Uh, depends on what you mean by “well known” - I’d tend to think of that as being “on the base version of one of the (multiplatinum) albums”, as vs. from the bonus tracks, LPs, soundtracks or the stuff she’s covered live. So, uh.

I’m not too fond of the songs that were clearly written for father/daughter dances - The Best Day and Never Grow Up - but that’s cause they’re clearly not even trying to speak to me and for what they’re doing they’re pretty well done. The duets are all kinda shit - she really is a singer/songwriter, and at her best writing for her voice only and only singing her own words, so let’s say The Last Time.

Now if by “well known” you mean “one of the radio singles”… huh. Apparently The Last Time was released as a single. Didn’t chart though, so let’s not count that.

Shake it Off. I hated it at first, but it’s inescapably catchy and it’s been stuck in my head this last week, same as everyone. ‘cause it’s like 100% hook, which is why it’s my least favorite. Like, I like Swift enough that I can recognize her songwriting quirks? I like Max Martin, too, and I can do the same thing with him. There’s been a few times when I heard one of his songs on the radio and I recognized him long before (if ever) the “artist”.

Like, Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson? No, it’s a Max Martin song. And Shake it Off is a Max Martin song. Red had a lot of pop production on it but you could hear the Swift songwriting underneath, particularly in the lyrics. Shake it Off has some - the “I keep crusin’/can’t stop won’t stop groovin’” is clearly developed from the same place The Way I Loved You got “you were wild and crazy/just so frustrating” (and I’m probably not giving enough credit to her vocal distinctiveness - she doesn’t have great range, projection, or endurance but she’s excellent at varying affect, for example the subtle hiccuping in the chorus), but it’s thin fucking gruel, man.

If you’re used enough to her songwriting style, you realize that in All Too Well, when she sings

And maybe we got lost in translation
Maybe I asked for too much
But maybe this thing was a masterpiece
´til you tore it all up

the “tore” completely breaks her usual phonemic flow, and even though it’s sung so the word’s kind of spit out for emphasis, it doesn’t even match up with the other cases where she breaks her patterns for effect.

you know what word would have fit perfectly though? “fucked”.

(I also have suspicions about “every one of us has messed up too” in Innocent, even though “messed” doesn’t stand out as much)

On the plus side, if I turn out to hate it, I’ve got the “Y Kant Taylor Read” joke queued up already.

An “official pop album” “inspired by the late ‘80s”. Eeehhhhhhhhhh, we’ll see.

tswifttours:

Air Asia has released a limited edition model of Taylor Swift’s RED Tour Asia A320 Livery. It can be purchased here! (x)

hrm.

So I’ve had people ask what’s up with me and Taylor Swift and the answer is that she’s the only active American writer I consider my unambiguous superior.

(And she is a writer first and foremost, only incidentally a performer. Even then primarily as an author of experiences, she’s not actually a particularly good singer or instrumentalist.)

taylor-swift-acoustic-live:

Natasha edited these :)

Some people asked about full recordings of the LA shows, and thanks to her, here is one!

A Tom Waits cover of Taylor Swift’s “Mean” would be amazing, up there with Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” cover.

One of the (many) things I like about Taylor Swift is that if you listen to her albums straight through you notice that a *lot* of verses are the verse of another song as seen from the other side

I really want to like Speak Now, but

Okay when I did a Taylor Swift-themed pinball tournament, this album was Bride of Pinbot, because “an album called ‘Speak Now’ about becoming a woman”, obviously. Which is true as far as it goes but more importantly clever; if without that pressure I were to describe it, it’s very much a breakup album as composed by a 19-year-old. And is impressive as such, I’d say its imagined audience is maybe 15-year-olds and Swift’s always been very good at putting songs together in a way that draw on her specific personal experience, play to her specific audience, but still manage to be fairly universal.

“Speak Now”, the song itself, is a girl romance-of-love daydream the same as all the boy romance-of-violence daydreams, where you save them from some crazy threat and they realize you had that in you all the time just keeping it in reserve and finally realize and fall to their knees in indebted awe, and is very well-done as such.

(“Better than Revenge” is a girl romance-of-(social)-violence daydream same way.)

“Innocent” is, like “The Best Day” before it, Swift showing off that she’s brilliant enough to reverse engineer pop culture tropes to speak to the experience of adult vulnerability just as well as actual grown-up Nashville songwriters can. (In part because so many of them draw on a longing for a childhood, um, innocence she still had direct access to?)

For all of the competence, aaaaaaaaaaahhh teenagers, I get it but the me it resonates with is a me I’m not comfortable copping to anymore (without, say, the use/mention distinction I’m invoking here); as far as breakup albums go at least Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous foregrounds your own personal failings in that “take ownership before they can wield it against you” way of manipulativeness that plays to my self-image of mature mastery.

aresnakesreal:

spotify what in the fuck

Taylor Swift is a supergenius lyricist. As a singer she has a limited range (but can emulate any idiom) and terrible vocal stamina for an arena headliner (so she’ll get that sexy smoker’s gravel in 5 years) but with words she’s one of 50 anglophones I consider on my level.

(hella volkish if that’s your thing)

Actually, in general Red is pretty heavily channeling the Silverlake sound of a few years ago, back when I was hitting up Spaceland on the regular. I definitely notice some Submarines in there too. Combined with the lyrics and the shift in her media persona, that’s actually a pretty interesting subtext, that this is the album where she fully abandons Nashville in favor of LA.

Modern producer-driven pop is interesting. I really like the Max Martin stuff, I think it’s interesting that we’re finally following Europe in building our pop on a base of electronic dance rather than rock, and the interchangeable female singer/genius male producer dynamic, while iffy in some ways, reminds us of the potential in Motown stuff before the Beatles (ironically, given their origins) exalted the folk singer/songwriter model. That said I really like how Ke$ha and Taylor Swift (from a Nashville tradition that never bought in to rockist authenticity) are our leading singer/songwriters now.

So the other night I got drunk and at the Gold Room jukebox put on You Belong With Me (which consistently gets one of the best cross-demographic responses I’ve seen), and so I came home and I was like OK I’m willing to give Taylor Swift a shot. So I got on iTunes and bought the Fearless album.

As it turns out, eh. I don’t like the rest of the album as much as the big hit single! Funny that.

But only just today when I was looking through my iTunes I realized I actually bought (for only $11!) the deluxe version of the album, which came with extras. Multimedia extras! So apparently I bought like a gigabyte and a half of Taylor Swift that night, and this is just kind of ridiculous.

So not only do I now own a copy of YBWM, and the YBWM music video, and the 20 minute YBWM music video behind the scenes, but I get the same trifecta for Love Story and White Horse. I now own a collection of press clips and voiced-over establishing shots from her first show of the tour! I now own a minute-and-a-half long T-Pain and Taylor Swift rap video parody written for the CMT awards. (What’s it like? It is a T-Pain and Taylor Swift rap video parody written for the CMT awards is what it’s like.)