Taylor Swift's New Album 'Folklore'

She had this to say.

Based on that preview pic, she's gonna water down Bjork/Kate Bush the way she watered down country.

she must be hyperactive and just HAD to work. good for her.

i've been drinking.

Will Kanye be listening? I mean, assuming his asylum allows that sort of thing?

If it’s a secret, why are you talking about it.

Hater.

I'll listen to whatever part of it's available on YouTube. Ever since she tweeted that we will vote Donald Trump out in November, I've kind of loved Taylor Swift.

Looks like she's appropriating Amish culture. She's from that area of Pennsylvania originally. Watch out for the Amish mafia girl!

We heard.

From Country to Pop to Urban to Folklore. This chick is getting into every genre.

The album is beautiful.

The music video for the lead single, "Cardigan". The visuals are stunning.

It’s good stuff. The Cardigan video is excellent, and the songs on the album are really good. The girl is one talented songwriter.

Listening now, she released all songs on youtube, some seriously good stuff!

I love 1989. I will be downloading this. Not my sort of music but will give it a go. Loving Easy by Troye Sivan- give it a go. I would like him to be a success

The duet with Bon Iver is OUTSTANDING .

What's the song with Bonnie Bear?

R16 see link

What an awful album cover.

It was shot during social distancing. The photographer was in Atlanta, she was in Nashville.

Plus that’s not the album cover. She made sure to make like 16 different album covers so crazy fans would drop all their cash on all of them.

Damn, they covered it on CNN, this must be a huge deal

She’s pregnant.

She’s pregnant with hits !!!

It is a beautiful album - it seems very timely

Notify me when somebody drops Taylor Swift ... from the Empire State Building.

I may have to download my first Taylor Swift album ever (I don't do Spotify).

[quote]I don't do Spotify

Thanks for letting us know

I listened to it and nothing was memorable. I'm surprised young people listen to this boring, flat music.

Guessing her last album didn't do so great, so she released this right away? Wasn't the last album out less than a year ago?

One of her songs came on the Muzak where I work the other night. It went something like this: We are never ever ever getting back together gether getherrrrr. Genius, I tell you.

She was supposed to go on tour to promote that album, R29 but the pandemic shat on that so she recorded a whole new batch of songs.

Her last album was the better of her pop albums. Her artistic growth is evident.

My fave:

Karlie Kloss, You Trying to Tell Us Something?

Karlie Kloss was caught kissing Taylor on the lips in one picture.

As T-Swift goes, its fine.

At least shes moved on from bubblegum dreck, but no great hooks though

R30 Is clearly an 80 year old man.

Her last album Lover sold 3.3 million copies world wide which was down from Reputations 4.5. Tour would have helped increase sales but it was still the best selling album of the year.

The duet with Bon Iver is not good. Lyrics are awful.

Is she still trying to sound like a NYC Latina?

“You need to calm tsDOWN!”

Why is it known as "dropping" when an album is released?

I heard the first single. It was ok. I’m not a taylor person but more power to her.

If she announced it then it’s no longer a secret...

I'm with r28. I listened to Cardigan and then listened to about a minute of the other songs on YouTube and they are all forgettable.

I guess if you want to put on an album that will put you to sleep or be background and not disturb anything else you are doing, then it's great.

R44 not all of us need to listen to EDM/ club music all the time

Im hearing a lot of Lana Del Rey and Lorde influence. I listened to a few but so far "Cardigan" is my favorite.

CNN say:

[quote] Taylor Swift's stirring and surprising new indie album, 'Folklore,' earns rave reviews from critics and fan

She’s getting insanely good reviews for it, and they’re well-deserved. “Last Great American Dynasty” is my early favorite.

This album makes me reach for my Zoloft.

[quote] Her last album Lover sold 3.3 million copies world wide which was down from Reputations 4.5.

R38 actually it's more than 3.3M, those numbers didn't include China which has become the biggest market for Taylor Swift outside the US. Her "Lover" album received 3x diamond certification (diamond = CNY $10M sales on digital download), since China is almost all digital singles, it's really hard to covert singles number to album, but the official tally is her CNY $30M singles number is about 1.7 million albums sold in China. She is the first non-Chinese singer to receive 3x diamond certification, of course she was the first to receive diamond (1989) , and 2x diamond (Reputation). Now, all three albums are certified 3x diamond in China.

I didn’t know that. Why is China not counted? That’s weird.

It sucks

I think it's because China has bypassed the traditional recording industry model, like everything entertainment related, the market is dominated by the ecommerce giants like Tencent, Alibaba... In less than 24 hours, her "Folklore" album already sold more than half million copies on QQmusic alone (owned by Tencent), and according to the news, this time QQMusic sold them as an album in pre-orders, not on individual single downloads.

I love it. It’s extraordinary.

