Taylor Swift - New Album: 'Lover' (Out 8/23/19)*

Ronan would also make my top 20! It’s a brutal song, though. If I listen to it on a rough day it completely breaks me.

 

Fantastic list! All Too Well is also my favorite. I might quibble with the order and replace a few picks, but otherwise can’t argue with your top 20. It’s tantamount to just how many great songs she has that you can make a top 60 and virtually ignore three whole albums. (Good job on White Horse, though )

 

I disagree. She came out of the gate so strong, and songs such as “Our Song,” “Teardrops On My Guitar,” and “Fifteen” still hold up for me.

 

This is just the kind of immature nonsense that Swift says when she's pissed off.

No way is she going to re-record her first six albums: A) It would be massively expensive to do it correctly; B) There's be no financial incentive to do so; C) Her voice has changed significantly since her first album, and it would be difficult to achieve.

Even if she did this, and even if she was successful, the re-records are not going to displace, or even successfully compete, with the originals on streaming services or in the racks.

Now, what she might do would be to re-record her biggest/best songs for use in licensing, so that she could offer her music for video placement and would control both the master and sync rights for the songs. This is the same thing Jeff Lynne and Squeeze did with their precisely re-recorded hits (regardless of what Jeff Lynne said was the reason). If the re-records are close enough, that's a good strategy.

But no way she re-records the full original albums as sound-alikes.

Now, she could go back and re-record one or more of them, rearranged/reimagined for the 30 year old woman she is now. But that's not what she is talking about.

 

I'm not sure you can disagree with the fact that the first couple of albums no longer connect with me personally. I didn't say they were bad, and I don't think they are. I just don't relate to them.

 

Her voice changing is a valid point, but she has the money to spend 365 days a year in the studio if she wants to, and, as you go on to note, there is in fact a massive financial incentive for her to do so with regard to licensing her songs to movies: her Big Machine recording of Love Story was used in this film, but she could make even more money by re-recording Love Story and licensing the new master to future movies. And I won’t be surprised at all if she does in fact re-record her earlier albums note for note, just to spite Scooter Braun. This is a woman who wrote a song titled “Better Than Revenge.”

 

Taylor Swift Removes "Spelling Is Fun" Part From "ME!"

I didn't hate the "spelling is fun" line, but either way I don't like this concept of changing the song after release. It's one of the inherent danger of streaming. (no different than if Kindle publishers wanted to go back and edit Huckleberry Finn for language)

 

What, you're not Fifteen anymore?

 

Guess I won’t be listening to I Saw Her Standing There or Surfer Girl any more, as I’m no longer a teenager.

 

Taylor Swift.
1:50

 

Trying to think of a top 10 now and this is what I’d pick:

State of Grace
All Too Well
Holy Ground
Out of the Woods
The Story of Us
Ours
Clean
Enchanted
Sweeter Than Fiction
Mine

 

Well, to be fair, The Beatles and Beach Boys were not teenagers when they recorded those songs.

 

?
Brian was 19 when he wrote 'Surfer Girl'. What age do you consider a person not to be a teenager?

 

I applaud whatever effort she makes to minimize the guy's profits from her work.

I've wondered why Robin Thicke didn't pull "Blurred Lines" from his album the moment he lost to the Marvin Gaye relatives. Cutting off the funding seems like the right thing to do in situations like that.

 

"I feel that artists should own their work". As much as I love her, have met her and have all her albums, that is a moronic infantile statement. She has more than enough funds to buy her masters, if that is what she really wants. IMO, thats not it...she is livid that someone sold them in the first place, evidently not understanding the concept of, you know, property rights/ownership etc etc. Very sad...all in my opinion.

 

Which is even more ridiculous than a teenager singing about being a teenager, I should think. Paul was was twenty-one when he was singing “she was just seventeen / you know what I mean.” I’ll accept anyone who finds Taylor’s early albums too juvenile if they promise never again to listen to Ringo sing “I’ve been told when a boy kiss a girl / take a trip around the world / hey hey bop shoo wop / bop bop shoo wop.”

 

This is a strange move but it's her song so she gets to make the call.

I think the Pitchfork rating for 1989 is shockingly low. Better than the one on Rate Your Music but still quite a miss.

But this is a publication that didn't even bother to review the album on release and then reviewed Ryan Adams' condescending cover versions instead.

 

A friend and I went to see Sebastian Bach some years back, and we discovered we felt decidedly silly singing along with "Youth Gone Wild" - we were in our 30's at the time.

 

The thing that bugs me about the whole spelling part it is that there is not a "me" in "Team". The letters that comprise the word "me" are also present in "team" but not in the correct order. It's a stretch.

 

Now that I think about it, I have to imagine the first run of CDs has long been printed and is probably not edited.

 

I guess the world will find out tomorrow.

 

Not a fan of her music but the fact she is 30 and still going is quite impressive, saw her performing on a morning TV show just today.

 

Since the 70s, Mick Jagger has substituted “you shoulda heard him just around midnight” for the original “hear him whip the women just around midnight”lyric of Brown Sugar. The Beach Boys completely re-recorded Help Me, Rhonda after its initial appearance on the Beach Boys Today.

Not sure that streaming poses a unique danger in this regard.

 

This isn’t the first time she’s tweaked a song lyric. Early pressings of her debut album feature the lyric "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy / That's fine / I'll tell mine you're gay" on “Picture To Burn.” Later pressings featured a re-recorded lyric with the last line changed to "you won't mind if I say.”

 

I hated that “spelling is fun” part so I’m glad it’s gone