Taylor Swift - 1989 (Taylor's Version) [Oct 27] + Re-Recordings
- Thread starter Babyface
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I still can't believe Peace was written by the same artist as ME! and London Boy dd
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She let herself down bad with Me! It truly lingers in my assessment of her to this day, and her so-called genius will always be tainted by the fact that she wrote it, recorded it, and released it as her lead single. It tarneshed the entire Lover era for sure because the album is pretty good apart from that song. She’s still 99% genius though.
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Also, I see a lot of dismissal for Lover (which as a piece of work is debatable, but opinions are that ..), but from a commercial point of view... It did a lot of good for Taylor. ME is an awful song and atrocious choice of a first single, but the album in general did great on streaming. And she later built on that with folklore/evermore and the re-recordings, but Lover was important for that path.
On a personal note, I will always have a soft spot for Lover because of Cornelia Street, Afterglow, It's Nice To Have a Friend, Afterglow and Daylight. I love them
On a personal note, I will always have a soft spot for Lover because of Cornelia Street, Afterglow, It's Nice To Have a Friend, Afterglow and Daylight. I love them
Yes to all of this.
However, ''I promise that you'll never find another like me'' is a line that comes to my head in random occasions and I sing often.
Could've been a 10 second intro to the album.
I think the problem with Lover is that a lot o people lost interest in everything after ME!. I rediscovered the album after folklore, i don't think i even listened it in full before and Taylor is one of my favorite artists ever. Like how are we supposed to know that an album with a lead single like that has songs like False God in it??? It makes no sense.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Lover. I hope Scooter decides to buy it so we can get Lover (Taylor’s Version) with Cruel Summer as the lead this time.
It's hers since it was the first album under a contract with a new label.
He/Him
I was in New York the day Lover dropped - by Sunday I made damn sure I was walking wistfully down Cornelia Street pretending I was in a music video. I would also recommend listening to It's Nice To Have A Friend while walking through an eerily empty Times Sq at 4:30am. I will be a Lover apologist forever!!!
I'm always perplexed by how underappreciated "Soon You'll Get Better" tends to be even in these Lover-revisionist conversations.
As a whole I think Lover has a much better hit-rate than reputation, but they're two sides of the same coin: unconvincingly packaged, workmanlike collections defined by a confusion about how she wanted to play the role of the world's biggest popstar, where she let her quality-control and instincts as a writer dip hard. They house plenty of good-to-great tracks between them, but I don't see why anyone would have much time for them as bodies of work in 2023. I don't think Midnights is an excellent album by any means but in a way it perfects the kind of album those two set out to be.
As a whole I think Lover has a much better hit-rate than reputation, but they're two sides of the same coin: unconvincingly packaged, workmanlike collections defined by a confusion about how she wanted to play the role of the world's biggest popstar, where she let her quality-control and instincts as a writer dip hard. They house plenty of good-to-great tracks between them, but I don't see why anyone would have much time for them as bodies of work in 2023. I don't think Midnights is an excellent album by any means but in a way it perfects the kind of album those two set out to be.
he/him
I think it’s the underuse of The Chicks.
I think both reputation and Lover are easier to swallow now that we're so far away from how utterly detestable and annoying she was at the time, but both are far below the calibre of songwriter that she's vaunted as by every single publication and honestly, Midnights too suffers from the same kind of dead-ending of subjects to sing about. I genuinely don't think reputation has anything worth returning to, while Lover at least has some songs that, in retrospect, represented the way out of the creative cul-de-sac she had found herself in. Midnights doesn't house the same clanging lows from either album but it's also ridiculously low on highlights. You can put it on and just forget it's even playing. The meek, pillowy electro-pop is so boring after a certain amount of time.
he/him
The single choices for Lover, title track aside, were as rotted as the art direction. She lowkey set herself up on that one
He/Him
Lover, for me, was the first time she creatively tread water. All of the soundscapes on the album she had explored in previous expeditions, almost always she’d done a better job the first time around too.