So that means Lover with two big hit singles (Me & You Need to Calm Down) was not disappointing and was on track to match Reputation if she had toured. Folklore is critically acclaimed and will no doubt feature at the Grammys, but I don't think any of the songs have hit potential. No chart-topping singles from this one.

Her music sucks!

Who's she dating now? I remember back when she had to be seen with everyone.

How good is her new album? So good that Aaron Schock is off Grindr this weekend so that he can absorb her music into his every pore. He's searching for a new personal anthem to replace "Shake it Off."

R57 Supposedly Joe Alwyn, a b-list British actor who has gay rumors. Taylor Swift keeps dropping lyrical hints that she’s into women though (read the lyrics to “Dress”, etc.). In this album she pretends she’s a guy in one song pining after a girl (Betty) because it’s so common for straight women to make those kind of songs...

R59 She and Joe have been together for a while now, but they're both bisexual.

There's a whole twitter dedicated to photo evidence of Joe being a homo.

r59, I don't think Betty is gay at all. It's written from a guy's (James') perspective.

i love exile. i just cant get into cardigan

People here trashed her last album and said that strong sales were due to marketing gimmicks, such as releasing different versions so her fans would each buy many copies.

Twenty-four hours after releasing this album, her record company is touting record-breaking performance, all digital.

“New York, NY (July 25, 2020) – In under 24 hours, Taylor Swift’s 5 Star album folklore sold over 1.3 million copies around the world. It also shattered “the global record for first-day album streams on Spotify by a female artist” with 80.6 million streams and delivered “the most-streamed pop album on Apple Music in 24 hours” with 35.47M streams. Additionally, folklore set the U.S. and Worldwide Amazon Music Indie/Alternative Streaming Record.

folklore is the ten-time GRAMMY® Award-winning, record-breaking superstar’s eighth album. folklore arrives as a fan favorite and ranks as Taylor's highest rated critically acclaimed album on Metacritic, currently ranked 96.5.

Here are what critics are saying about folklore:

“5 Stars” – The Guardian, Laura Snapes

“Folklore proves that she can thrive away from the noise: if you interpret “classmates” as pop peers, Swift is no longer competing.” – The Guardian, Laura Snapes

“Taylor Swift's surprise album 'Folklore' is her best yet.” – USA Today, Patrick Ryan

“A Rating” – Entertainment Weekly, Maura Johnston

“...a content smile of an album on which one of the world's biggest pop stars, charts be damned, forges her own path and dares listeners to come along for the ride…” –Entertainment Weekly, Maura Johnston

“5 Stars” – The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick

“These are beautifully turned songs filled with empathy for downtrodden characters battered by life but always ready to fight back, bridging social distance with langorous melodies and deep emotion. The lockdown may have been a terrible moment for music and musicians, but it has resulted in Taylor’s Swift’s most powerful and mature album to date.” – The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick

“Thank you, Taylor, for this masterpiece of an album.” – Buzzfeed, Ryan Schocket

"The mainstream deity wears well the role of a solemn storyteller, who’s more comfortable than ever weaving her tales without happy endings (and whose goth-inspired album cover looks like an Opeth throwback). Such an approach reminds of the darker tones found in Bruce Springsteen’s The River, the double-album that first saw the Boss wholly embrace the idea of telling other folks’ tales in the first-person — a formula that would guide him for decades. Swift may not be far behind on Highway 9." – Spin, Bobby Oliver

"One musing bleeds into the next; sonic themes maintain a brilliantly downcast cohesion, like smooth obsidian glass. It’s a record born of necessity, a testament to her deep need to make music, even when it makes no sense to do so." – Spin, Bobby Oliver

“5 Stars” – i Newspaper, Sarah Carson

“A dazzling, timeless surprise album.” – i Newspaper, Sarah Carson

“In years to come, when we look back at the timeless Folklore, Swift's words will once again prove astoundingly, simply, true.” – i Newspaper, Sarah Carson

“Some of us have spent years dreaming Taylor would do a whole album like this—but nobody really dreamed it would turn out this great. Her greatest album—so far.” – Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield

“4.5 Stars” – Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield

“The album is ruminative and dreamy, the work of an artist, who, cut off from the everyday world, turned inward, following the rushing rapids of her imagination and scooping up songs as they flowed past.” – Los Angeles Times, Jody Rosen

“A- Rating” – Consequence of Sound

...tons more A-level reviews included in the release.

I’ve started to like Taylor ever since she called out that rightwing cunt Senator Marsha Snatchburn of Tennessee for being a vile, heinous, disgusting excuse for a human being.

All those years she kept quiet while Trump supporters claimed her as one of them until she started to speak up. That's when I started paying attention.

