Day 71: Mine

There is a lot of value in songs with multiple layers to dissect and discover. I typically enjoy these songs more than ones with clearly mapped out story lines, but this is by no means always true. Taylor Swift's music is a great way to illustrate this since she has made many songs with varying levels of clarity and hidden meaning. Having subtext in a song makes it more enjoyable to listen to multiple times since there are always new things to come back to, but that's not what we're discussing today. Instead, we will be talking about one of Taylor's biggest hits of all time, Mine from her 2010 album Speak Now.

Between the relatively linear plot and the very clearly enunciated vocals, you really only need to listen to this song once to understand what it's about. Sure, you can read more into certain lines but for the most part what you see is what you get. But what this song lacks in depth it more than makes up for in general overall quality.

First, I want to make an important distinction. Just because there's not seven layers of hidden subtext in this song that doesn't mean it isn't saying anything interesting. It's hard to write a song with a deep meaning that takes many listens to interpret, it's harder to write one with an equally interesting message that only requires one listen to understand. This is truly how Mine exceeds, by taking a complex idea usually difficult to put to words and making it crystal clear.

What's even harder is to communicate this idea without being too obvious. Taylor never outright says "Love made me overcome my emotional obstacles" even though that's obviously her message. Instead she gives us a scenario where the most unlikely person falls in love and gets over her baggage, telling the audience "If this wreck can find love then so can you!"

The music in this song is also fantastic. Listen to this song focusing on the main electric guitar and you can hear how it highlights each emotion and smooths the transitions without ever overshadowing Taylor. The use of secondary vocals in this song is also done very well. In some songs it feels like the sections that get background vocals are just the ones that sound good with them, but Mine really takes care to add them at lyrically important sections.

Taylor has made many songs that can roughly fit into the "finding love made me feel complete" category, ranging all the way from her oldest album to her newest, but this one may just be the best. It doesn't take any extraordinary risks, it just executes every Taylor Swift trope near perfectly. Oh also I hate the music video for this song. Dont @ me.

See you tomorrow,

-C 

Day 70: Fearless or Brave?

While listening to an old review of Taylor's second album, Fearless, released by Big Machine Records I stumbled across this old quote from Taylor about how she chose the title for the album.

"Fearless, to me, I thought about it before I titled the album that. Because you really have to make sure that it explains this body of work that you're putting out, the last two years of stories that you want to tell. So I thought about it, and I thought about what my own personal definition of the word 'Fearless' is. And to me, 'Fearless' isn't not having any fears. It's not that you're not afraid of anything. I think that being 'Fearless' means that you have a lot of fears but you jump anyway."

I can't decide if this is genius or stupid. On one hand it's a great way to frame the songs on the album and I think that it makes a lot of sense. Taking the leap even though you have doubts is a truly admirable thing to do after all. But I just can't stop thinking about how Taylor is, on some level, just kinda wrong here. Taylor, the word you're looking for is "brave", or "courageous". Fearless means you're not afraid, not overcoming your fears. I know language is fluid and you can use words however you want, I'm just saying that the justification you gave for the word choice seems a little off.

The real question is this: does it even matter? Well, maybe. If the use of the word makes sense in context then no, it doesn't matter that Taylor's definition is technically incorrect. So long as she uses it in a way that makes sense to the audience then there's no problem and my quips just transform me into that annoying ass kid from The Polar Express.

"wEll iF yOu lOoK iN tHe dIcTiOnArY yOu'LL sEe hOw wRoNg yOu aRe"

So to see if it works let's look at Fearless, but this time the song. How does the song use the lyric?

"And I don't know how it gets better than this
You take my hand and drag me head first, Fearless
"And I don't know why but with you I'd dance
In a storm in my best dress, Fearless"

Behold audience, the chorus! But, before we can dive in too deep we need to recognize what this song is about. It's about a romantic date very early in a relationship. Wow, that was easy!

Okay, maybe there's a little more to it than that. Yes, they're on a date, but how does Taylor feel going into the date? If we can nail this down then we'll be able to better contextualize the chorus, makin' our brains real big in the process. 

