album Taylor Swift - 'THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT'

[Maroon legacy]

32 minutes ago, AnitaFalafel said:

I look in people's windows constantly blows me away. It's so... Odd, and beautiful, and heartbroken. It almost feels elevated against her usual catalogue, I just 

 

This whole album feels like a huge leap forward in regards to her usual music and I don't get how people aren't seeing this 

ILIPW on TTPD is like Glitch on Midnights

[Maroon legacy]

TTPD
MBOBHFT
SLL
BDILH
FOTS
GAS
WAOLOM
ICFH (NRIC)
ICDIWABH
TSMWEL
iggyb
COSOSOM
HDIE
SHH
IHIH
TYA
ILIPW

I see why people started shortening the titles like "I Can Fix Him" or "Chloe and oomfs", cause there's no way we're gonna remember all these abbreviations 

[Tusk]

Who's perched for the third version that's being released tonight?  

[Maroon legacy]

2 minutes ago, Tusk said:

Who's perched for the third version that's being released tonight?  

what version? 

[Mandalore]

3 minutes ago, Tusk said:

Who's perched for the third version that's being released tonight?  

[305]

1 hour ago, AnitaFalafel said:

I look in people's windows constantly blows me away. It's so... Odd, and beautiful, and heartbroken. It almost feels elevated against her usual catalogue, I just 

YES. I literally can't get over it, something about it is so addicting. 

I had a random thought about how she uses the word "more" in the line "What if you look up and your eyes met mine one more time", my brain wants to say "last" and I feel like most people would've written that line using "last" but using "more" adds to the feeling of longing and crazy feeling that comes when missing someone so dearly. It's just so intentional and it's crazy how just one word can change the meaning of a lyric. 

[Mandalore]

I Looke in People's Windows is even better when you consider it a euphemism for stalking an ex's social media. 

[Bethenny Frankel]

after almost two weeks now, I can't say the album has gotten any better for me. the only highlights for me still are fortnight, loml, down bad and so high school.

[Maroon legacy]

Is People Windows actually about social media? I find the original irl stalking concept way more romantic 

Edited May 2 by Maroon legacy

[Mandalore]

1 minute ago, Maroon legacy said:

Is People Windows actually about social media? I find the original irl stalking conception way more romantic 

It's not, it's just a funny thought I had of "looking in people's windows" in a modern realistic way. 

[Great Username]

I love this piece so much. Refreshing to see someone thoughtfully engaging with the songcraft and writing style. 

 

This dissection of The Manuscript made me appreciate it so much more

Quote

 

TTPD's most striking formal choices are found on The Manuscript, the full album's track-31 closer, which describes an experience with an older man that the narrator is haunted by and subsequently turns into art. I'm going to quote this one in full, because it's short and because you need to see the whole thing to understand the effect that caught my attention. Here's the first verse:

 

Now and then she re-reads the manuscript
Of the entire torrid affair
They compared their licenses
He said, "I'm not a donor but
I'd give you my heart if you needed it"
She rolled her eyes and said, "You're a professional"
He said, "No, just a good samaritan"
He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was
Soon they'd be pushing strollers
But soon it was over

 

The first two lines set up a structure you expect to hear filled in; the rest of the verse refuses that structure. The lyrics are—or seem—artless; the piano plunks tentatively around them in a way that reminds me of the intro to Ani Difranco's You Had Time, which she played haltingly on the piano, an instrument she rarely used.15 Dessner obviously knows how to play the piano, but he uses his skill to create a similar effect. The melody, to borrow again from Dave's post about modal songwriting, reminds me of what a cantor might sing at religious services: it's almost the barest amount of musicality that you could even call singing, the lines having a certain simple shape and stretching or contracting as needed to fit the words. She sings it slowly, uncertainly, as if she's making it up on the spot. Only with the last two lines do we start to see what we might expect in a song: that repeated soon, taking on a different emotional cast the second time; the slant rhyme of strollers/over, taking us away from this memory and into the rest of the song. Then comes the second verse:

 

In the age of him she wished she was thirty
And made coffee every morning in a French press
Afterward she only ate kids' cereal
And couldn't sleep unless it was in her mother's bed
Then she dated boys who were her own age
With dartboards on the backs of their doors
She thought about how he said
Since she was so wise beyond her years
Everything had been above board
She wasn't sure

 

The contrast between the French press and kids' cereal might be the most devastating image of her career. It's spare and simple and it tells the whole story in a few quick strokes. So small, so undignified. So much communicated through negative space: we don't know how old she is, but we know it's young enough to playact thirty like a kid playing with their parent's briefcase. The form remains loose, but it's growing more bounded. The lines are still shaggy but less unruly than before, except when memories of what he said to her intrude. That first contrast of during and after is lightly contained by the matching  short e's in press and bed; doors loops together with board and with that final, heartrending sure. Here we come to the bridge:

 

