In the haze of ' Midnights ' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound HEAD TOPICS

In the haze of ' Midnights ' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

10/21/2022 1:44:00 PM

On ' Midnights ' Taylor Swift pushes her voice in new directions rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits

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NPR

On 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift pushes her voice in new directions, rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits. On Swift's 10th and most challenging album, she and producer Jack Antonoff push her voice in new directions, rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits. Midnightsrelays 13 specific after-hours agonies, most ostensibly from her own life, though a couple of tracks, like the highly theatrical"Vigilante S***," could be read as the kind of fiction that still strongly represents its author's experiences. Many of these songs are easy to Easter-egg as they take up the same threads that have dominated her writing since her pop breakthrough."You're On Your Own, Kid" is a Nashville story, with its callow heroine playing industry parking-lot parties and quickly outpacing the mentor figure for whom she lusts and yearns."Maroon" is from her wine-drinking New York days, probably referencing the same elusive free spirit who haunts her in Read more:
NPR » The Clock Strikes: Time for Taylor Swift’s New LP, ‘Midnights’ Taylor Swift Shares Teaser Trailer for 'Midnights' Music Videos During Thursday Night Football Taylor Swift Debuts Trailer for 'Midnights' Music 'Movies' Ahead of Album Drop Taylor Swift Makes Return to Pop in New ‘Midnights’ Album, Will Release Music Movies for Songs