There’s just nothing that is essential to her discography here. Cruel Summer comes close but it, like many other tracks on the album, is really just a kaleidoscopic regurgitation of Getaway Car and Out Of The Woods before it. It bops, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of her very best.
And the less said about the nadir of her discography the better. How it was recorded, let alone made the lead single for her ‘comeback’? What was she thinking?
But even beyond the singles and much of the filler there’s just something so bland about it, it’s a body of work with basically nothing interesting or coherent to say with nothing more tying it together than a focus grouped, cotton candy, pastel hellscape. A hellscape, by the way, that relied heavily on rainbows and still managed to feel borderline homophobic in how aesthetically displeasing it was.
Yes I do think the album, or something very similar, needed to happen as a palette cleanser post-Reputation, so I try to forgive it for being so mediocre. I clearly have not been successful in my endeavour. I shall keep trying.
But at the end of the day it did help bridge us to what came next. And from a brand rebuilding perspective the era was a huge success. So we have to thank it for that, if nothing else. I like to think the fact she knows we all hate Me, going so far as for the first time in her career to openly admit defeat by scorching all traces of “Hey kids, spelling is fun!” from the internet (and refusing to acknowledge it during the current tour), is a huge part of what enabled one of the most incredible course corrects in the history of time that followed. Say what you will about her relentlessness, she’s nothing if not astute to diminishing returns and knowing keenly when it’s time to chart out a new course. Thank fuck she did.
There’s just nothing that is essential to her discography here. Cruel Summer comes close but it, like many other tracks on the album, is really just a kaleidoscopic regurgitation of Getaway Car and Out Of The Woods before it. It bops, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of her very best.
And the less said about the nadir of her discography the better. How it was recorded, let alone made the lead single for her ‘comeback’? What was she thinking?
But even beyond the singles and much of the filler there’s just something so bland about it, it’s a body of work with basically nothing interesting or coherent to say with nothing more tying it together than a focus grouped, cotton candy, pastel hellscape. A hellscape, by the way, that relied heavily on rainbows and still managed to feel borderline homophobic in how aesthetically displeasing it was.
Yes I do think the album, or something very similar, needed to happen as a palette cleanser post-Reputation, so I try to forgive it for being so mediocre. I clearly have not been successful in my endeavour. I shall keep trying.
But at the end of the day it did help bridge us to what came next. And from a brand rebuilding perspective the era was a huge success. So we have to thank it for that, if nothing else. I like to think the fact she knows we all hate Me, going so far as for the first time in her career to openly admit defeat by scorching all traces of “Hey kids, spelling is fun!” from the internet (and refusing to acknowledge it during the current tour), is a huge part of what enabled one of the most incredible course corrects in the history of time that followed. Say what you will about her relentlessness, she’s nothing if not astute to diminishing returns and knowing keenly when it’s time to chart out a new course. Thank fuck she did.
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I mean, she's a terrible visual artist. Every single album has had visuals with the taste level of a five minute Pintrest browse no matter how good the music has been.
Yeah, I like Lover and think it's a good album, but it's frustrating to think it could've been so much better with some changes. I think some of the songs were there as a form of strategy rather than quality, which is not the best mindset for making an album....I always felt ME! was some sort of attempt to make a new Shake It Off, and to "brighten things up" after the darkness of reputation. I'm glad she threw out that mental checklist from her album making process.
It also has some gems that I think helped paved the way for folklore/evermore....songs like Death By A Thousand Cuts and It's Nice to Have a Friend where she realized that she could start writing from other peoples' perspectives (and also experimented a little bit sonically).
I think she learned some valuable lessons from the reception to all of these. Midnights feels like her returning to the world she was in for rep and Lover, but with much better overall execution.
It also has some gems that I think helped paved the way for folklore/evermore....songs like Death By A Thousand Cuts and It's Nice to Have a Friend where she realized that she could start writing from other peoples' perspectives (and also experimented a little bit sonically).
I think she learned some valuable lessons from the reception to all of these. Midnights feels like her returning to the world she was in for rep and Lover, but with much better overall execution.