I thought you gays hated lesbians

R66 She was still pretty young then. She started making political statements at around the same time in life (late 20s/early 30s) I had my political awakening. She’s a pop star who grew up in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and who was groomed and pitched to a country music audience. Given her upbringing and her age, I don’t really hold it against her that she isn’t a lifelong progressive activist. I think that’s a completely unrealistic expectation for someone with her background. I am glad she ultimately came around because she does have influence on young people, but it’s a little disturbing to me that we have to rely on the influence of entertainers to instruct people to reject fascism and political corruption.

Would her coming-out be the biggest in entertainment?

Is Taylor Swift were to come out, she would inevitably come out as bisexual. She has dated too many men to suddenly announce she is a lesbian and everything has been a lie. She would date some demi-butch woman with short hair for about two years, people would remark that it was a long relationship for her, and then there’d be a dramatic breakup, an album, and she’d marry a man within a year.

See also: Miley Cyrus, Ani DiFranco

[quote]See also: Miley Cyrus, Ani DiFranco

I thought Ani DiFranco always claimed to be a lesbian, but then suddenly married a man and came out as bisexual?

[quote] Such an approach reminds of the darker tones found in Bruce Springsteen’s The River, the double-album that first saw the Boss wholly embrace the idea of telling other folks’ tales in the first-person — a formula that would guide him for decades

You just know that the Springsteen comparison has her dancing around every room in the mansion.

R70 But Karlie and Diana or any other women that her stans claim she was with, aren't butch. Not even tomboys. They are all extra feminine

Fuck her. Can't sing, can't write anything on her own, has a Pekingese mouth.

I made that bitch famous ...

This from the New York Times 3 days ago-

[quote] Taylor Swift and Kanye West Will Tangle Again, With Dueling Albums

[quote] The two pop stars, who have been linked since the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, are both set to release new records on Friday.

Then this from The Sun today-

[quote] The rapper was due to release new album and video Donda: With Child on Friday, but it failed to materialize.

Wow @ the reviews.

I can't stand her. She seems like a totally manufactured product. She tries to affect a certain voice when singing- young and innocent and breathy- so everything she sings sounds false. And she has bitchface.

Even her appearance is contrived. She won't go outside unless she looks like she's been in hair 'n makeup for two hours.

My favorites are :

1) Exile(ft Bon Iver)

2) Seven

3) Epiphany (I might be biased here as I am a doctor myself)

This is a good album. Don't dismiss it just because you don't like the person it's coming from. I am surprised too. After Reputation and Lover i thought she had lost herself to mindless pop, but this album is wonderful! Here I am linking Exile btw...

[quote] She tries to affect a certain voice when singing- young and innocent and breathy- so everything she sings sounds false. And she has bitchface.

Oh look. A gnat just tried to bite my ankle.

r79. Mine are:

1. Exile (ft Bon Iver)

2. August

3. Betty

this mentally stunted broad still writing at the 15 year level.

Also take some damn voice lessons.

I listened casually and I did think it was weird that a 30 year-old woman is writing about high school romances in school gyms involving 17 year olds. Why? Is she a musical YA author?

Anyone who calling her manufactured and writing about high school romance clearly hasn't listened to the album.

I've never bought or listened to TS in my life and its easily the best album of the year. Absolutely breathtaking.

Breathtaking is a bit much. I would take it back a few notches as to not expose yourself

if Taylor's writing is at a 15 y/o's level, at what level is most current pop written? 7? Embryonic?

“Last Great American Dynasty” is one of the best songs she’s ever written. “Betty,” “Invisible String,” and “Epiphany” are lovely as well.

The lyrics are teenager-y and let's not start with the voice. She sounds like 14 year old. People that like this or call it folk, have never listened to folk music

I like Taylor Swift’s music overall, but we have to be honest even though it’ll invoke the wrath of defensive trolls. There is a lot of hyperbole going on in this thread.

I think Swift is a clever writer with clever ideas. “Clever” is really the best word I can think of to characterize her lyrical ability because she tells stories well and from interesting points of view, and she has a way of turning a phrase that can be thought provoking.

At the same time, her lyrics are often nonspecific and trite in a way that disappoint me—usually scene-setting stuff such as “it was sunny,” “green was the color of the grass where we used to read...teal was the color of your shirt.” These are minor details that probably few people notice, but they’re just very generic sorts of observations that would never be considered part of great writing in either prose or poetry. They do invoke specific visuals, but grass is green, we all know without it being stated; saying “grass” alone creates the mental image of the color. And when there are so many different ways to invoke color memory, Swift always just says the color in a way that certainly would be criticized in any writing workshop as unimaginative and clunky.

See also:

“Losing him was blue like I'd never known Missing him was dark grey, all alone Forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you never met But loving him was red (red-red, red-red)”

Beyond those details, she has a very specific genre of sentimental romance that is not everyone’s taste. Her lyrics do convey interesting insights about romance and relationships sometimes. That’s a real strength. But they are also often expectedly sentimental, as in the new album she has a song about feeling like an old cardigan. On a past album, she sang about someone leaving behind a scarf that smells like him. She has some go-to romance-trope details that she seems to judiciously toss around in her music. In the new album, “August sipped away like a bottle of wine.” Sweaters, scarfs, wine, long drives, lying in the grass on summer days—the vignette she paints could be patched together to make a Nicholas Sparks movie trailer.