"And you know I wanna ask you to dance right there
In the middle of the parking lot"

Okay now we're getting somewhere! Taylor wants to dance in a parking lot, which is clearly an awful idea. The ground is too hard, plus there's 2000 lb death machines being driven by old grannies who will hit you and not even notice. So, Taylor is being tempted to do things she knows aren't a good idea while she's around this hunky Harry.

"We're drivin' down the road
I wonder if you know
I'm tryin' so hard not to get caught up now
But you're just so cool
Run your hands through your hair
Absent mindedly makin' me want you"

Take notice of the first three lines here; they're the most important. Taylor can feel herself being pulled in and really wants to just fall but is also trying not to get swept off her feet too hard. Okay I think now we can revisit the chorus. Keep these pieces of into in mind, as they are actually super important!

"And I don't know how it gets better than this
You take my hand and drag me head first, Fearless
"And I don't know why but with you I'd dance
In a storm in my best dress, Fearless"

Behold, the chorus...again! Knowing what we now know we can deduce that Taylor has guards she normally keeps up in situations like these, but this dude is just so great that her walls fall down. She initially had fears but she decided to follow her heart and ignore them. Therefore, she is, in some sense, legitimately fearless. The way she used the phrase not only makes perfect sense in context, it even fits with what she said in the interview!  It's almost like she knows what she's doing or something!

So in the end I'm just a lonely nitpicking nerd. I guess some things never really change.

See you tomorrow,

-C

Day 69: reputation

Fair warning: This post ended up being ridiculously long. That being said, if you didn't come here for analysis of Taylor Swift's works that go way too deep then you're in the wrong place. You may now proceed.

Like all art, music can be boiled down to the most basic building blocks of tone and theme. For music, theme is usually contained in the lyrics; it's what the song is about. Tone, on the other hand, is how the abstract ideas are presented to the audience. Two pieces can have a very similar theme while having wildly different tones and vice versa. After a few days of review, I can say that the best part of Taylor Swift's Reputation stadium tour on Netflix is how the tone and theme are always both so craftily designed and matched to create a cohesive experience. Today I'll be comprehensively going through the entire show and briefly reviewing each performance while also tying in the changing tonal and thematic threads running through the performance.

But first, I want to point out one specific example of a concrete example of how tone and theme work, and to do this I will be examining Taylor's performance of Dancing With Our Hands Tied. She does the entire song using nothing but an acoustic guitar and her voice, but it feels perfectly natural. I've listened to Reputation more times than I could ever hope to count in the last couple months, but I somehow couldn't even recognize the song at first. After stripping the song's more electronic exterior Taylor recognized that it had potential to live in more than one genre. You may think "so what, she just picked the song that you could play acoustic guitar to and rolled with it", but that's exactly the point. Taylor recognized that this strategy wouldn't work equally well with every song, so she selected the track where a tone change would be most appropriate.

Changing the music doesn't change a song's theme, only which aspects are emphasized. The ideas behind the lyrics are the same, but the way it's presented is vastly different. Hence, (mostly) same theme different tone. The theme of Dancing With Our Hands Tied is of nostalgia over a relationship constricted by the world around them. If you read my post about State Of Grace from a few days ago them you'll understand me saying how this sounds like a blend of the overarching themes of two albums: Reputation and Red. This is why when, during this concert, Taylor changed the music to match a tone that more heavily emphasized the nostalgic aching aspect of the song, it ended up sounding like a song from Red. The theme was already there, all that she had to do was tweak the rest of the sound in the song so that it matched it. You may think that an acoustic guitar is too vague to be matched specifically to Red and that would be fair, but not all guitar music is created equal. Taylor's first four albums all make wide use of guitars, but in very different ways. Keep this in mind, as the rest of the concert plays with these ideas a lot. None of the rest of the sections will be given as much depth as this one; I'll just be using this terminology to more quickly review each one. Now, this has already gotten pretty long so here we go.

1: ...Ready For It?
The concert starts with ...Ready For It?, a pretty obvious choice. It quickly ramps up the intensity, is the first song on the album, and has lines that go perfectly with the opening of a concert. And it's not just it's name!

"Baby let the games begin"

Yup. Really the only place for this song to go is the beginning of the set. It also lets the crowd get an introduction to all the dancers briefly before having more in depth roles later in the show. Moving on!

