Day 61: Merry Holidays!

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas to all you wonderful Michaels and Mandys out there in the world! And if you don't celebrate Christmas, happy December 25th plus whatever holidays you do celebrate! As always, I'll be doing a noice holiday retrospective of the current state of the blog and myself. And I've gotta say, things are going pretty well.

I'm at about the point where I've become very familiar with about 90% of Taylor Swift's music, maybe even up to 95% depending on what you count as canon. Right now I usually listen to her default albums, meaning I'm less familiar with the deluxe editions. I've listened to all the deluxe editions multiple times but they don't usually come to my mind right away when I think of Taylor's songs. There are only a couple music sources I haven't dived into at all, and I will be doing that soon.

One of the bigger projects I've been working on is a ranking of all of Taylor's songs. It's a pretty big undertaking and I want to make sure I get it right, so don't expect it for another few weeks. No doubt some of the rankings will move around, plus the way I evaluate "best album" is highly subjective, meaning that trying to rank albums from a list of ranked songs is pretty difficult. That said, even in the early stages there are some pretty clear result that I feel confident will remain true throughout the rest of the process. I can pretty easily split Taylor's albums into two groups that I like to refer to as "The Good Albums" and "The Great Albums". The order withing groups is still being decided, so without further ado here are "The Good Albums", in no particular order.

• Fearless
• Taylor Swift
• Red

These albums are all good and have some great hits between them! They actually all have very different reasons for not breaking into the next group that I will give the most basic summary of now.

• Fearless: This album has a few great songs and a bunch of below average songs. Interestingly, Fearless has the best worst song out of any of Taylor's albums, but also has the second worst best song. What I mean by that terminology is that the lowest ranked song from Fearless is ranked higher than any of the other album's lowest ranked songs, while it's highest ranked song is lower than all but one other album's highest ranked song. Make sense? Good, me neither. Anyways, my big takeaway from my initial look at the data is that most of the songs on this albums are "good", but it takes a lot more than "good" to be one of the top Taylor Swift albums.
• Taylor Swift: The better half of Taylor Swift is on par with most of the other albums, but the worse half is by far the worst of any album. The biggest issue with Taylor Swift is that it has so many duds that fall so far short of the good songs on the album. That said, there are more great songs on this album than Fearless, so that's at least something.
• Red: I know I said this was in no order, but Red is the only album that I see any chance of moving between categories from now until when the final list is unveiled. There aren't as many bad songs on this album as I first thought, and some songs are a lot better than I first gave them credit for. That said, there are still some issues I have with the songwriting in Red that I will be addressing in future posts that make it outclassed by the future albums.

Here are what I call "The Great Albums", again in no particular order. However unlike the previous category (the order of which I don't see changing much), the albums in this category are incredibly close in quality.

• Reputation
• Speak Now
• 1989

• Reputation: There is a very serious argument for this being the best Taylor Swift album, and no I'm not kidding. There aren't as many big hit stunners as there are on Taylor's other albums, but the average song quality of this album is by far the best. There are only 1 or 2 songs that can even be argued to be bad, and the rest fall into the category I refer to as "very good". If you value consistency then this album is outclassed by none.
• Speak Now: This is tricky, because you're basically about to read the same paragraph twice. According to their distribution in the rankings, Speak Now and 1989 are the most similar albums out there. These two albums have the majority of my top 10 songs but are also way more represented in the bottom 10 compared to Reputation. This makes trying to choose between them extremely difficult, since it comes down to pure opinion more than any of the rest of the rankings on this list, and that's really saying something.
• 1989: This is tricky, because you're basically about to read the same paragraph twice. According to their distribution in the rankings, Speak Now and 1989 are the most similar albums out there. These two albums have the majority of my top 10 songs but are also way more represented in the bottom 10 compared to Reputation. This makes trying to choose between them extremely difficult, since it comes down to pure opinion more than any of the rest of the rankings on this list, and that's really saying something.

Again, I will be going into much greater detail when I reveal my finalized list but that is at least 3 weeks away. Also, I failed to recognize this 11 days ago but I am more than halfway done and that's pretty insane! I have pretty much gotten accustomed to my life at this point and as much as I want to listen to podcasts and other music, 39 days doesn't even feel like that long at this point. It feels especially short considering how many more topics I want to cover before February! Here's a short list of topics that you'll have the privilege of looking forward to in the next few weeks.

• The aforementioned Taylor Swift song ranking list
• Taylor Swift's role in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
• Reviews of some of Taylor's biggest hits (I Knew You Were Trouble, Tim McGraw, Mean, Gorgeous, and more!)
• Some fun in the YouTube comments section 
• Taylor Swift's stadium tour on Netflix which will be available in less than a week!

When people hear about my blog, they always ask how many Taylor Swift songs there are (I usually say 86), then immediately ask if I am doing one song a day plus a few other posts. If you have been keeping up with me then you will surely know that this isn't the case, and as we enter the final third of this blog it has become more clear than ever that I won't be able to talk about all of Taylor's songs, or even likely come close.

Because of this, I think I will be focusing more on songs I like in the remaining 40 days rather than critiquing ones I don't enjoy. There are still some major songs that infuriate me I have yet to mention but for the most part I would only be repeating myself. So, unless I feel there is real purpose behind it I will be trying to shit on Taylor's less good work a little bit less.

Oh man, there is so much to talk about and I can't wait! I hope you're excited as I am! I have stumbled across some pretty incredible stuff the last few weeks and I can't wait to share it with all of you. 

See you tomorrow,

-C