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dailytomlinson · 4 years

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While many artists would jump at the chance to tell you how lockdown has been a fruitful opportunity for self-improvement, full of pseudo self-help books and pompous podcasts, former One Directioner Louis Tomlinson is adamant that he has done, well, nothing.

“I’ve just watched loads of s___ TV,” he says after a long pause. “The Undoing is decent, isn’t it?”

Twenty-eight--year-old Tomlinson from Doncaster was always the down-to-earth Directioner, frequently describing himself as fringe member who spent more time analysing the band’s contracts than singing solos, known for chain-smoking his way through several packs of cigarettes a day and swearing like a trooper. A rarity, these days, among millennials who’d rather suck on a stem of kale and tweet about their #blessings.

The gig means a great deal to Tomlinson, whose first ever tour as a solo artist, to promote his debut solo album WALLS, was cut short back in March after just two concerts in Spain and Mexico. It was an album he’d spent five years working on: a guitar-led project that ruptured with the preppy pop anthems of One Direction, inspired instead by Tomlinson’s love for Britpop.

No doubt he was anxious to get it right following a decade “grown in test tubes”, as Harry Styles once described the band’s formation on the X Factor, where they came third before going on to make a reported $280,000 a day as the most successful band in the world. The pressure, too, was intense: all four bandmates had already released their own solo debuts.

Was he left reeling, I ask, unable to perform at such a crucial moment?

“The thing that I always enjoyed the most about One Direction was playing the shows, so my master plan, when I realised I was going to do a solo career, was always my first tour. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for the best part of five years now. I got so close, I got a taste for it, and it’s affected me like everyone else, but I’m forever an optimist,” he says down the phone, with what I can only imagine to be a rather phlegmatic shrug.

Sure, I say, but the last year can’t have been easy. Didn’t he feel like his purpose had popped?

“You know what,” he says, reflecting, “maybe because I’ve had real dark moments in my life, they’ve given me scope for optimism. In the grand scheme of things, of what I’ve experienced, these everyday problems...they don’t seem so bad.”

Tomlinson is referring to losing his 43-year-old mother, a midwife, to leukemia in 2016, and his 18-year-old sister Felicite, a model, to an accidental drug overdose in 2018. The double tragedy is something he has been open about on his own terms, dedicating his single, Two of Us, from WALLS, to his mother Johannah, while often checking in with fans who have lost members of their own family.

It’s not unusual for Tomlinson to ask his 34.9 million followers if they’re doing alright, receiving hundreds of thousands of personal replies. It’s not something he will discuss in interviews, however, after he slammed BBC Breakfast for shamelessly probing his trauma in February this year. “Never going back there again,” he tweeted after coming off the show.

“Social media is a ruthless, toxic place, so I don’t like to spend much time there,” says Tomlinson, “but because of experiencing such light and shade all while I was famous, I have a very deep connection with my fans. They’ve always been there for me.”

In return, Tomlinson is good to them. Last month he even promised some new music, saying that he’d written four songs in four days. Does this mean that a second album is on the way?

“Yeah, definitely,” he says. “I’m very, very excited. I had basically penciled down a plan before corona took over our lives. And now it's kind of given me a little bit of time to really get into what I want to say and what I want things to sound like. Because, you know, I was really proud of my first record, but there were moments that I felt were truer to me than others. I think that there were some songs where I took slightly more risk and owned what I love, saying, ‘This is who I want to be’. So I want to take a leaf out of their book.”

Fans might think he’s referring to writing more heartfelt autobiographical content such as Two of Us, but in fact, he’s referring specifically to rock-inspired Kill My Mind, he says, the first song on WALLS. “There’s a certain energy in that song, in its delivery, in its attitude, that I want to recreate. People are struggling at the moment, so I want to create a raucous, exciting atmosphere in my live show, not a somber, thoughtful one.”

He sighs, trying to articulate something that’s clearly been playing on his mind for a while. “You know, because of my story, my album was a little heavy at times and a little somber. And as I'm sure you're aware, from talking to me, now, that isn't who I am.”