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Silver Peak has gained newfound attention in recent years as the energy and transportation sectors race to wean themselves off climate-warming fossil fuels. Read more >> Listen here! Stick to shitlib takes The Clock Strikes: Time for Taylor Swift’s New LP, ‘Midnights’The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Cares? Beatles revolver remix got leaked Hello miss cat I would rather hear two cats 🐈‍ with their tails tied together thrown over a tree limb. Taylor Swift Shares Teaser Trailer for 'Midnights' Music Videos During Thursday Night FootballLaura Dern, the Haim sisters, Jack Antonoff, Mike Birbiglia and more appear in the clips, which Swift made with cinematographer Rina Yang Looks like the Buzzer$ work late tonight to stream TSmidnighTS 😂 Taylor Swift Debuts Trailer for 'Midnights' Music 'Movies' Ahead of Album Drop'RIP' Us! 💀 Taylor Swift debuted a teaser trailer for her Midnights 'music movies' — and we will NOT be calming down. Taylor Swift Makes Return to Pop in New ‘Midnights’ Album, Will Release Music Movies for SongsIn addition to debuting the new 13-track pop album, which features a collaboration with Lana Del Rey, Swift premiered a trailer for the album's 'music movies.' taylorswift13 Simply perfection! She’s full of surprises. She Is A Competitor! With lots of Talent!! Congrats! Taylor Swift returns to pop with poetic 'Midnights,' her most deeply personal album yet'Even as she returns to a pop backdrop heavy on synths and electronic drums, (Taylor) Swift remains our lyrical Sherpa,' MRuggieriUSAT of usatodaylife writes about 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift's 10th studio album. MRuggieriUSAT usatodaylife Why is the mediaa keeping this a secret MRuggieriUSAT usatodaylife It’s 45 minutes long you tweeted this 12 minutes after it was released. Let us listen first! treepaine MRuggieriUSAT usatodaylife She's so talented!! On her new album, Taylor Swift lets the cracks show'Midnights' finds the megastar in vulnerable moments of sorrow, anxiety and romance. Swift has said that Midnights relays 13 specific after-hours agonies, most ostensibly from her own life, though a couple of tracks, like the highly theatrical"Vigilante S***," could be read as the kind of fiction that still strongly represents its author's experiences.Oct.Midnights , due out…at midnight.surprise her fans with some news : her next record. Many of these songs are easy to Easter-egg as they take up the same threads that have dominated her writing since her pop breakthrough."You're On Your Own, Kid" is a Nashville story, with its callow heroine playing industry parking-lot parties and quickly outpacing the mentor figure for whom she lusts and yearns.m."Maroon" is from her wine-drinking New York days, probably referencing the same elusive free spirit who haunts her in Lover 's"Cornelia Street. The videos will feature what Swift called “amazing actors” — among them Laura Dern, Mike Birbiglia, Jack Antonoff and the Haim sisters — and kick off tomorrow morning with a clip for “Anti-Hero.""Anti-Hero" has her behaving badly over tea, a nod to her current London home. The marbled vinyl has been pressed and sorted into collectible variants. The album includes two songs clearly dedicated to her partner Joe Alwyn (he cowrote one under his pseudonym, William Bowery), extolling his patience with her ever-changing moods and railing against outside forces who continually challenge their privacy. on August 29, that her new project is called Midnights . (The album's most political line:"The only kinda girl they see / is a one night or a wife. It is time for a new Taylor Swift album.") These stories won't surprise anyone, but their form may catch appreciators of Swift's conversational singing style off-guard. She's still sing-talking, doing that expert, subtle interpolations of hip-hop's cadences and country crooners' relaxed timbre. She announced the 13-track “Midnights” two months ago, calling it “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” and “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. But often, she and Antonoff twist and push her gleaming vocals in new directions. That's where the softening happens.) It is Swift’s fifth album in just over two years, following her quarantine-era, indie-folk-style “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and then “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two rerecordings of her early albums, a project she undertook after her former record label was sold without her participation. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren’t — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake. For all of her kindness in the world and empathy and dedication to openness as a songwriter, Taylor Swift is, in her essence, sharp. Her vulnerability hides a blade. In a sense, “Midnights” is Swift’s return to the pop pipeline after her digressions of the past couple of years. This quality resides in her voice, a weightless instrument that Swift has honed over time into Valyrian steel — glamorous, gleaming, but more deadly than it appears. Sharpness is also key to Swift's perspective, surfacing in her love of the telling detail, of the rejoinder that cuts through whatever bulls*** the object of her love/hate has burdened her with. On the third track, “Anti-Hero,” she sings: I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser Midnights become my afternoons When my depression works the graveyard shift According to the album’s credits, most of the songs were written and recorded with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, and much of it was recorded at Antonoff’s home studio in Brooklyn and at , the Greenwich Village warren founded by Jimi Hendrix. It's a quality associated with gamine women, boyish in their agility and their cool refusal to be seduced. It is not lush; by some definitions, it's not feminine. The actress Zoë Kravitz, who has been making an album with Antonoff , is listed as one of the six songwriters of the first track, “Lavender Haze,” alongside Swift, Antonoff, Mark Anthony Spears (a. It can be misunderstood as pettiness or even cruelty. On Midnights Swift and Antonoff alter her voice in ways that fight against its cool glint, multitracking it until it glows, altering its pitch at times so that it's barely recognizable.a. On"Midnight Rain" it's auto-tuned to vacillate between birdlike high notes and an almost masculine lower register, punctuating the story the verses tell of a young woman outgrowing a relationship with a sound that evokes that process of unfolding into a new self."Labyrinth" — as good as any song inspired by one of her favorite subjects, the experience of still hanging on when you have to let go — melts her voice into myriad light streams, some as twisted as in a Bon Iver song, others clearly hers. Swift’s friendship with Kravitz, as fans know, is close enough that she once acted as an uncredited assistant on a pandemic-era remote photo shoot of Kravitz for The New York Times Magazine. These synthetic renderings work against the high craft of Swift's meticulous songwriting, the neatness and control that makes her songs powerful but that can also diminish their emotional impact. Usually she's explaining every move she makes, but here the music pulls her into the eternal now of her emotions, working against her persistent impulse to make sense of them. “They said the end is coming/Everyone’s up to something,” she sings on the track. Though they always return to the lucidity at Swift's core, these efforts recall the metamorphic effect of songs like .