Okay, back to Taylor Swift. One more post! And sorry about that pause. But actually-- no!-- let's talk about that, too: thirty-one songs is just so many songs! I mean, even taking several days to blog about them, it's starting to feel like a marathon! Why didn't she just save half of these for another album in a year or two? I mean, maybe the music is just pouring out of her and she can't stop it. But at some point you need a good editor who knows how to cut stuff! And I NEVER feel like that! But I'm feeling it now. I really am.
But okay, enough griping. Let's look at the remaining songs!
"Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus" This may have been the point in the album (as well as my blogging) when I began to lose interest. This song is fine. It's fine! But it honestly sounds almost exactly like half the other songs on the album. So much so that I can barely remember it now! It does at least give us the line, "You needed me but you needed drugs more" so we can fully understand what went wrong with her relationship with Matt Healy. So that's nice. And, let me just say again-- I like the song! I just can hardly tell it apart from the other songs. It's a weird problem to have!
"How Did It End?" Okay, so here I don't even understand myself, because this song also sounds remarkably similar, but I LOVE this one. It might be my favorite song on the entire album. I love the piano gently rolling in the background. I love comparing the death of this relationship to an actual death. I love how desperately sad it is. I love everyone gossiping and talking to their husbands and cousins wanting to know what happened, and the idea of Taylor wandering in circles in the shops like she was lost. Because that's exactly how a breakup feels! And when she sings, "My beloved ghost and me, sitting in a tree, D-Y-I-N-G" it's so morbid and awful and yet, it's exactly right, too. It reminds me of the opening to Mystery, this show on PBS that my mom always watched while she ironed (and which terrified me as a kid-- why are the detectives ignoring the weird moaning woman up on that fence???). I love this song so much. A+
"So High School" I was ready to love this song, but I don't. I don't much like it at all. I think, since it comes right before "I Hate It Here" it would be about how awful high school is-- I was prepared for another kind of "Down Bad" song, but instead it's glorifying it, talking about how she feels giddy and in love hanging out with (presumably) Travis Kelce while he and his friends play Grand Theft Auto and the whole song just makes me feel embarrassed for a bunch of 30-year-olds playing video games together and thinking this somehow romantic. Gross. If you want romance, I'll need it to be anything but high school. All the interior rhymes are nice, but... {Swipes left and removes from playlist}
"I Hate It Here" I have mixed feelings about this song. The opening line is hilarious ("Tell me something awful, like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy"). I'm taking off points because this is the second time she talks about being a precocious child (it was already mentioned in "But Daddy I Love Him" with the line, "Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all") and repetition like that on the same album is annoying. The main gist of the song is that there's difficulties in every time period-- we want to romanticize the past and forget what was hard about it-- and I can totally get behind that idea (also explored in a fun way in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris!). But Taylor goes into story mode, telling us that she and her friends would play a game where they would pick a different time to play and she tells us, "I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid" and I'm not sure where I stand on this. Because if she actually said that, that's hilarious! (And honestly, based on everyone's reactions of looking down because she made it not fun, this totally might have happened. I can definitely picture it. And quite frankly, if this is true, then awkward teenage Taylor is a riot!) But if she didn't actually do this, then it's just a weird story she made up to sound more enlightened, and that's just annoying. I need someone to fact-check this song for me so I can decide whether or not I actually like it!!! Aside from that, the actual song is another one that's fine but fairly forgettable. Make of that what you will.
"thanK you aIMee" This one bugs me. She's talking about her enemy as if we won't know who it is, but then capitalized the letters KIM so we can be sure this is going back to her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. But honestly? They just got divorced and Kanye's mental health has fallen off a cliff and Taylor taking mean swipes at Kim when she's clearly down just feels mean. I'm quite certain that Taylor Swift is not a very nice person (no one makes it big in these industries by being nice), but I don't want to see it quite so blatantly. Be nice, Taylor, you're on top of the world with your Eras Tour and there's no reason not to be. (I do appreciate the lyric when she says that everyone knows her mother is a saintly woman, but she used to say she wished that Aimee (Kim) was dead-- any time we can bring Mama Swift into the narrative it's a good thing!)
