i have a lot to think about with this album but at present my #1 thought is that i'm so glad she kept up the energy from London Boy for London Boy II, going from "yeah, i go to the 'pub' with the man i 'fancy,' to eat 'fish and chips' with his 'mates'" to "and where does this sad song take place? Why, on the Heath, of course, where *all* the sad english things happen"
I would just like to say that if intolerable golden brit Joe Alwuss keeps you waiting six years for a commitment and in some of that time you let your mind wander you have my FULL SYMPATHY
incidentally this album makes me feel slightly more confident in one of my goofier Taylor readings, which is that "high infidelity" is about (some) swifties. "Do you really want to know where I was April 29th? / Do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes?" etc…
“It is clearly very, very personal but often seems written to deliberately baffle people who want to match songs to people.” when she drops that heroin line into the football metaphor… like i will never know her motivation but, well! (is she reminding us that the real alchemy is that she turns her life into songs and we’ll never know what the raw ingredients were before she handed us the gold? am i reading too much into it? i’m probably reading too much into it.)
i love your suggestion for taylor to get into the Side B habit (it would if nothing else suit her outrageous productivity) but with this one in particular the double drop feels like part of the point of the album even if i think i agree with you that the first half is “better” (in that i think the first half really works as an album and while the second half is pretty sonically and stylistically cohesive it feels like a collection of songs). i didn’t feel this way about midnights, where the 3 am tracks felt like More Midnights, some of which were great but didn’t deepen the album. but with this one… i dunno. there’s a sense in which dropping a back half so different from the first is kind of a flex, like, “oh yeah i can go write a nice tight reflective acoustic number whenever i want - i did all the weird shit in the first part on purpose.” (that tweet in the last footnote… so true and literally so funny.) or, like, it draws the curtain closed to emphasize that however raw and vulnerable part one feels, it is a closed work of art, a performance, not any more or less “real” than what follows. idk. i keep being like “why would she do it this way other than she likes creating chaos” and it totally could just be that, or the rerecords still looming. i think i’ve also sort of hit a place with this album of “if it were ‘better’ i would like it less,” which is a way i feel occasionally about works where the messiness feels integral to what it is i love about them (wish i could come up with an example other than preferring tender is the night to the great gatsby, quite possibly the most annoying example i could give, but we are who we are), but which is typically a hard stance to defend critically, lol.
It just occurred to me that if the title of the album were different, maybe immediate reactions would be, too. Is that a weird thought? If every self-important, too-cool-for-school opinion-haver were presented with the same songs wrapped up in another song's title -- Fortnight or Clara Bow, for instance -- would they grasp the wit then?
Silly exercise. But it seems a lot of people with liberal arts degrees might have just seen "The Tortured Poets Department" and went, "This is an opportunity to mock this degree-less amateur scholar!"
i have a lot to think about with this album but at present my #1 thought is that i'm so glad she kept up the energy from London Boy for London Boy II, going from "yeah, i go to the 'pub' with the man i 'fancy,' to eat 'fish and chips' with his 'mates'" to "and where does this sad song take place? Why, on the Heath, of course, where *all* the sad english things happen"
I would just like to say that if intolerable golden brit Joe Alwuss keeps you waiting six years for a commitment and in some of that time you let your mind wander you have my FULL SYMPATHY
incidentally this album makes me feel slightly more confident in one of my goofier Taylor readings, which is that "high infidelity" is about (some) swifties. "Do you really want to know where I was April 29th? / Do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes?" etc…
“It is clearly very, very personal but often seems written to deliberately baffle people who want to match songs to people.” when she drops that heroin line into the football metaphor… like i will never know her motivation but, well! (is she reminding us that the real alchemy is that she turns her life into songs and we’ll never know what the raw ingredients were before she handed us the gold? am i reading too much into it? i’m probably reading too much into it.)
i love your suggestion for taylor to get into the Side B habit (it would if nothing else suit her outrageous productivity) but with this one in particular the double drop feels like part of the point of the album even if i think i agree with you that the first half is “better” (in that i think the first half really works as an album and while the second half is pretty sonically and stylistically cohesive it feels like a collection of songs). i didn’t feel this way about midnights, where the 3 am tracks felt like More Midnights, some of which were great but didn’t deepen the album. but with this one… i dunno. there’s a sense in which dropping a back half so different from the first is kind of a flex, like, “oh yeah i can go write a nice tight reflective acoustic number whenever i want - i did all the weird shit in the first part on purpose.” (that tweet in the last footnote… so true and literally so funny.) or, like, it draws the curtain closed to emphasize that however raw and vulnerable part one feels, it is a closed work of art, a performance, not any more or less “real” than what follows. idk. i keep being like “why would she do it this way other than she likes creating chaos” and it totally could just be that, or the rerecords still looming. i think i’ve also sort of hit a place with this album of “if it were ‘better’ i would like it less,” which is a way i feel occasionally about works where the messiness feels integral to what it is i love about them (wish i could come up with an example other than preferring tender is the night to the great gatsby, quite possibly the most annoying example i could give, but we are who we are), but which is typically a hard stance to defend critically, lol.
It just occurred to me that if the title of the album were different, maybe immediate reactions would be, too. Is that a weird thought? If every self-important, too-cool-for-school opinion-haver were presented with the same songs wrapped up in another song's title -- Fortnight or Clara Bow, for instance -- would they grasp the wit then?
Silly exercise. But it seems a lot of people with liberal arts degrees might have just seen "The Tortured Poets Department" and went, "This is an opportunity to mock this degree-less amateur scholar!"
as the one person on earth who was fine with Matty and Taylor together I approve this message
This makes me genuinely interested to get around to the album, great work!!
(there will probably be a second one that's more about the second album… i love "the bolter" and "the albatross" unreservedly i'll say that much)