It must be draining, I say, the weight of expectation in both the media and across his fanbase, to be a spokesperson for grief and hardship. To have tragedy prelude everything he does and says.

“Honestly, it’s part of being from Doncaster as well, I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. That’s the last thing I want.”

Too many incredible memories to mention but not a day goes by that I don't think about how amazing it was. @NiallOfficial @Harry_Styles @LiamPayne @zaynmalik . So proud of you all individually.

The problem is, says Tomlinson, he doesn’t have the best imagination. “I have interesting things to say musically, but what’s challenging from a writing perspective is that I write from the heart, and I can’t really get into someone else’s story. And right now, being stuck at home, you have so little experience to draw from. It’s actually quite hard to write these positive, uplifting songs, because actually, the experiences that you're going through on a day to day basis, you know, you they don't have that same flavour.”

There is something that’s helping, though: a secret spot near Los Angeles, where he divides his time. “It’s remote and kind of weird, and I’m going to go there for three days and write. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to it. I found it via a YouTube video. It’s got some very interesting locals who live there, it’s sort of backwards when it comes to technology. It feels like you’re going back in time when you’re there. But I don’t want to give it away.”

Another source of inspiration for his second album is the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ back catalogue. “I grew up on their album Bytheway. And during lockdown I've been knee deep in their stuff. I’ve watched every documentary, every video. And I find their lead guitarist John Frusciante just fascinating.”

Has he spoken to Frusicante?

“I f______ wish,” snorts Tomlinson.

Surely someone as well-known as Tomlinson could easily get in touch?

“No, honestly, I think he’s too cool for that. He’s not into that kind of thing.”

Tomlinson’s passion for all things rock is also spurring on a side hustle he picked up as a judge on the X Factor in 2018: managing an all-female rock band via his own imprint on Simon Cowell’s Syco label. While the group disbanded before releasing their first single, and Tomlinson split from Syco earlier this year, the singer is keen to nurture some more talent.

“I'm not gonna lie, my process with my imprint through Syco, it became challenging and it became frustrating at times,” Tomlinson says a little wearily. “The kind of artists that I was interested in developing – because I genuinely feel through my experience in One Direction, you know, one of the biggest f______ bands, I feel like I've learned a lot about the industry – they weren’t ready-made. So I had lots of artists that I took through the door that were rough and ready, but major labels want to see something that works straight away. I found that a little bit demotivating. I love her and she's an incredible artist, but not everyone is a Taylor Swift.”

Tomlinson spends much of his free time scouting new talent either on YouTube, Reddit or BBC Introducing – he’s currently a huge fan of indie Brighton band, Fickle Friends. His dream is to manage an all-female band playing instruments. “Because there's no one in that space. And I know eventually if I don't do it, someone else will!”

Before he drives off to rehearsals, we chatter about how much he's been practising his guitar playing, and how he can't wait to take the whole team working at his favourite grassroots venue, The Dome in Doncaster, out ice-skating after he performs there on his rescheduled tour. “Because I've got skills,” he says, and I can hear his chest puff.

And then I ask the question every retired member of One Direction has been batting off ever since they broke up in 2015, after Zayn Malik quit. Rumours that his bandmates saw him as a Judas went wild after some eagle eyes fans noticed they’d unfollowed him on Instagram. Payne, Tomlinson, Horan and Styles have barely mentioned him since. Recently, however, they re-followed him, and Payne has teased that a One Direction reunion is on the cards.

So: might 2021 be the year of resurrection?

“I thought you were going to ask something juicier!” say Tomlinson witheringly. “Look, I f______ love One Direction. I'm sure we're going to come back together one day, and I'll be doing a couple of One Direction songs in my gig. I always do that, so that's not alluding to any reunion or anything. But, I mean, look, I'm sure one day we'll get back together, because, you know, we were f______ great.”

#telegraph uk #press #louis tomlinson #241120 #its FULL of stunts as telegraph usually goes #stunt mention #Eleanor Halls

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louistomlinsoncouk · 4 years

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“I’ve just watched loads of s___ TV,” he says after a long pause. “The Undoing is decent, isn’t it?”