"I Look in People's Windows" I was ready to like this one because-- full confession here-- I love looking in people's windows. I promise, not in a creepy way! I'm not hiding in anyone's bushes peering in, seeing something I shouldn't see. But if I'm walking by and I can see into your house, I will totally look and check out what color you've painted your dining room or if you have built-in bookshelves. I love seeing that stuff! So I saw the title of this song and I was like, "All right! Taylor and I have something in common!" I'm here for that! But the actual song is... kind of boring? And, once again, sounds too much like all the other songs. I appreciate the line near the end, "Like I'm some deranged weirdo" but the song itself is another pass.
"The Prophecy" Finally, another song I really like! This one is great. Full of longing, beautiful and haunting. My only gripe is the line, "I got cursed like Eve got bitten." Does Taylor think Eve got bitten by the snake in the Garden of Eden, because that's not at all how the story goes. Someone, sign her up for a bible study class! I love the line, "A greater woman stays cool, but I howl like a wolf at the moon." We all have that inner wolf who just wants to howl at the injustice of it all. Nice imagery, Taylor!
"Cassandra" This song is fine, but once again she's taking swipes at people and it seems unnecessary to me. In this case she's mad at her family (!!!) and the "Christian chorus line" who "All said nothing; blood's thick but nothing like a payroll, Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul." I mean, I get the anger, but also, you gotta love people who hate you for your religion but also are mad that you aren't praying for them? Like Billy Joel in "Only the Good Die Young" or that amazing episode of Seinfeld where Elaine finds out (to her horror) that her boyfriend is a Christian... Yeah, whatever, Taylor.
"Peter" Another good one! I think the only other time Taylor Swift has referenced Peter Pan is when she sings the three words "Peter losing Wendy" in "Cardigan" and really, this is a story she should be delving into. This one is nicely done, I like the piano and everything.
"The Bolter" Another one I quite like. Although-- I'd been listening to it cleaned up and accidentally got the not-clean version playing on my Alexa and was a bit shocked! This song wasn't one that I would have assumed had F-words in it. But also, once I knew they were there, it made the song more powerful. (Same thing happened with the song "Maroon" actually.) I usually don't like swearing, but if you're going to swear, let it at least mean something. But yes, make sure you get the clean version if your kids are around! Anyway, I happened to see some article about how this is based on an actual person, Lady Idina Sackville. When I assumed it was autobiographical I didn't much care for it, but I like it better knowing this. And Ms. Sackville sounds like a wild ride of a person! This is a good song. (It does use the word precocious again. Did she just learn this word? Why is it popping up in all of her songs all of a sudden?)
"Robin" I guess this was written about one of Taylor's friend's children? It's a sweet sentiment, but it doesn't do much for me. And I honestly can't quite explain why not? Because I want to like it, but I feel like it doesn't ever really go anywhere and it hints too much at stuff that I don't understand, so I just don't get it. It's apparently about her long-time collaborator and producer Aaron Desner's youngest son. But it has lines like, "Buried down deep and out of your reach, the secret we all vowed to keep it, from you In sweetness" Um, what??? What is happening here? Is this actually Taylor's secret kid? What's the secret??? (It might just be the secret that being a grown up is hard. I'm honestly not sure. But it sounds like a bigger deal than that?) I don't expect Taylor to explain everything about all her songs to everyone, but she is kind of known for her Easter eggs, so when I'm left with all these clues that don't point to anything, it feels like a letdown. I want to know more! And yes, with all her Easter eggs, she totally did this to herself, so I don't feel bad being so nosy. In any case, this song is just kind of boring. {Skip.}
And finally-- finally-- two hours later, we get to the last track
"The Manuscript" We made it! We got to the end! And this track, sadly, is another pass for me. I read what others thought of it-- people who can't listen without crying, and people pointing out that this really explains what Taylor Swift is doing with all of her life stories, turning them into something that everyone can relate to and cry with, and that's actually a really beautiful thing. But the song itself feels like not much of a song at all. Thinking about it, I can't actually remember the tune. If it's so barebones it's not even there, what's the point?
Ugh. I feel like I've been so negative. It's weird because there are so many songs I enjoy from this album, but you're never going to love every single track on an album, and in this case, it felt like this time she wrote so many songs, but she managed to multiply her mistakes a bit more than she multiplied her successes. And so many of the songs all sounded the same. A few of them definitely could have been cut, or saved in the vault to be reworked for another day (or, rather, another album). I don't hate the album, I just think it could have been a lot more succinct.
Okay, back to just talking about my family again! 😂
No comments:
Post a Comment