2: I Did Something Bad
Really just an extension of the previous song, this really keeps the "reputation" part of Reputation going. I like how intense the beginning is, Taylor doesn't get that many chances to show off vocals that intense, so it's nice to see. The lightning effects were also pretty shocking. I'm not sorry.

3: Gorgeous
A pretty major shift in both tone and theme, so Taylor makes it happen by first addressing the crowd in a more intimate way. It'll get more intense later, but this is a good starting point. This is also where Taylor explicitly introduces some of the other performers. They won't be as front and center for the rest of the show, especially the backup singers, so it's nice knowing where the voices are coming from, especially since for the people who actually went to the concert and don't have the benefit of Netflix cams.

4: Style/Love Story/You Belong With Me
A nice medley of some variously old hits. The lighting is pretty well done, and it's also cool to see the band. Not much else to say except how cute Taylor's interactions with the band members are. Some of them look a little older than I expected, I wonder how long they have been playing music for Taylor.

Okay I just looked it up and three of those guys have been playing with Taylor for over a decade. Hot diggity dawg. Let's keep it moving!

5: Look What You Made Me Do
I really liked the outfits in this section. And hey, they even had a literal "tilted stage". That's "funny".

6: End Game
Good follow-up to the previous song that only slightly changes the tone. Considering the next track, an intermediate was needed, while the wardrobe didn't need to change at all. Endgame was a good choice to separate these two tracks, since it has a similar enough tone to both of them to make the transition smooth.

7: King Of My Heart
One of my favorites from the show. I already raved yesterday about it so I won't bore you with more details that I love, but I will say that it has among the best dancing, interaction with the dancers, use of set pieces, and vocals from Taylor. I'm having fun just watching it! Which is the point I guess. Here's that drum gif again if you missed it before. I personally can't stop watching it.

Thumpity thump thump

8: Delicate
Notice again how Taylor has a major shift in both tone and theme here, so she prefaces it with a short, intimate monologue with the audience. This is also when she flies over the audience. This is among the weaker vocal performances in the concert, but I think it's justified. After all, Delicate's tone compared to the other songs is more, well, delicate. It's a difficult song to scream, so it's not going to translate to the medium of a concert as well. So let's make up for it with the power of flight! Hey, I'm down.

9: Shake It Off
Will Taylor ever not do this song in a concert? Unlike the previous song, this one translates especially well to a concert form. The choreography is also lots of fun here. There's not a lot more to say, except...hold on. Is that who I think it is?

No, not the celebrity guests! Do you see him there, on the far left? That is most definitely Meekus from the hit movie Zoolander starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson!

Oh my god, it is you! I thought you died in that awful gas station explosion! I guess he somehow survived and became one of Taylor Swift's backup dancers! Cool.

10: Dancing With Our Hands Tied
Yeah, I'm still not over Meekus being here. Plus I already talked about this one! Just give me a minute!

11: All Too Well
Okay, I'm over Meekus (for now). This song is really good. It's also super impressive that people can belt all the lyrics without trying, because this song is not only super long but also super wordy. I get why though, it's a beautiful song and the way Taylor talks about how it's changed is pretty touching. It's probably the best non-single from Red, and there's a case for best song overall from that album. I'm not sure if I buy that but I can see it. Anyways, good performance and it's nice seeing the occasional song from previous albums that weren't smash hits. Am I bitter that it wasn't Better Than Revenge? Maybe, but I'll live.

12: Blank Space
Hey, nice dress. Hold on, when did you put that on? You've been wearing it since the end of Shake It Off? But how? I've been bamboozled!

That's not fair. Anyways, this song is way better in concert than I expected. It's already a great song, so seeing it done so well "live" made me happy.

13: Dress
Like Delicate, this song is difficult to scream so it's among the weaker vocally but visually this section is just like, the dopest. Considering how this is one of my favorite songs from the album I enjoyed watching it a lot. The camera usually doesn't stray far from Taylor, so seeing a more detailed view of the visuals they put together was worth it, even if it meant seeing Taylor a little less. I also never realized how similar the tone between this song and Blank Space is, which is why this section of the show blended so well.