Far from aimless, however, today the singer is full of beans, cheerily shushing his barking dog as he potters about his North London home where he lives with his best friend from home, Oli, and his girlfriend, the model Eleanor Calder.

Was he left reeling, I ask, unable to perform at such a crucial moment?

Sure, I say, but the last year can’t have been easy. Didn’t he feel like his purpose had popped?

In return, Tomlinson is good to them. Last month he even promised some new music, saying that he’d written four songs in four days. Does this mean that a second album is on the way?

It must be draining, I say, the weight of expectation in both the media and across his fanbase, to be a spokesperson for grief and hardship. To have tragedy prelude everything he does and says.

“Honestly, it’s part of being from Doncaster as well, I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. That’s the last thing I want.”

There is something that’s helping, though: a secret spot near Los Angeles, where he divides his time to see his four-year-old son, Freddie, whom he shares with his ex Briana Jungwirth, a stylist. “It’s remote and kind of weird, and I’m going to go there for three days and write. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to it. I found it via a YouTube video. It’s got some very interesting locals who live there, it’s sort of backwards when it comes to technology. It feels like you’re going back in time when you’re there. But I don’t want to give it away.”

Has he spoken to Frusicante?

“I f______ wish,” snorts Tomlinson.

Surely someone as well-known as Tomlinson could easily get in touch?

“No, honestly, I think he’s too cool for that. He’s not into that kind of thing.”

So: might 2021 be the year of resurrection?

#louis tomlinson #24nov20

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bananaofswifts · 3 years

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For Women's History Month 2021, GRAMMY.com is celebrating some of the women artists nominated at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show. Today, we honor Taylor Swift, who's currently nominated for six GRAMMYs.

When we met Taylor Swift in 2006, it was immediately apparent that her songwriting approach was like ripping a page out of her diary.

"Just a boy in a Chevy truck/ That had a tendency of gettin' stuck/ On backroads at night/ And I was right there beside him all summer long/ And then the time we woke up to find that summer gone," she lamented in the first verse of her debut single, "Tim McGraw(opens in a new tab)." The way the then-16-year-old Swift could turn personal anecdotes into instantly memorable hooks mirrored the prowess of an industry veteran, appealing to more than just the teenage girls that could relate to a short-lived high school romance.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Swift has introduced another layer of intrigue with a foray into indie folk, unveiling a pair of albums, folklore and evermore, last year. Recorded entirely in isolation after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, folklore has been widely acclaimed(opens in a new tab) as Swift's best album, touted for its intimate songwriting and cinematic dynamics; evermore has received similarly glowing reviews(opens in a new tab).

folklore was 2020's best-selling album(opens in a new tab) and earned Swift five GRAMMY nominations at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show, including her fourth Album Of The Year nod. (evermore will be eligible for the 64th GRAMMY Awards in 2022.) As her 10 previous GRAMMY wins suggest, though, this new chapter isn't an abrupt departure for the star—it's a masterful continuation of her evolution as a singer/songwriter.

If there's one thing that Swift has proven throughout her career, it's that she refuses to be put in a box. Her ever-evolving sound took her from country darling to pop phenom to folk's newest raconteur—a transition that, on paper, seems arduous. But for Swift, it was seamless and resulted in perhaps her most defining work yet. And folklore’s radiance relies on three of Swift’s songwriting tools: heartfelt balladeering, autobiographical writing, and character-driven storytelling.

While there was always a crossover element to Swift's pop-leaning country tunes, her transition from country starlet to pop queen began with Red. The album’s lead single, the feisty breakup anthem "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together(opens in a new tab)," was Swift's first release to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and, ironically, scoffed "indie records much cooler than mine"). She declared a full pop makeover with 2014's 1989, but the response proved that her bold move was the right one: Along with spawning three more No. 1 hits, the project won Swift her second GRAMMY for Album of the Year.

