Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department (April 19, 2024) Album • Page 84

How big would the debut of this album have been if there were not 19 variants? Genuinely asking/curious.

 

It had the same number of variants as Midnights and 1989 TV. So… those numbers. She’s just that much more popular now.

 

I thought the days of million-in-a-week sellers were over before Midnights happened. Wild that Tortured Poets beat it by more than a million copies.

 

Yeah that feels like the easiest thing to point to that her popularity is at an insane high, even compared to Midnights, which I think warranted more hype based on the two previous albums before it.

 

For what I enjoy about Taylor's music, I really heavily lean toward the standard album here than The Anthology. I've been thinking about it a fair amount and I think the key different with Dessner vs Antonoff to me is how the music and lyrics interplay. There's a lot of talk about how there are "bad" lyrics here, but I don't really agree with that. The only lyrical issues I have are where it kinda feels like she is forcing more words/lyrics into a space where they don't flow or fit as well. For me, this happens a fair amount on the second disc, where her lyrics feel a bit like a square peg in a round hole of Dessner's soundbed of music.

I think about songs like the title track, and while it's wordy, I really feel like Jack's production works WITH the lyrics and they play back and forth with each other, there's musical moments that feel like the are working with Taylor's lyrics and vice versa. For lack of a better description, a lot of the Dessner songs feel like she is trying to fit her lyrics TO the music that exists, whereas the Jack songs feel like they work together back and forth for the music to fit the lyrics and lyrics to fit the music.

I know we will never actually know, but I do wonder how the songwriting process works with her and Jack vs her and Aaron. Aaron and I think Taylor have referenced multiple times that he "presents" songs to her, so I mentally am picturing songs songs that he has composed and she writes over. With Jack, especially since we have seen their process with the reputation mini-documentaries, and Miss Americana, we know that they work back and forth consistently. Maybe her and Aaron do that more than I expect... but either way, I'm just rambling on saying the same thing at this point

 

i've thought this about her collaborations with Aaron. i think working asynchronously made more sense at the onset of COVID rather than together working on a song start to finish. it also seems like this style was partially a product of Aaron wanting to feel the waters of what a collaboration would look like, hence him sending her a folder of ideas to write to. what i don't think he was expecting was that she'd send completed ideas back shortly after. it's weird that a style that gave her her two strongest albums just doesn't seem to be as effective here. so it's either than they're collaborating in a back-and-forth style, and they're having trouble building songs around each other's competencies. or he's still presenting her with nearly finished material, and the songs she's being given aren't as strong as folklore/evermore, and when combined with the lyrical concepts she's trying to convey on this record, they just don't flow as well.

 

Does Taylor have any tracks where she wrote both the music and lyrics? Just wondering what a fully solo track might sound like.

 

since Red I've been wanting taylor to collab with some of the soft/pop rock artists of the 90s like Johnny rzeznik or alanis or Rob Thomas so that era can have a Renaissance lol but I feel like olivia rodrigo is more likely to do that now.

 

Uhhhh a lot. She started off writing tons of her songs on guitar/piano.

 

she definitely has one's she's written entirely by herself (obviously Speak Now is the best example of this). now production-wise, i don't think she's handled every facet of the music herself.

 

I think it could be more that those ideas he sent were leftovers from The National and BRM and the opportunity presented a chance to use them. The National appears to be in a much more productive state these days so they don’t have nearly as much leftover as before.

 

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I basically listen to the original album, imgonnagetyouback, and the announced bonus tracks.

 

As much as it’s played up as Taylor and Beyoncé, it’s Taylor’s world by a mile.

 

Nearly every song on the main album here has already surpassed stream counts of everything on Cowboy Carter other than Texas Holdem, it's truly insane

 

I feel like if you're getting compared to Taylor in this day and age A) it's unfair, and B) you've already won

 

yo not really a taylor fan, I listened to Folklore/Evermore during the pandemic passively because I liked the indie sounds. Admittedly I am a huge on/off again 1975 fan though so I've been drawn to listen to this mammoth album because I'm invested in the drama

the lyrics on but daddy I love him are wild, they're very reminiscent of how matty writes lyrics? maybe some of the nicest things anyone has ever said about him

*listening to the smallest man who ever lived*

these are the most scathing (accurate) things anyone has ever said about him

I must say the drama of their relationship is the stuff that makes incredible music and for me this makes the album cut deep. Like in Guilty as Sin where she references Matty's avowed favorite band and 'Downtown Lights' and the song itself even sounds like it? Or in But Daddy where they use a vocal synth flourish lifted straight from EP/Debut era of the 1975? There's a lot to be said about parasociality of music but she leans fully into it to great effect

Beyond the drama I actually love her lyrics? They are super vivid/visual and direct. I can see why people call them clunky for much the same reason people dismiss matty's for being thesarusized. She makes you feel exactly like she wants you to soncially and lyrically.

 

Not that anyone here is comparing them. I know stans do, but I feel like beyonce is totally fine in her lane. I feel like since 4 she's more embraced different styles and black influences in her music and the masses are never going to be into that on a taylor swift level because it's not as... safe? Applicable to them? Idk the right word

I know I posted it recently but folklore wasn't only a great step musically but popularity-wise obv she was never a flop, but I noticed her becoming seen as corny and "cheugy" or whatever slang younger gens use to drag our age group. At least the anecdotal youths i work with. but the cottage-core Gen z kids really embraced folklore and evermore and got them feeling like shes relatable again. Idk many Gen alpha kids music to speak on that tho. They're more into imagine dragons and like five nights at Freddy's nightcore remix. I feel like this entire paragraph is written in a different language lmao.

 

Confirmed, I have no idea what that says

 

I believe the word you’re looking for is “good”

 

I read this and aged 20 years.

 

I work with children and youths and they somehow keep me feeling young because I understand their language somewhat while also making me feel approximately 84 years old

 

im surprised how low speak now TV is

 

This was my problem with Midnights from the first listen. I love how that record sounds, but the lyrics feel like such a waste of the music. The hooks were really well-crafted, but it was so frustrating to have those songs stuck in my head.

 

The Black Dog is a great song

The live renditions of some of these songs are going to breath entirely new lives into them. So much so that I wish we were past the Eras and onto a new album tour cycle

 

Chart positions for the whole album