And then, yes, there is the teenaged high-school romance thing she still writes about at age 30. It’s odd to me. From the new song “Betty”:

“ In the garden, would you trust me If I told you it was just a summer thing? I'm only seventeen, I don't know anything But I know I miss you Betty, I know where it all went wrong Your favorite song was playing From the far side of the gym“

And then finally, having come of age in the 90s, my favorite musician remains Tori Amos and I was a big fan of Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, et al., and I went to Lilith Fair every year.

Cont...

Cont.

Everyone is calling this new Swift album folk and I hear pop music with some folky qualities. I like the album. But if it’s going for folk, I think what’s missing for me is the voice. Swift’s voice is so processed that it doesn’t have a natural quality on most of this album—same issue as with Madonna on most of her songs except a few on American Life. The layering of her vocals on songs that could sound really intimate and personal and delicate if Swift had the security not to ‘improve’ her voice to make it more palatable through computer processing makes it feel less authentic to me. The intimacy of her lyrics sometimes are at odds with the impossible-not-to-notice production manipulation. Nineties’ women’s folk and folk-pop often was just a woman with a guitar and percussion or a woman with a piano, a singer-songwriter, who sang her poetry in imperfect intimacy. So I really can’t hear that in this album.

It’s good. It’s a Swift product, and she is good at what she does. But so far, her music reminds me of that Deanna Carter country song from the 1990s that was engineered to cross over to pop, both productionwise and lyrically. These could be Swift lyrics, and they could be Nicholas Sparks teen romance:

“Like strawberry wine and seventeen The hot July moon saw everything My first taste of love oh bittersweet Green on the vine Like strawberry wine”

So at this point, as much as I appreciate her talents, Swift to me still seems like an all-purpose commercial YA romance writer, just one who works in music instead of in print.

Detailed analysis of some lyrics above, but what about the music? Lyrics don’t need to be great poetry if they’re tied to strong melodies.

R91 I don’t know anything about music composition or arrangement. I am a writer (not a songwriter) and so all I am equipped to comment on and what I notice most when I listen to well-written songs are the lyrics. I wouldn’t comment on the lyrics of a typical popstar, but Swift is always credited by many as being her generation’s great songwriter, and so above is my reaction to those claims.

As I said, despite sounding hypercritical above, I like her music for what it is and I do think she is talented. I just consider her more of a genre (romance, esp. teen romance) writer lyrically speaking.

I do notice in this album’s songs a lack of adolescent brattiness such as “Look What You Made Me Do” and “You Need to Calm Down” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” and I think that that suggests at 30 she may be getting beyond her snarky/sarcastic worldview, which I think would be a good thing.

She still has potential to develop into a more mature lyricist. I just find it odd that she is still contemplating teen boys and girls in school gyms when that was half a lifetime ago. It seems like arrested development. Time to move on.

I’ve only heard cardigan and thought it was really boring. Assuming the other tracks are better

[quote] There is a lot of hyperbole going on in this thread.

Maybe so, but the entertainment/music press started it. We didn't invent the hype over this album. Some of the rave reviews were from shills, but some were from honest reviewers who usually don't hesitate to throw stones.

[quote] I just find it odd that she is still contemplating teen boys and girls in school gyms when that was half a lifetime ago. It seems like arrested development. Time to move on.

Know your core audience and your fans, right? Throw your audience a bone. Proceed with caution as you transition from the surefire avalanche of money to "art."

Just to put things in perspective: these are some of the same critics who voted Lana Del Rey's "Norman Fucking Rockwell" their album of the year 2019.

Cardigan is beautiful and uses the old “cardigan” to beautiful effect.

Re:Lana, she was terrible until she teamed up with Jack Antonoff who reined her worst instincts in. Norma Fucking Rockwell! is an outstanding record.

But we really need to talk about Phoebe Bridgers, who delivered the best singer-songwriter album after Fiona’s FTBC.

DULLNESS OVERLOAD

My favorite female pop album this year is Gaga’s Chromatica, but this is a close second. And I’m not a swift fan.

Fiona Apple still holds the title of best record of the year in my opinion, but Swift isn’t far behind.

^ the best record of the year???

I’ve seen Swifty fans on Twitter say that Folktale is better than Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

Which is like saying Luncheon of the Boating Party is better than The Scream. They can hardly be compared except in terms of personal taste. One is pleasant and one is not. One is viscerally expressive and the other is delightful and dappled with light. Neither one is ‘better.’

R103 that’s true, they’re essentially the same record gone about in two very different ways. Ranking them is silly when they actually compliment each other so well.