From there, 2017’s Reputation, a response to media scrutiny, and 2019’s Lover, an often bubbly exploration of all facets of affection, followed. Although they shared similarly grandiose production, Lover featured a handful of poetic ballads, including "The Archer(opens in a new tab)," a self-reflective love song that teased Swift's folk sensibilities through storybook lyrics and ambient textures.

Swift’s ballads are key in understanding the full essence of folklore. They’ve regularly marked standout moments on each of her albums, both thanks to her poignant vulnerability and rich tone. Fearless standout "White Horse" earned Swift two GRAMMYs in 2009; Red's painstaking "All Too Well" was an instant fan favorite; 1989's "This Love" and Reputation's "New Years Day" provided tenderness amid otherwise synth-heavy sounds.

The raw emotion she puts into her downtempo songs comes alive on folklore, introducing a new wave of neo-classical sonics that elevate her fanciful penmanship to an ethereal level. Whether or not Swifties saw a full indie-pop record coming—at least not yet—the shift isn't all that surprising. Folklore’s romanticized lyrics and relatively lo-fi production are arguably what many fans have been patiently waiting on.

Lyrically, the super-personal nature of Swift’s music has always captivated fans and naysayers alike; diehards and critics dissected each of her albums for its real-life subjects and hidden meanings. While she played into those conspiracies at the time—whether she was revealing names in titles like "Hey Stephen(opens in a new tab)" and "Dear John(opens in a new tab)" or scathing the other girl on "Better Than Revenge(opens in a new tab)"—even Swift herself admits that her teenage method had an expiration date.

"There was a point that I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs that [it] felt unsustainable for my future moving forward," she told Apple Music's(opens in a new tab) Zane Lowe in December of 2020. "It felt like too hot of a microscope ... On my bad days, I would feel like I was loading a cannon of clickbait when that's not what I want for my life."

That realization is what helped make folklore so memorable: Swift stripped away the drama to let her artful storytelling shine. Sure, there are occasional callbacks to personal happenings ("invisible string(opens in a new tab)" references sending her exes baby gifts and "mad woman(opens in a new tab)" alludes to her legal battle with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun). Still, she largely shies away from her autobiographical narratives to make way for her imagination.

"I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I hadn't," Swift wrote in a letter to fans(opens in a new tab) on social media the day folklore arrived. "The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible."

folklore might be her first full project dedicated to creating characters and projecting storylines, but Swift has shown a knack for fantasy from the start. Tracks like "Mary's Song (Oh My My)(opens in a new tab)" on her self-titled debut and "Starlight(opens in a new tab)" on Red saw Swift craft stories for real-life muses ("Mary's Song" was inspired by an old couple who lived next door to Swift in her childhood; "Starlight" was sparked from seeing a picture of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy as teens). Even when songs did pertain to her real life, Swift often had a way of flipping memories into whimsical metaphors, like the clever clap-back to a critic on Speak Now's "Mean(opens in a new tab)" or the rebound relationship in Reputation's "Getaway Car(opens in a new tab)."

To think that we wouldn't have folklore without a pandemic is almost surreal; it's already become such a fundamental piece of Swift’s artistic puzzle. There was no telling what may have come after the glittering "love letter to love itself” that was Lover, but it seems isolation made the singer rethink any plans she may have had.

"I just thought there are no rules anymore because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, 'How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?' If you take away all the parameters, what do you make?" she told Paul McCartney in a November (opens in a new tab)Rolling Stone(opens in a new tab) interview(opens in a new tab). "And I guess the answer is folklore."

Even if she hasn’t been making indie music herself, Swift has shown an affinity for the genre over the years through curated digital playlists(opens in a new tab). Those included four songs by The National including "Dark Side of the Gym," which she references on folklore single "betty(opens in a new tab)," and "8 (Circle)" by Bon Iver, Swift's collaborator on folklore's gut-wrenching "exile(opens in a new tab)" as well as evermore’s title track. (“Exile” is one of folklore’s GRAMMY-nominated cuts, up for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.)

