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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2020 19:16:47 GMT
Taylor Swift has announced the surprise release of her eighth album, Folklore. The Grammy-winning songwriter produced and co-wrote much of the album alongside Aaron Dessner of the National. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon also appears on the record, alongside Taylor Swift’s regular collaborator, Jack Antonoff. It will premiere at midnight EST on 23 July. http://instagram.com/p/CDAs776jUtR Writing on Instagram, Swift said: “Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.” She wrote and recorded the music in isolation, collaborating with “some musical heroes” remotely. In a statement posted on Twitter, Dessner said that Swift approached him in late April about writing together. He shared sketches that he had been working on with Swift, who sent him “a fully written version” of a song a few hours later. “The momentum never really stopped,” he wrote. http://instagram.com/p/CDAsU8BDzLt Said Dessner: “I’ve rarely been so inspired by someone and it’s still hard to believe this happened.” He detailed further collaborators on the record, including the National’s Bryce Dessner and Bryan Devendorf, and many of the band’s frequent collaborators, such as Ben Lanz, Thomas Bartlett and Kyle Resnick. Swift wrote: “Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re living in keep reminding me that nothing is guaranteed. My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world. That’s the side of uncertainty I can get on board with.” Folklore follows Swift’s 2019 album, Lover. She was due to headline Glastonbury 2020 before it was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. It is not the only surprise album planned for release this week. Swift’s historic rival, Kanye West, has said he will release his new record, Donda: With Child, on Friday.
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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2020 7:30:21 GMT
developing on Lover’s stranger, more minimalist end. Photograph: Beth Garrabrant/Stoke PR Taylor Swift announced the existence of her eighth album an uncharacteristic 17 hours prior to its release: “Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening,” she said – among them, a headline slot at Glastonbury – “But there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.” Swift only released her last album, Lover, last August. If she was surprised to have emerged from lockdown with Folklore – a 16-track album largely produced (remotely) by the National’s Aaron Dessner – her fans were even more stunned by the fact that Swift would release a record with zero fanfare. Swift pioneered the art of the all-consuming album rollout. It usually starts with her sharing coded hints that her well trained fans understand immediately. Then there are teasers for lyric videos that beget actual blockbuster videos, strewn with self-mythologising references for Swifties and journalists to unpick. It’s a smart promotional strategy-by-proxy for an artist who has done little press in the past five years, and a good way of making your actions seem as if they were written in the stars. There are sometimes baffling brand endorsements. The often unpopular lead single seldom sounds like the rest of the album. By the time that arrives, a weariness has descended: the sense that one of pop’s all-time greatest songwriters is overcompensating despite her clear talent. Recent albums, too, have been consumed with the various dramas that have plagued her since the country ingenue became a pop superstar with 2012’s Red. Despite the last 12 months bringing a new, high-profile disagreement with her former label and enduring disputes with Kanye West, thankfully Folklore features none of that, beyond inadvertently arriving the same day as West said he was releasing a new album. Moreover, Swift conveys the sense that her tendency to desire the last word, in public and private, has been her undoing: “I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere / Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here,” she sings on This Is Me Trying. Folklore proves that she can thrive away from the noise: if you interpret “classmates” as pop peers, Swift is no longer competing. Bombastic pop makes way for more muted songwriting, and a singular vision compared to the joyful but spread-betting Lover. With concerts off the table for the foreseeable future, no longer needing to reach four sides of a stadium may have proven liberating.
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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2020 19:32:43 GMT
Elements of her fanbase have long wanted her to revisit the Nashville songcraft of her youth through an adult lens, but this isn’t that album. Folklore is largely built around the soft cascades of piano, burbling guitar and fractured, glitchy electronica that will be familiar to fans of the National’s post-2010 output – at least part of the album came about from Swift writing to Dessner’s musical sketches. Swift’s most coherent record since her staunchly country days, it’s nonetheless her most experimental, developing on Lover’s stranger, more minimalist end. More than one song evokes the intimate celestial tenderness of Sufjan Stevens circa Carrie and Lowell. At the opposite end of the scale, This Is Me Trying subtly grows into its wracked orchestral grandeur, sounding more unsettling still for how Swift’s voice, processed at a ghostly, vast remove, seems to encompass the whole song with her desperation. Swift is known for her vocal directness – there is no pop star as adroit at searing a chorus into your brain, or as winking in her tartness – if not her range. But the demands of pop processing mean her voice has never been heard as it is here: the acceptance that colours it on The 1, a bouncy reminiscence of a lost lover from her “roaring twenties”; how weatherworn yet at peace she sounds as she remembers the good parts of a treacherous relationship on Cardigan, a song as cavernous and shimmering as a rock pool in a cave. Her vocal trademarks remain in the yo-yoing vocal yelps on August, and the climactic, processed cri de coeur of My Tears Ricochet, and she holds her own against the wounded bark of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on Exile, which paints a split first in scenes of overt betrayal, and then gorgeous, subtle harmonies at crossed purposes indicating a problem deeper than one infidelity. Given the more earthy production, some will characterise Folklore as showing a more authentic side of Swift. Not only would that be facile, asserting some authentic self is also explicitly not her aim. In a brief essay included in the liner notes, she says of the album’s concept: “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible.” She writes that some songs are about her and others are about invented characters. More interesting than parsing which is which (many are obviously both) is the sense that Swift is interrogating her own self-conception and challenging that personal mythology: how helpful and true those ideas are to herself as a woman of 30. Swift’s longest lyrical obsession is the loss of innocence, a theme she makes fairly devastating here. Set to high piano flurries, Seven switches between hopscotch-rhyme verses about childhood rituals, and pleading, choral depictions of herself at seven, “in the weeds, before I learned civility,” she sings. “I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted.” What conditioning beat out of her as a girl, it beat back in decades later: the tense, slippery Mad Woman traces the self-perpetuating cycle of women being angered by being labelled angry – both massively improve on Lover’s slightly facile gender inequality treatise, The Man, because they’re personal, not projections. Later she recalls naive young love, “back when we were still changing for the better”, then, on Illicit Affairs, willingly entering into a deceitful relationship with someone who “showed me colours you know I can’t see with anyone else”.