So Taylor Swift's album is better than a Bob Dylan's album?!

Kacey Musgraves would like a word.

From the NY Times:

“Far more often, though, the production dictates Swift’s boundaries. The smoky “Cardigan” has a number of moving parts, distracting from Swift’s breathy, undersung vocals. The hymnal “Epiphany” feels claustrophobic — Enya-like without the flutter. “Mirrorball” verges on shoegaze, and “Mad Woman” has the blend of morose and wry that’s a Lana Del Rey trademark.

...

If this is a ploy to be cloaked in — and enhanced by — the alleged seriousness of indie rock, it only underscores how frail and unversatile that seriousness is.

That’s clearest on “The Last Great American Dynasty,” a musical biography of Rebekah Harkness, an heiress with a wild life story who happened to own Swift’s home in Rhode Island. Harkness is a classic Swift heroine — purposeful, disruptive and misunderstood: “There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen/She had a marvelous time ruining everything.” On a different Swift album, a song like this would have reveled in the mess, but this version is controlled, almost sad. Inside, there’s a brash version of this song yearning for air.“

The NYT review is the only not glowing one I’ve seen

I like it. It's a lot better than Justin Timberlake and Gaga's attempts at Country

Funny how people are calling this indie music. She's the most corporate mainstream musician on the planet. Indie=independent. At least that's what it stand for in the 90s, when it was made up. So her music couldn't be any more far away from indie and DIY aesthetics and way of creating

Her audience is Millennial women pushing-40 who think they are still decorating the gym for the homecoming dance.

You could call it indie inspired commercial pop.

I think she is fine. I’m not one to attack an artist for experimenting and imitating others’ styles. That’s what we did in graduate school—wrote pastiches based on writers’ styles.

That said, she does lots of pastiching. Somehow I felt like her song ‘Wildest Dreams’ was an approximation of a Lana Del Ray song the first time I heard it even though I was barely familiar with Lana Del Ray at the time.

She grabs here inspirations here and there and instead or whirring them up in a blender, she tends at this point in her career to do general imitations of others’ styles, layering her words on top.

It’s fine. It’s a thing artists do as they are growing.

“For a certain variety of '90s-raised, formerly goth-dabbling nerd-woman, Taylor Swift's rendition of her Red ballad "All Too Well" at this year's Grammys was a strikingly weird experience. As I watched the much praised performance, I kept feeling a twinge of déjà vu: The piercing stare into the camera. The casual but sassy hair flip/side-eye combination. The look-at-me-no-don't-look-at-me games she was playing, delicately inclining her face away lest we witness a moment too intimate for intrusion, then flipping over-the-shoulder glances at people in the seats. And then she started in with the headbanging. And it hit me: Tori Amos. The Taylor Swift performance everyone is talking about is Taylor Swift imitating Tori Amos.”

Swift openly admits that Lana inspires her a ton. “Cardigan” sounds the most like Del Rey on the new album, but even that song is still unmistakably Taylor Swift.

She grafts her wistful teen romances, complete with scarves, sweaters and other knitwear in remote country houses, onto different genres of music using different producers. She writes on guitar and piano and then has producers convert the songs to country (add strum and twang!) or pop (apply Max Martin production principles!) or ‘folk,’ if we’re to believe this is folk. (It is way too produced to be folk, especially all the layered and processed vocals.) But the lyrics and the song subject matter has hardly changed throughout her career.

Madonna has basically always done that, too. She writes about dancing and love and sex and breakups, and then has producers convert the songs into dance, pop, rock, rockabilly, etc.

"Indie" is also a sound. It's like saying pop = popular. It does, but you can also be a bedroom musician making pop music that no one will ever hear.

[quote]they actually compliment each other so well

"Hey Bolt Cutters. You're so fetch!"

"I know, Folklore... I learned it from watching you *wink*"

The way her vocals are processed keeps the songs from sounding even remotely like folk or indie to my ears. It's a bummer because I think I'd like the songs better with just her voice, as thin and wavering as it is.

You know, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen get away with having poor singing voices, and they both are exemplars of folk music. All the computerizing of Swift's voice makes me feel like she doesn't have confidence in her music.

I’d go as far as saying that Folklore is Taylor’s answer to FTBC

Are we supposed to know what FTBC is?

If you read the thread you would already know.

Yeah, totally gonna do that

R117 She’s using the other meaning of folklore you dweeb

^ people are calling it a folk album, you twat

I wrote a comment about the album on Twitter that didn’t use Swift’s name or the album’s name, and which could be interpreted as mildly critical but certainly was not very critical or condemning.

A Swift fanatic who is also a published author found my tweet and lashed out at me because I, “A MAN,” said something about Taylor Swift and I have no right to do that by virtue of being a man because Swift “doesn’t make music for YOU.”