The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner co-wrote nine and produced 11 of folklore's 16 tracks, soundtracking Swift's imaginative tales with sweeping orchestration and delicate piano. Their partnership started with "cardigan(opens in a new tab)," a melancholy take on teenage love(opens in a new tab) that's up for Best Pop Solo Performance and the coveted Song of the Year. The team-up was a dream come true for Swift, a self-proclaimed National superfan and a career highlight for Dessner, who shared in an Instagram post(opens in a new tab) about folklore that he's "rarely been so inspired by someone." He sees the album as a pivotal moment for both Swift's career and pop music.

"Taylor has opened the door for artists to not feel pressure to have 'the bop,'" Dessner shared with (opens in a new tab)Billboard(opens in a new tab) in September. "To make the record that she made, while running against what is programmed in radio at the highest levels of pop music—she has kind of made an anti-pop record. And to have it be one of the most, if not the most, successful commercial releases of the year that throws the playbook out.

"I hope it gives other artists, especially lesser-known or more independent artists, a chance at the mainstream," he continued. "Maybe radio will realize that music doesn't have to sound as pushed as it has. Nobody was trying to design anything to be a hit. Obviously, Taylor has the privilege of already having a very large and dedicated audience, but I do feel like it's having a resonance beyond that."

Swift's other primary folklore collaborator was Jack Antonoff. He has been her right-hand man since they first paired up on 2013's promotional single "Sweeter Than Fiction(opens in a new tab)" (Swift referred to him as "musical family" in her folklore announcement(opens in a new tab)). Even after years of creating stadium-ready pop smashes, Antonoff said in his own folklore Instagram post(opens in a new tab), "I've never heard Taylor sing better in my life / write better."

As Swift recognizes herself, folklore ushered in a new way of thinking for the superstar that not only brings out her best, but sets a promising precedent for what's to come. "What I felt after we put out folklore was, 'Oh wow, people are into this too, this thing that feels really good for my life and my creativity,'" Swift added in her interview with Lowe. "I saw a lane for my future that was a real breakthrough moment of excitement and happiness."

Her enthusiasm is tangible on both folklore and evermore. Dubbed folklore’s sister record, evermore further expands Swift’s newfound mystical atmosphere. Much to the delight of many Swifties, the follow-up also calls back to her country beginnings on tracks like the HAIM-assisted “no body, no crime(opens in a new tab),” as well as her pop expertise on more uptempo cuts like “long story short(opens in a new tab).”

Together, the albums are a momentous reminder that Swift is a singer/songwriter first. Her wordcraft is some of the most alluring of her generation, and that’s never been lost on her music, regardless of the genre she’s exploring. But now that Swift also feels she's at her best, it’s evident folklore was just the beginning of Taylor Swift in her finest form.

#taylor swift #folklore #Grammy #WOW

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hlupdate · 4 years

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“I’ve just watched loads of s___ TV,” he says after a long pause. “The Undoing is decent, isn’t it?”

Far from aimless, however, today the singer is full of beans, cheerily shushing his barking dog as he potters about his North London home where he lives with his best friend from home, Oli, [...].

Was he left reeling, I ask, unable to perform at such a crucial moment?

Sure, I say, but the last year can’t have been easy. Didn’t he feel like his purpose had popped?

In return, Tomlinson is good to them. Last month he even promised some new music, saying that he’d written four songs in four days. Does this mean that a second album is on the way?

It must be draining, I say, the weight of expectation in both the media and across his fanbase, to be a spokesperson for grief and hardship. To have tragedy prelude everything he does and says.

“Honestly, it’s part of being from Doncaster as well, I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. That’s the last thing I want.”

There is something that’s helping, though: a secret spot near Los Angeles, [...] “It’s remote and kind of weird, and I’m going to go there for three days and write. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to it. I found it via a YouTube video. It’s got some very interesting locals who live there, it’s sort of backwards when it comes to technology. It feels like you’re going back in time when you’re there. But I don’t want to give it away.”

Has he spoken to Frusicante?

“I f______ wish,” snorts Tomlinson.

Surely someone as well-known as Tomlinson could easily get in touch?

“No, honestly, I think he’s too cool for that. He’s not into that kind of thing.”