And the years passed like scenes of a show
The professor said to write what you know
Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward
Then the actors were hitting their marks
And the slow dance was alight with the sparks
And the tears fell in synchronicity with the score
And at last
She knew what the agony had been for

 

Now this sounds like a song: show/know/forward; marks/sparks; score/for. The melody arranges itself into something you could hum, still slow, still simple, but with an gentle swell. And finally, our coda:

 

The only thing that's left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I re-read the manuscript
But the story isn't mine anymore

 

Four neat, more or less pentametric lines, an easy ABAB rhyme scheme: that's a song. A song being sung in the first person, by a singer who knows how to make them. And in closing so gracefully, the artlessness of the introduction becomes legible. This is a song about turning pain into art; we can hear the story becoming a song from verse to verse, structure finding its way into the words over time. We can hear her refining her voice from beginning to end; we can hear that as she starts writing, the world begins to cohere. Near the end, we hear the first line of the song again—now and then she rereads the manuscript, identical but for the pronoun—but now, after the story has been given a shape, it no longer marks the beginning of something she she couldn't control; instead, it slots easily into place.

There's an interesting ambiguity to the final line of The Manuscript: the story isn't mine anymore. The story isn't hers—because she's shared it with the world, and it belongs to all of us now? Because by writing her way out of her pain, she became someone other than the girl in the story? Because, as BDM suggests in her post, by making her pain public she lost the ability to keep it to herself? Yes to all, I think. This is what she does; this is who she is; this is what she's left with and what she can count on, a truth so fundamental it goes beyond questions of good or bad. It is what it is. What that means depends on how you listen; I hear it a little differently each time.

 

 

Edited May 2 by Great Username

[Maroon legacy]

4 minutes ago, Bethenny Frankel said:

after almost two weeks now, I can't say the album has gotten any better for me. the only highlights for me still are fortnight, loml, down bad and so high school.

That's sad! I think you should buy the typewriter, an army doll, visit London, get abortion, escape from jail, move to Florida, mast*rbate, leap from the gallows, try to fix the man, handle your sh*t, send a message to the smallest man, find a new love and became the next IT girl so you could love other 13 tracks from the album!

And with Anthology... well, I guess you don't want to be in a cell with snakes and howl at the moon, so can't help you there! 

[Magickarp]

acoustic GAS kinda ate 

 

 

[ALA]

I'm still processing the Anthology tracks, am having a new fave every few days 

[Magickarp]

Are u gonna Marry, Kiss, or Kill me  (screaming and who he picked to Marry)

 

 

 

[Mr. Duff]

Let me flex I Hate It Here today. This hits so much when you are in a space of everything not working out that you just hate existing at that moment. Really a standout. I can actually here it fitting well with Evermore, like after Coney Island. I listened back to back to Coney Island and this... I felt so much bliss and pain at the same time.

 

Plus the melody of the chorus is just so good.

[Mandalore]

58 minutes ago, Magickarp said:

Are u gonna Marry, Kiss, or Kill me  (screaming and who he picked to Marry)

 

 

 

The fact that this interview was done at peak anti-Taylor sentiment aka late 2016. A real Taywarrior in my book 

 

It's only one of the lines she quotes directly from something he said others include "full throttle" "you already know babe" which he uses quite often. 

Edited May 2 by Mandalore

[Dear Reader]

King 

[Hunter_13]

This album only gets better and better 

[Kern]

So happy that Repuation and TTPD are 10/10 albums!

[Dear Reader]

my ex texted me apologizing and saying Taylor's album is good. I guess he must have heard The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived and decided to apologize 

[Magickarp]

Aaaahhh one of her best Bridges. Idk what old timey classic effect Aaron but on her voice, but it's narcotiX.

 

And I won't confess that I waited, but I let the lamp burn
As the men masqueraded, I hoped you'd return
With your feet on the ground, tell me all that you'd learned
'Cause love's never lost when perspective is earned
And you said you'd come and get me, but you were twenty-five
And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired
Lost to the "Lost Boys" chapter of your life
Forgive me, Peter, please know that I tried
To hold on (Hold on) to the days (To the days)
When you were mine
But the woman who sits by the window
Has turned out the light

[Mandalore]

14 minutes ago, Kern said:

So happy that Repuation and TTPD are 10/10 albums!

[PoisonedIvy]

5 hours ago, Starchild said:

Also if y'all want some cool reactors that grew to just love Taylor that were part of the "GP" these guys are amazing

 

especially the guy on the bottom, he's so fun to listen to 

 

 

 

I love the guys above, they actually engage with the lyrics. And the light skin one admits he's a high school dropout but that she forces him to expand his vocabulary and work on his critical thinking. I love that type of engagement with her catalogue 

[PoisonedIvy]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6eN4BGOFPw/?igsh=MTMzcGQybG93eGwxcw==
 

Taylornation posted this reel with Down Bad playing, but no one's mentioned it in here yet