People are fucking deranged.

Dropping makes it sound like a mega pregnant belly

Meanwhile people are at each other’s throats about ... a pop album lol!

r124 "People [on Twitter] are fucking deranged."

Fetch The Bolt Cutters sucked. Fiona Apple was not being viscerally expressive, she was making awful music targeted towards the pretentious college student crowd. But it worked because that crowd eats shit like that up.

Fetch The Bolt Cutters will be forgotten and Fiona will whimper back into obscurity, but Folklore left an impression. Not to mention despite her fakeness as a person, Folklore actually feels like a person made it as a way to express themselves through art. FTBC just sounds like Fiona was trying to hit a specific "off-key wailing set to banging on pots and pans to appease pretentious white feminists" quota.

R128 So hyperbolic. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is too weird not to be very polarizing, but it is a great work of experimental music and it both suits our messy, antic era and will stand the test of time. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but your suggestion the album will be forgotten for the sake of suggesting Swift is a musical genius is fallacious. Fiona Apple is a critical favorite whether you like that or not and it will be at or near the top of year-end and decade-end best-of lists.

Taylor Swift is a ubiquitous pop star, she is prolific and she is appreciated by critics, as well. You don’t have to sell a story that Fiona Apple is less than she is in order to convince others that Swift deserve’s Apple’s praise.

R129 I know that Swift gets more praise than Apple. I don't think Swift deserves Apple's praise, I think that Apple doesn't deserve the praise in the first place. I think that far too often people use "experimental" to excuse an album sucking. They say that it was purposefully not good because it was "experimental".

The word "experimental" in a music sense is just becoming code word for shitty at this point.

I remember the time when Mandy Moore went “indie” and this album is the equivalent of that, the evolution of a pop princess screaming to the world that she is mature now. The songs all sound the same though, and like Mandy, Taylor had more melodious and catchier songs as a kid. What is it about the “indie” route that automatically garners rave reviews and respect even if the songs have barely any hooks? Oh yes, they both have tinny high pitched screechy voices too aside from being suburban white girl darlings.

I thought Billie Eyelash was the second coming of Fiona Apple?

Video plagiarism!

Eilish’s music is nice and all but doesn’t come close to packing the wallop of early Fiona. Eilish still sounds like a kid, Fiona’s voice at the same age was almost scary.

[quote]I thought Billie Eyelash was the second coming of Fiona Apple?

Eyelash is more like a bargain-basement Alanis.

Eilish is more like Tori Amos. She doesn't sound angry like Alanis and Fiona did. She sounds like a mouse, a very high and quiet and shy voice.

I can kind of see a comparison between Eyelash and Tori. Eyelash honestly reminds me most of Marilyn Manson since she is so unabashedly goth-dark (“All the good girls go to hell/Cause even God herself/has enemies”) but Tori’s “Little Earthquakes” did include lyrics about witches and vampires and the chant “give me life/give me pain/give me myself again.” The difference is that Eyelash is more like a typical depressed adolescent who tells everyone killing herself would be awesome.

And some of her lyrics like these are more like young Fiona Apple tonally:

“What do you want from me? Why don't you run from me?

What are you wondering? What do you know?

Why aren't you scared of me? Why do you care for me?

When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”

Compare with Fiona’s:

“ I let the beast in and then

I even tried forgiving him, but it's too soon

So I'll fight again, again, again, again, again

And for a little while more

I'll soar the uneven wind, complain and blame the sterile land

But if you're getting any bright ideas, quiet dear

I'm blooming within

Fast as you can, baby

Wait, watch me, I'll be out

Fast as I can, maybe late but at least about

Fast as you can leave me

Let this thing run its route

Fast as you can”

And Fiona’s “The First Taste” is very Lana Del Rey dark daddy fantasy:

“I lie in an early bed thinking late thoughts, waiting for the black to replace my blue. I do not struggle in your web because it was my aim to get caught, cause Daddy Longlegs I fear that I’m finally growing weary of waiting to be consumed by you. Give me the first taste. Let it begin. Heaven cannot wait forever. Darling, just start the chase; I’ll let you win, but you must make the endeavor.”

Tori did a lot of anger and brooding but not so much the damaged femme fatale thing; that was Fiona, and then Lana came along to take over that terrain, leaving Fiona just damaged. Tori’s music is almost never coy. Fiona’s often was coy, Lana’s is almost always coy, and Billie Eyelash’s is similar in that regard.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift found another knitted garment that smells like an ex-boyfriend!

I really hate this basic, blonde bitch with a passion. She represents everything that is wrong with whiteness. The fact she so effortlessly sells truckloads of albums just tells me how dumb, basic, and boring the populace really is.

