song she's written that even began to approach this same sort of perspective on love, although her very first single, "Tim McGraw," does get into a very heavy "isn't it pretty to think so" take on love, à la the famous ending of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

The way she breaks the words of the chorus down into one syllable per beat is a killer hook, too: "I got that red lip - ped class - ic thing that you like," etc.

And overall she's singing way better than she ever has before on this track: the lyrics no longer have to do all of the work - the little "oh!" she interjects into "Fade into view - oh! - been a while since I even heard from you" is such a singer-y thing that she's never really done before.

And it's even a harmonic breakthrough for her: instead of just the relative minor, there's a second minor chord in the song! But all kidding aside, the opening arrangement with the guitar and the synth bass really works for me.

 

Eh....doesn't do anything for me. I find the song unremarkable, though the chorus is hooky enough. As I said I find the central trope feels a little warmed over, but I'm not parsing the very granular nuances of her perspectives on love from song to song and album to album. That's not something that concerns me. I mean, it's not like she's expressing some entirely new and different idea under the sun -- if there's anything new in the record it's only new relative to the constant of her previous work, not of which was very novel either, or even using a clever reversal of the familiar the way say Dylan did with the phrase "love sick." With Taylor's records I usually find I'm more interested in how she says what she has to say than what she has to say -- the story telling more than the story. And in that regard this new record kinda largely doesn't ring my bells.

 

She has cat eyes. Still pretty hot, though.....

 

Fair enough. I agree that the idea itself is nothing new under the sun, but, as I believe you remarked above with regard to the charges that her chord changes aren't new, there is truly nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes tells us. But I am interested in the changes in her perspective from album to album, and, as I noted above, the "how" of the way she delivers the line "I've been there too a few times," and the entire verse section, really works for me. I don't know that her storytelling has ever been better than it has been on this track, actually; it's a song that doesn't need a music video, because her storytelling is so cinematic, from the literal cue "fade into view," to the other highly compressed, but vivid, imagery throughout the verses "midnight / no headlights," etc.

As this long thinkpiece in Slate notes

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...o_the_pop_star_s_world_conquering.single.html

the model for her songwriting on this new album is more screenplay than diary entry, and, while, on this album she hasn't gone down the expected traditional path of acoustic "quality songwriting" à la Joni Mitchell or Emmylou Harris that her older white male listeners (i.e., me) might have hoped for as she matured, she has matured, and her cinematic writing on this record is a "real achievement," as the Slate critic puts it. His piece is too long to quote in full here, but is worth reading.

 

From Businessweek.com, Four Lessons From Taylor Swift’s Latest Hit Record:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-31/four-lessons-from-taylor-swifts-latest-hit-record

In summary:

1. Avoid Spotify
2. Don’t forsake retail
3. Genre is not such a big deal
4. Selling a million albums is hard work

 

Part of her success with "2," I think, is how the standard CD is almost like a deluxe CD, with the different inserts of photographs in each package. If you want people to buy the physical product at retail, instead of buying it from iTunes, or simply stealing it online, making the package nice is probably a good idea. Giving Target three super-solid bonus tracks, arguably better than many of the songs on the album proper, didn't hurt retail sales either.

 

It's funny but I kind of feel the opposite that the new record is less cinematic but I'm sure I'll give the album a few more careful spins. At the moment for me it is the first album of hers I'm not itching to spin again and again on first listening but maybe it'll grow on me or maybe not.

 

My wife and young daughter have been playing this album nonstop for days, NONSTOP, as I imagine wives and daughters have been all across the world. It's a hit record no matter how you slice it.

Taylor Swift is a pop star I would love for my little girl to idolize

 

Fair enough.

 

I love pop music and many other genres, but I don't get the big popularity of TS... mediocre vocalist, even less when performing live. I have listened to the album. I prefer the pop direction she has taken. There is some songwriting ability, though I doubt her music will be memorable and lasting...Twenty years from now, will anyone be commenting on this release for it's musical impact? Likely, it will be more for being an album that sold over 1 million it's first week of release in 2014 and a reminder of how the music industry can sense a void and find "something" to fill it.

 

ooh a target cd. don't people around here love those?

 

Now this is interesting;

http://nypost.com/2014/11/01/taylor-swifts-label-eyes-over-200m-in-sales/

 

Sales aside I think as usual there are a handful of artists in pop music whose work people -- both fans and peers in the industry -- always feel like they need to hear and in a way react to. At the moment I'd say it's probably Taylor, Beyonce, maybe Rihanna, Jay Z, Kanye, maybe Drake, possible Kendrick Lamarr but it's hard to conclude that off one influential album, Jack White, maybe Arcade Fire, maybe the Black Keys, Miranda Lambert... don't follow hard rock enough to know who occupies that kind of leadership space in that scene maybe Corey Taylor's two bands.