Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department (April 19, 2024) Album • Page 83

I believe there’s a good 13-song album that could be made from these 31 tracks.

I do not believe that said album would’ve been better than Midnights.

 

For the record, I think Midnights is her worst album that isn't the debut, and the debut still has higher highs. It is the most "she has nothing to say right now" album of her career.

I think Tortured Poets makes it clear how much she was pulling her punches on Midnights. Listening back to Midnights after hearing this one, it just seems to me like she wasn't ready to be totally open about whatever was going on with Joe, but still wanted to get an album out there to justify a big tour, and so there are a bunch of songs that just don't really have the urgency or character of her best material ("Labyrinth" and "Sweet Nothing" are her most inert love songs, "Bejeweled and "Karma" lack the sizzle, verve, and hooks of her best pop bangers, etc.). There's still interesting stuff on that album (the two songs I mentioned as my favorites feel like her reflecting on her origin story, which is fun) but on the whole, it strikes me as pretty inessential, especially in retrospect.

 

Midnight Rain is pretty easily top 10 for me, so that might be where we majorly disagree

 

Sweet Nothing forever

 

my favourite thing from the Midnights era was that You're Losing Me track. such a good song

 

You're On Your Own Kid, Midnight Rain, Question, Bejeweld, Sweet Nothing are tracks I would put on the list of her best. Lavendar Haze, Maroon, Antio-Hero, Karma, would keep them

 

This past winter I spent one weekend at a lakehouse with some of my friends and one of my friends literally only played Sweet Nothing on repeat the entire weekend. It's a good song but I had to not listen to it for a long time after that.

 

I absolutely love Midnights but I think this is way better. "You're on Your Own Kid" is my favourite on there and I think I'd take "So Long, London", "But Daddy I Love Him", "Guilty as Sin?", "loml", "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" and "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" over that song and nothing on here is as weak as "Vigilante Shit".

 

I agree. This, Midnights and Lover are mostly not my thing really. I’m a much bigger fan of her pop rock work from Fearless to Red and I love folklore and evermore as well.

 

In a parallel universe where she didn't just write an entire album roasting his bandmate, I feel like Taylor working with George from The 1975 would be super interesting. I feel like all the sound design and layering he does would mesh really well with this era of Taylor.

 

is it bad that i just don't understand the comparisons to Lana Del Rey with this album? sure, there are some moments where the tone and cadence of her vocals are similar, but Lana's music - particularly her latter output - has such a very specific quality to it that i just don't hear here. maybe i'm missing something, but singing in a lower register accompanied by a slightly morose-sounding piano doesn't automatically make a song a LDR-soundalike.

 

Sweet Nothing and You’re On Your Own Kid are the 2 best.

Maroon and Mastermind are very good.


I’ve said this before but “Sweet Nothing” is a Youth Lagoon song, full stop. It’s pure catnip for me.

 

on a different note, i know lots of people who prefer Aaron's work on this album, and think that Taylor should be working with him more than Jack because his sound is getting stale. and while it'd be great to hear them work together more, i also think The National's sound is so specific and prevalent through Aaron's production work that i'm wondering if people would think more of their collaborative output would also end up sounding stale after a few records.

 

At this point, I want her to go work with Max Martin again for a little bit.

 

I absolutely think her work with Dessner (and The National’s work in general at this point) is stale. She’s due for a switch up. I know a lot of people have complicated feelings about Lover but the highs on that record are so high and I miss the dynamic songwriting from song to song. We are in high floor low ceiling territory right now, and I gotta say it gets boring quick. Though I think TPD is solid at its best, as a 31 song collection it just doesn’t work.

 

Over 2.5 million units in a week?!? Taylor Swift Debuts With 2.61 Million Units for 'Tortured Poets'

 

yea I think Dessner actually feels like he’s stepping out of his comfort zone a teeny bit on this (it is surprising to me how pure pop some of his half here is), but I don’t think there’s a ton of room left for him to make fresh sounding stuff with her. Honestly, folklore and evermore kind of killed the National for me - they’re so great, and it’s so obvious a ton of that material started as national demos, and I feel like at this point the late period National sound has said all it can say.

 

I can't believe I'm saying this, as a longtime critic of the "too many cooks in the kitchen" aspect of modern pop songwriting/production, but her most exciting albums had her switching up collaborators from song to song, and I want that back. Bring back the Red/1989 model where she'd do a song with Butch Walker here, a song with Jeff Bhasker there, a few tracks with Max Martin, some stuff with Nathan Chapman, some stuff with Ryan Tedder, a song with Imogen Heap, etc. Not necessarily with that set of collaborators, but just a similar approach of working with a lot of different people on one album and seeing what they can do to shake her out of her comfort zone. The problem right now isn't that Jack and Aaron aren't doing good work, it's that they're the only other voices in the room, which, for an artist who rose to prominence by working with a ton of different people, is bound to be noticeable and feel stale after a few full albums of the same.

 

i love midnights honestly lol. it maintains a consistent vibe and manages to be a lot of fun a lot of the time (question, bejeweled, karma). i think it’s easily better than this (which i still like a lot of at least on the standard album)

 

hit the nail on the head re: comfort zone, although that should come with a careful selection of collaborators. even with Lover, which had production work from 4-5 different producers (even though Jack did 11 songs), it felt like very few sonic risks were taken. Joel Little's production work is downright forgettable on this record because it felt so middle of the road in a lot of ways. Jack's production is all over the place - some good and some not so good, while Louis Bell and Frank Dukes appear only a couple of times, with their best work on Afterglow and a B-side that didn't see the light of day until last year. i feel like the mixed-ish reception to that album (particularly Little's songs as single choices) - combined with her COVID collaborations and the mostly insular team of Chapman/Antonoff/Dessner for the rerecordings - really dialed down her willingness to seek out multiple collaborators that could help shape her sound further. it feels a lot like discussions about the film industry and creative risk taking by major studios. you have films with original ideas that don't do as well as tentpole franchises and suddenly you're not willing to invest in new voices because you fear shoddy returns on investment.

 

"Question" goes in the "bad Taylor Swift" songs bucket for me. Just a complete lyrical mess, IMO.

Yeah, I think the key with the earlier albums is a lot of those people were songwriters first and producers second, and on Lover it kind of flipped, which is how you end up with some more anonymous material. Versus Red or 1989 where the songs are really differentiated by who is working on them.

I agree that she's really built a tribe around her, and seems unwilling to journey far outside of that. Which is frustrating, because I think having someone nudge her out of some of the bad songwriting and production habits she's developed would really be helpful. I think her not working with Max Martin anymore might have something to do with the fact that she doesn't want to be pushed in that way. Like, I didn't totally love his "melodic math" influence on her music back when it was happening, because I felt like it pulled some of the lyrical depth and specificity out of her songs. But now I feel like we've swung so far in the other direction that her wordiness is sometimes getting in the way of the flow of the songs. Her vocal melodies have absolutely gotten worse and her singing doesn't stand out as much on the last few albums, and I think that's because of how many words she's trying to fit into some of these verses and choruses. "Bejeweled" is a catchy song, but the chorus is so overstuffed with words that the the hook never really lifts off, IMO.

 

Entire top 14

 

from reddit

 

I feel like rep tv could cross a million, but I wonder how much the debut gets. Feel like it’s going to be significantly lower

 

My conspiracy theory is that Debut is going to be her last re-record release and it will be a double or triple album to end with a bang. We know that the most unreleased material that exists is from her early years, so in theory the vault could be massive. Paired with how well this "double album" performed, our capitalist queen would love to WOW fans with another double release. JUST A THEORY