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Post by Admin on Oct 26, 2020 4:12:01 GMT
Her last album, 'Lover,' was the only album to sell a million in the U.S. in 2019. As Taylor Swift’s Folklore album returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for an eighth nonconsecutive week (on the chart dated Oct. 31), it also becomes the first album to sell a million copies in the U.S. in 2020. With another 57,000 copies sold in the U.S. in the tracking week ending Oct. 22 (according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data), Folklore’s total album sales jump past 1 million (to 1.038 million), making it the first album to sell a million copies in 2020. It’s also the first album released in 2020 to sell a million. Folklore was released on July 24 and debuted atop the Aug. 8-dated Billboard 200. Swift’s last album, Lover, released on Aug. 23, 2019, was the only album to sell a million in the U.S. in 2019. It sold 1.09 million that year, of its now-total 1.22 million. Folklore and Lover are the only albums released in 2019 and 2020 to sell a million copies in the U.S. Folklore is Swift’s ninth album to sell at least 1 million copies in the U.S. Those nine albums include all eight of her studio efforts, along with her Christmas release The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection. Here’s a look at all of Swift’s million-selling albums, in order of release: Taylor Swift (2006, 5.75 million sold to date), The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007, 1.08 million), Fearless (2008; 7.21 million), Speak Now (2010, 4.71 million), Red (2012, 4.49 million), 1989 (2014, 6.25 million), Reputation (2017, 2.28 million), Lover (2019, 1.22 million) and Folklore (2020, 1.04 million). This story first appeared on Billboard.com.
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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2020 22:21:08 GMT
Taylor Swift, the prevailing goliath of the pop cosmos, isn’t new to the idea of selling a million albums. For someone who has created pop with much dexterity in her previous seven albums, Swift has had exceptional record-breaking highs (1989 from 2012 sold more than 10 million copies and Red remains a quadruple-platinum album). So much so that the traditional logic of the digital age, that music albums are not in vogue, has never touched Swift.
Despite contemporary fandom being an online affair, of which 30-year-old Swift is a master, her loyal fans, ‘Swifties’, have always picked up the physical copies of her albums – vinyl and CDs – besides buying her music online. But all of that was before the pandemic. That is when she had all the resources at her beck and call. But the COVID-19 situation changed all those arrangements. Since March, Swift was in self-isolation at her home in Los Angeles and made use of it by writing new music, turning her musings into a new surprise album – Folklore. It broke the record for first-day streams by a female artist on Spotify, followed by more than a million albums getting sold.
While too many musicians have been making music during the lockdown, why such unprecedented sales for Folklore – 16 songs created in self-isolation – the highest for any album in 2020?
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2020 5:22:46 GMT
Finally, an album for adults Swift is talented, yes, but most of the love she gets is from those under 25. The reason is her trajectory. Before Taylor Swift became a pop sensation, she was 16 and a country music rockstar, who was creating folkish tunes marinated in urban flavours. The Pennsylvania-born singer-songwriter moved to Nashville to find herself and did spectacle-style live shows there, “living for the approval of strangers,” as she says in Miss Americana, Lana Wilson’s documentary on Swift. She crossed over to high-gloss pop soon, becoming one of its biggest names. She picked up the Grammys and other awards, drew completely from her life and layered the songs with personal references, but it’s Folklore that finally has the grown-ups tuning in. The reason is its tunes – a stripped version of the gloss that has catapulted her into the indie aisle suddenly, where that cultivated indie rock listener hangs out.
Sophisticated storytelling Swift has always been a great storyteller, mostly of her own life – her misery, high-school boyfriends, a friend who had an eating disorder, break-ups, celebrities, affections, being a victim to Kanye West’s remark during an award show where he crashed the stage and said that Beyonce should have won instead of Swift. She responded with songs. But in Folklore, the storytelling changes focus. She is less self-obsessed, talks of other characters from her life that have existed or might in future. In one of the songs titled Epiphany, Swift speaks about her grandfather fighting during World War II and attending to one of his bleeding fellow soldiers. The reference to “laboured breathing” transports us to the 2020 pandemic and with much empathy. Which is also why Swift is selling. The new Swift is more compassionate to other people’s stories. The stories are personal but not about her only. That’s a huge change. 📣 Express Explained is now on Telegram
A marketing whiz On Swift’s website, the ‘Cardigan’ from the song of the same name, and the ‘In the trees’ hoodie is available with the deluxe version of the album, which also has a bonus track. The merchandise from Folklore is selling in combination with the standard digital album. Back in 2012, in the case of 1989, she had a deal with Target to sell the deluxe version of the album that came with bonus tracks. But besides regular marketing strategies, Swift has engaged in more indirect efforts. Hers is a diverse and loyal fanbase – mostly the young from a globalised and diverse world whose social media presence is a significant part of their lives. She engages with her fans on social media aggressively, takes selfies with them, hugs them, talks to them like they are her close friends. Therefore she’s been called calculating by the media. Calculated or not, Folklore is a reinvention that is likely to go a long way.