R128 R129 R130 fiona’s album should be it’s own topic. I didn’t like it & I played it a good dozen times. It unfolds & reveals itself but that’s when it lost me. I didn’t think there was much there. Because of covid she won’t tour it (i’m guessing) & i would’ve gone in a second - which could’ve offered another chance to get with the songs. (I’m in my 50’s) I don’t know much about taylor swift but i know she writes her own stuff & has been evolving from a pop star to a singer / songwriter. That’s good news. I’ve liked the new bob dylan album , the new jessie ware album & paul mccartney’s deluxe Flaming Pie re-release.

She's quite a queerbaiter, isn't she?

All of these people are ghastly, just ghastly.

Ghastly troll please show up in other threads. We love you

Update on Folklore-

[quote] Taylor Swift’s New No. 1 Album Outsold The Rest Of The Top 50 Combined (And Then Some)

[quote] From the moment she first announced her new album Folklore (which arrived just hours after she made her millions of fans aware of its existence), the set was always headed toward a No. 1 debut in most countries, including in the United States. This frame, the singer-songwriter’s first proper folk record starts off atop the Billboard 200 with the largest debut of 2020, moving just under 850,000 equivalent units.

[quote] That sum is primarily made up of sales, as hundreds of thousands of superfans either bought a digital copy of the title or chose one of many merchandise bundles on her website, which all come with some kind of edition of the set. Thanks to all those purchases, Folklore has not only become the bestselling album in the country, it blows every other title away.

At the moment I only like Cardigan and August. I wish her voice wasn't so autotuned.

Agree about the voice R144. She has always been criticized for having a weak singing voice, and it never really bothered me before. But with everyone calling this album ‘folk,’ and with the pared down instrumentation, her processed, multi-layered vocal tracks are really distracting to me. It makes me feel like she didn’t have the confidence to let her voice be heard as it is, flaws and all, and that’s a really anti-folk attitude.

The one thing Madonna has done that has legitimately impressed me in the past couple of decades is to produce some tracks that feature her unprocessed voice sounding flawed and wavering. That takes courage for a career vocalist, and it pays off for some music—especially folk music. People know Madonna is not a great singer and so people don’t hold her to that standard. Swift should realize the same about herself: she might impress non-fanatics a lot more if she stopped polishing all of her music until it sounds like it has gone through a conveyor belt of scrubbers.

Multitracking has been popular in pop music since forever, but I do agree that the strongest songs on Folklore (August, Betty, Peace) have little to none of that.

R146 I meant Seven, not August. August is pretty multi-tracked, but I do like it.

R146 I don’t know anything about how music is produced and so I can’t comment on multitracking, but you mentioned her new song August as an example, and August to me sounds exactly like a slightly more uptempo Lover, meaning it has the same ‘dream pop’ atmospheric production vibe from Jack Antonoff as the title track from her last album, which was unabashedly pop music. Multitracking or not, her voice in both sounds highly processed to me...I don’t know how to articulate it, but reverb or some other form of layering/softening/filling out her vocal track with an airy, distant quality is just...pop. Not folk. At all.

Compare “August” and “Lover.” The new one is mid-tempo; the older one is down-tempo; otherwise, they sound to me to have popped out of the same pop-music factory.

I do like the production of ‘Peace.’

‘Betty’ sounds pretty country to me. I confess that I can’t really appreciate this song because of a weird bias I have, totally distracted by the idea that this is a 30-year-old woman writing (and therefore thinking) about a teen love triangle that takes place in a school gym. I know no one else on planet Earth thinks this is strange but I just have a hard time getting over it when this is hailed as her mature, adult album. And it seems even stranger to me when people argue that she is probably just writing to the interests of her longtime fan base...when her longtime fan base should be the same age she is, and therefore it also seems weird if they are fixated on teen romances. It’s a personal hangup. I take responsibility for being a bigot and allowing this prejudice against YA fiction stories being mixed into ‘mature’ albums.

If she were to brand herself specifically as a young adult genre writer who works in the medium of music instead of books, though, and stuck with the genre entirely instead of mixing it with diaristic songs, I would find that really interesting.

But since she basically only writes two kinds of songs—personal experiences or teen romances—it just makes me think that the woman is in a state of arrested development. My bias. I claim it.

As you are aware, there's gold in them thar arrested development hills, pardner.

R150 Very aware—and that gold mining, again, makes her music pop and certainly not folk.

Her fans sound just like one would imagine

Taylor Swift Doesn’t See ‘betty’ As Queer Canon:

Taylor is a redneck homophobe, she's only switched her tune to the "I'm a Democrat who loves gays and diversity and hates Trump" because it's what's popular right now and she can bank off of it.

She comes from a deplorable, rural, Republican family and despite the act she puts on she's still the same person she was when she wrote "Tim McGraw" in 2006 and a song that included telling her friends that her ex was gay as a punchline.