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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2020 19:27:34 GMT
The new Taylor Swift album is good. If this were a different moment, I might have resisted such an unequivocal public declaration. Like so many other people who are too addicted to social media and pop culture squabbles, Swift always represented a type of too-polished rich, white pop artist: beautiful, undeniably talented, but a little too hung up on old grudges and the mean things random people say about her ("Shake It Off," "Look What You Made Me Do," "You Need to Calm Down") to see how good she really has it. But dismissing Swift because it was sort of cool to do so was, of course, always a waste of time — and it’s an even bigger waste right now. Everything is horrifying, and we should all enjoy beauty where we can find it. Swift’s eighth album, "folklore," was produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, who also co-wrote 11 of the 16 songs, and his influence is clear on every track’s pianos, strings and guitars. Unlike dance-pop albums that have come out in 2020 from artists like Charli XCX, "folklore" isn’t defiant toward the circumstances of its creation. And unlike Fiona Apple’s "Fetch the Bolt Cutters," this record was produced during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, so the emotions on display can be connected directly to this year’s specific type of toxic garbage fire. It’s even possible to pretend this is an album by a talented newcomer from Duluth, Minnesota, rather than one of the most famous pop stars in the world. That immediately makes it more interesting than if "folklore" had been rolled out with months of fanfare, prereleased singles and carefully tested media appearances and prewritten narratives for every song. What else is there to do right now but fill in the blanks ourselves? Swift is known for meticulous image management, so it at least sounds like a departure to say on Instagram that she’s embracing imperfection with "folklore" — but this is still a record with multiple deluxe editions and of-the-moment visual aesthetic. The black-and-white photos of Swift staring into the distance in fields and forests have already inspired the internet to churn out jokes about “cottagecore” and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" memes. (And “exile” is a duet with Bon Iver, the artist who took his own sad times in a cabin and built a small artistic empire in the upper Midwest.) But contemplative woodsiness has been a cornerstone of sad-indie-dude music for more than a decade, and Swift’s decision to try it fits nicely (one could even say like a cozy "cardigan," which is also the title of the first single). Most tracks sound like they’d slot easily into an episode of "Friday Night Lights," which is the sort of statement that would have sounded outlandish if someone said it while the show was actually on the air. But we live in strange times, so let’s embrace it.
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Post by Admin on Jul 26, 2020 3:30:00 GMT
After Taylor Swift announced her new album "Folklore" last Thursday, many music fans pointed out the similarities between the pop superstar's new cover artwork and the black metal community, which is closely linked to the world of folklore and dark fairy tales. Among the people who noticed "Folklore"'s metal vibes is Ihsahn, frontman of Norwegian black metallers EMPEROR, who went as far as to share a side-by-side comparison of the Swift album cover — featuring Taylor standing in the middle of the woods in black and white — and that of "Telemark", the solo EP he released this past February. http://instagram.com/p/CDExVRsF_Fn Earlier today, Ihsahn wrote on Instagram: "So, anyone check out the new @taylorswift yet? Personally I like the design" The musician, whose real name is Vegard Sverre Tveitan, also reposted a message from the "Telemark" artist David Thiérrée, who wrote: "Well, folks, I'm not the only one to think that Taylor Swift's new visual is very Metal... Even very close to Ihsahn's artworks I made. I could have done it for her, probably for a cheaper price than what she paid #taylorswift #taylorswiftfolklore #folklore #blackmetalart #telemark #davidthierree #darkarts #metalcovers #artist #artwork #metalartist #owlstrollsanddeadkingsskulls #blackmetalmusic #blackmetalcovers" Swift's eighth studio album, "Folklore" was surprise-released on Friday, July 24. The superstar's follow-up to 2019's "Lover" features 16 tracks, with song titles like "Illicit Affairs", "Mad Woman", "The Last Great American Dynasty" and "Betty". When Swift released her 2017 album "Reputation", many were quick to notice the similarities the cover art had to the hardcore genre — namely, the hardcore-inspired font.
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