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Post by Admin on Nov 14, 2020 23:37:57 GMT
McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?
Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”
McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.
Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.
McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?
Swift: Oh, absolutely.
McCartney: They have to, don’t they?
Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.
McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.
Swift: She went to a regular school .…
McCartney: Yeah, she did.
Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.
McCartney: All of them did, yeah. It was important, but it worked pretty well, because when they kind of reached adulthood, they would meet other kids who might have gone to private schools, who were a little less grounded.
And they could be the budding mothers to [kids]. I remember Mary had a friend, Orlando. Not Bloom. She used to really counsel him. And it’s ’cause she’d gone through that. Obviously, they got made fun of, my kids. They’d come in the classroom and somebody would sing, “Na na na na,” you know, one of the songs. And they’d have to handle that. They’d have to front it out.
Swift: Did that give you a lot of anxiety when you had kids, when you felt like all this pressure that’s been put on me is spilling over onto them, that they didn’t sign up for it? Was that hard for you?
McCartney: Yeah, a little bit, but it wasn’t like it is now. You know, we were just living a kind of semi-hippie life, where we withdrew from a lot of stuff. The kids would be doing all the ordinary things, and their school friends would be coming up to the house and having parties, and it was just great. I remember one lovely evening when it was Stella’s birthday, and she brought a bunch of school kids up. And, you know, they’d all ignore me. It happens very quickly. At first they’re like, “Oh, yeah, he’s like a famous guy,” and then it’s like [yawns]. I like that. I go in the other room and suddenly I hear this music going on. And one of the kids, his name was Luke, and he’s doing break dancing.
Swift: Ohhh!
McCartney: He was a really good break dancer, so all the kids are hanging out. That allowed them to be kind of normal with those kids. The other thing is, I don’t live fancy. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an embarrassment, if I’ve got someone coming to visit me, or who I know…
Swift: Cares about that stuff?
McCartney: Who’s got a nice big house, you know. Quincy Jones came to see me and I’m, like, making him a veggie burger or something. I’m doing some cooking. This was after I’d lost Linda, in between there. But the point I’m making is that I’m very consciously thinking, “Oh, God, Quincy’s got to be thinking, ‘What is this guy on? He hasn’t got big things going on. It’s not a fancy house at all. And we’re eating in the kitchen! He’s not even got the dining room going,’” you know?
Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.
McCartney: But that’s me. I’m awkward like that. That’s my kind of thing. Maybe I should have, like, a big stately home. Maybe I should get a staff. But I think I couldn’t do that. I’d be so embarrassed. I’d want to walk around dressed as I want to walk around, or naked, if I wanted to.
Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.
McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.
Swift: I remember what I wanted to know about, which is lyrics. Like, when you’re in this kind of strange, unparalleled time, and you’re making this record, are lyrics first? Or is it when you get a little melodic idea?
McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics — for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and.…
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Post by Admin on Dec 9, 2020 19:35:42 GMT
“He is my co-writer on ‛Betty’ and ‛Exile,’” replies Taylor Swift with deadpan precision. The question Who is William Bowery? was, at the time we spoke, one of 2020’s great mysteries, right up there with the existence of Joe Exotic and the sudden arrival of murder hornets. An unknown writer credited on the year’s biggest album? It must be an alias.
Is he your brother?
“He’s William Bowery,” says Swift with a smile.
It's early November, after Election Day but before Swift eventually revealed Bowery's true identity to the world (the leading theory, that he was boyfriend Joe Alwyn, proved prescient). But, like all Swiftian riddles, it was fun to puzzle over for months, particularly in this hot mess of a year, when brief distractions are as comforting as a well-worn cardigan. Thankfully, the Bowery... erhm, Alwyn-assisted Folklore — a Swift project filled with muted pianos and whisper-quiet snares, recorded in secret with Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner — delivered.
“The only people who knew were the people I was making it with, my boyfriend, my family, and a small management team,” Swift, 30, tells EW of the album's hush-hush recording sessions. That gave the intimate Folklore a mystique all its own: the first surprise Taylor Swift album, one that prioritized fantastical tales over personal confessions.
“Early in quarantine, I started watching lots of films,” she explains. “Consuming other people’s storytelling opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines?” That’s how she ended up with three songs about an imagined love triangle (“Cardigan,” “Betty,” “August”), one about a clandestine romance (“Illicit Affairs”), and another chronicling a doomed relationship (“Exile”). Others tell of sumptuous real-life figures like Rebekah Harkness, a divorcee who married the heir to Standard Oil — and whose home Swift purchased 31 years after her death. The result, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” hones in on Harkness’ story, until Swift cleverly injects herself.
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