[quote]despite the act she puts on she's still the same person she was when she wrote "Tim McGraw" in 2006

I'm not a fan, but no 30-year-old is the same person they were at 16. Everyone undergoes massive changes during those years. Could you at least give her the benefit of the doubt? Are you the same person you were 14 years ago? Is it really that unlikely to think that everything she's been exposed to (including, apparently, spending time in Britain) has changed her, including her political views?

As much as Taylor Swift has annoyed me in the past, I’m happy that the album is successful because it’s the first album after the big sale of her masters to Scooter Braun, etc. It’s a big middle finger to him and Scott Borchetta (they bought her past songs for $300 million) but now she’s just as successful with the new album AND owns these masters for this album herself. Good for her and good for artists to be able to own their own masters as they SHOULD rather than being owned by record labels.

R156 Wasn’t last year’s Lover her first Scooter-free album?

I like her like I like ice water. It’s refreshing and I crave it sometimes but it’s barely sustenance.

But you do have to give her credit. She knows how to write and sell songs for the masses, and she is is pretty damned bold and doesn’t settle for being pushed around as almost everyone in the music industry does.

“Taylor Swift and her brother, Austin, created a fake cover band called Jack Leopard & The Dolphin Club, and recorded a cover of Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” with Austin on lead vocals. That cover was then used over the credits in this week’s episode of Killing Eve.”

And she didn’t do it as a gimmick: she figured out it’s a way to work around the ownership issues:

“The end result being that Swift gets to put her song on a TV show she likes without allowing her old label to reap the benefits.“

R153 lol I saw some of the fans discussing that on LChat. They seem to think some of her songs are about Diana Agron and not Karlie.

I've listened to the album and I really like it. It is definitely a Sunday afternoon at home kind of album, not something you'd listening to on a Saturday night trying to get the party started. It is very melodic, peaceful and the lyrics are great - I can't believe she writes her own lyrics -pretty amazing.

R160 From Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro to Tori Amos, Kate Bush and Fiona Apple, all of whom write their own compositions and lyrics, play and sing their own music, why is it hard to believe Swift writes her lyrics? Enough people are incredibly talented in such a hugely diverse array of ways that what never ceases to surprise me is that every shitty top 10 pop song is written by a committee of 10 people and often is sung by someone who can’t sing well, much less play music or write.

[quote] It is definitely a Sunday afternoon at home kind of album, not something you'd listening to on a Saturday night trying to get the party started. It is very melodic, peaceful and the lyrics are great - I can't believe she writes her own lyrics -pretty amazing.

I listened to parts of the album recently on YT, R160. And the lyrics are BASIC. The melody is basic as well. The voice is basic. And not in a "Norah Jones" kind of soothing simple way - but in a milquetoast "meh" kind of way.

It's not horrible. It's not "amazing". It's just "meh".

Refrain: "And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone's bed / You put me on and said I was your favorite"

"But I knew you / Playing hide-and-seek / Giving me your weekends, I / I knew you"

A lot of it is like amateurish scribblings that High School girls write. And it's indeed probably marketed towards HS girls. Most of Swift's songs have a teen-like quality to them.

It's ironic that Swift referred to "Peter (Pan) losing Wendy" in her lyrics. Because (like many Disney Kids who get famous as teenagers, which stunts their growth) Swift herself seems to suffer from "Peter Pan syndrome" - Swift is in her 30s but still writes like she's in an entry-level poetry class in Junior High.

I've been to many Indie Music fests. And the lyrics Swift writes are a dime a dozen. Unfortunately, most of those Indie performers don't have Swift's cutesy Aryan, preppy looks and rich dad. Most of the Indie performers look like they need a shower. In the music industry, looks sell.

[quote] Good for her and good for artists to be able to own their own masters as they SHOULD rather than being owned by record labels.

Swift could have easily owned her Masters - if she had chosen to work as an Independent Artist from the get-go, R156. No one forced her to sign up to a Record Label. She could have gone Indie (many do).

But she chose to sign up to a Label (where her rich dad was a shareholder & board member, btw). Yes, she was young when it happened - her dad helped her make the deal. But if she's (retroactively) not happy anymore about that deal - then she should sue her own Dad / Mom for negotiating a bad deal for her.

The record label invested in her, paid for the production, paid for the promotion, the sound editing, potentially even for ghost writers to touch up her lyrics & melody if necessary. "Taylor Swift" may not have even become "Taylor Swift" without that Record Label investing in her.

If I sign up to a tech company and write computer code as part of the deal - the tech company owns that code, not me. If I design a beautiful sports car under contract with Toyota - Toyota owns that design, even though I came up with it. Why should it be different for musicians? Why should they be given 'preferential treatment' compared to all other industry workers? If musicians don't want external ownership - then just be an Indie Artist, simple as that. Whereas Swift wants to have her cake and eat it too.

R163 i think this is very personal because of Scooter. Seems like there's alot of history there.

[quote]It's a "secret album".

Good. Keep it a secret.