14: Bad Blood/Should've Said No
Another lift? Ge'ez now I'm just nervous. Okay, I'm gonna be honest. I don't really like Bad Blood that much, but pairing it Should've Said No brought a smile to my face. This is a perfect example of songs that have the same theme being changed slightly so that they fit together. If these songs are similar enough in theme then it works, and it really works here. I never would have guessed this pairing would work, but it turns out some people understand Taylor's music even better than me.

15: Don't Blame Me
After another peak of intensity they take a quick break so that when this song starts it isn't too jarring. The costumes are really weird for this song and I dig it. Vocally this has to be one of the best performances from Taylor; she really nails every single part of this song and then some. Good shit.

16: Long Live/New Year's Day
The perfect mashup. While the previous union was through theme, this one is more through tone. These songs have little to do with each other on paper other than being about a romance. Rather, they go together well because they sound the same and treat their subject matter in the same way. The gentle way these songs are presented bounce off each other very well, and the piano brings it all together very well. And the way Taylor pauses and smiles when the audience proclaims it's unifying love to her is just precious. I honestly think it's genuine but I don't care if it isn't because even this aside goes with the tone of the songs she was singing. Wow.

17: Getaway Car
Before this song started there was a super weird section about a girl with not just a broken heart, but apparently a broken soul. It's really...something. Honestly Taylor is way too big of a nerd and just blew me away with this 3000 IQ play. And if I recall there was something about time machines?

Oh shit, I actually remembered that correctly? ...Huh. So going back to the actual song, it's a lot of fun and even though it wasn't the best vocal performance (it was just fine), it was just way too much fun not to enjoy. To be honest I was kinda hoping the concert would end here because of the "goodbye" but life can't always be so simple.

18: Call It What You Want
The fancy part imagery seems pretty standard but ends up working really well a couple songs later. You'll see. Also, you can't fool me Meekus! Now that I know your secret it'll take more than a costume change to fool me!

But yeah, cool number. Next!

19: We Are Never Even Getting Back Together/This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Seriously, is there a possible mashup with a longer title? This is 2 songs with 15 words, one of which is a contraction! So yeah, I swear I thought they forgot about This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which I was initially excited about. It's not actively awful but I'm not the biggest fan of that song so I was initially skeptical when I saw it was the finale number. But it totally works! It's probably the best presentation possible for this song, and the ending with the fountain is a great time. I personally thought they went in way too hard on the laugh but whatever.

Wow, that's a lot of songs. And apparently Taylor Swift didn't know what a 767 is! I guess I'm biased though, speaking as someone from Seattle interested in engineering. Fun stuff! There will still be few more posts about songs from Reputation, and I will likely use this performance as an evaluative tool for a few of the songs. We will see! Anyways I know this was a long one so thanks for reading! Have a good one!

See you tomorrow,
-C

Day 68: Today

Welcome to 2019! Today I will be discussing New Year's Day, the final song on Reputation. I know, I'm hilarious. Despite it being a single from the album, this song typically flies under the radar compared to it's contemporaries. That's a darn shame too, because this song is just delightful. It shows how being with someone in the less glamorous moments can be even more romantic than your stereotypical new year's kiss.

I'm not going to spend forever discussing this song because it does a great job of being exactly what it sounds like. Rather than trying to be memorable through a cryptic message, this song retains it's novelty through a tone unique not just among songs on Reputation, but all of Taylor Swift's music. It's a refreshing breath of fresh air that helps to remind just how flexible of an artist Taylor can be. 

"Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you"

This line is the perfect symbol to represent the entire song. A simple idea presented in an elegant way. It'll get stuck in your head if you're not careful. The way Taylor repeats it transforms it from just a line in the song to a mantra like status. Sure, it has meaning on it's own but after hearing it enough it's meaning becomes the song as a whole. Does that even make any sense? Maybe not, but it feels true and isn't that what really matters?

"Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere"

First, I want to say how remarkably similar this line is to one from Enchanted. 

"Please don't be in love with someone else

Please don't have somebody waiting on you"

Sure, the lines are similar but they're also present in very similar locations in the song and repeated in nearly the same way. Freaky! I don't know if it is a reference, a songwriting habit, or just a coincidence but I thought it was notable. 

So yeah, that's kinda all. Great song, very relaxing. Apparently listening to it on repeat for 30 minutes results in strange blog posts. How about that.

See you tomorrow,

-C