So: might 2021 be the year of resurrection?

#louis tomlinson #241120 #lt livestream #e and f mentions from the journalist removed where there is [...]#nothing altered from louis #stunt mention #at the link

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Dust Volume 7, Number 5

Sarah Louise

A week or two before this Dust’s deadline, we got our first tour announcement by email in more than a year. It was the first of deluge, as live music looks to be coming back with a vengeance starting this summer and really picking up steam around September. Meanwhile, we celebrate our newly vaxxed (or for our Canadian correspondents half-vaxxed) status with tentative steps outside. Your editor had her first beer at a brew pub in mid-May, and it was stupendous. Also stupendous, the onslaught of new music, which has, if anything, accelerated. This month, contributors include all the regulars plus a few new people: Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Patrick Masterson, Ray Garraty, Tim Clarke, Andrew Forell, Ian Mathers, Bryon Hayes, Jonathan Shaw and Chris Liberato. Happy spring, happy normal and happy listening!

Amulets — Blooming (The Flenser)

Blooming by AMULETS

Like a lot of us, Portland-based noise artist Randall Taylor discovered the solace of long walks during the pandemic. His work, which has always used tape degradation to explore the intersection of time, loss and technology, shifted to incorporate another source of decay: the natural world. So, in opening salvo, “Blooming,” alongside blistering onslaughts of eroded guitar sound, it is possible to hear the sounds of a fertile garden — birds, insects, air movement. You can nearly smell the flowers and feel the sunshine on your skin. “The New Normal” explores sounds of creaking, friction-y word and metal, alongside pristine chimes of synthetic tone. It is uneasy, with skittering string-like squeaks and swoops, but also deeply meditative; it shifts from moment to moment from anxiety to provisional acceptance, much as we all did last year, staring out our windows. Overall, the tone is elegiac, gorgeous, but Randall does not hesitate to introduce dissonance. “Heaviest Weight” thunders with frayed bass tones, a weight and a threat in their subliminal pulse. The contrast between that ominous sound and purer, clearer layers of melody, makes for unsettling listening—are we at war or peace, happy or sad, agitated or calm? And yet, perhaps that’s the point, that the past year has been swirl of feelings, boredom alongside anxiety, hope lighting the corners of our listlessness, the smell of flowers pleasing but faintly reminiscent of funerals. Blooming decocts this mix into sound.

Jennifer Kelly

Astute Palate — S-T (Petty Bunco)

Astute Palate by Astute Palate

Astute Palate is a hastily assembled group of rockers summoned to support David Nance in Philly on a date when he couldn’t bring the David Nance Band. Participants included Richie Records proprietor Richie Charles, Lantern’s Emily Robb, Writhing Squares/Purling Hiss/all around Philadelphia regular Daniel Provenzano on bass and, of course, Nance himself, all huddled together in Robb’s recording studio for a weekend together. None of this origin story does justice, however, to the pure liquid fire of this one-off musical collaboration, dominated by Nance’s viscous, distorted blues-inflected guitar wail, but knocked sideways by brute force drumming, wild hypnotic bass lines and the ritual incantation of Nance (and later Robb) singing. The long “Stall Out” does anything but, rampaging free-range in unbridled Crazy Horse/Allmans-style abandon for close to ten minutes without a single sputter. “A Little Proof” is somehow simultaneously heavier and more country, spinning out the soul-blues jams like a younger, unrulier cousin to MC5. “Treadin’ Schuylkill” gives Provenzano the spotlight, opening with a growling bass solo soon joined by heavy psych guitars (a nod, perhaps, to the illustrious locals in Bardo Pond). If Nance et. al. can pull stuff this fine out in a stray road warrior weekend, what are the rest of you doing with your lives?

Jennifer Kelly

Axis: Sova — Fractal (God?)

Fractal - EP by Axis: Sova

Axis: Sova is a combo of three Chicago guys plus one drum machine, which had already been inactive for two or three seasons before the initial COVID lockdown. This digital EP is their way of clearing up some business that could no longer remain undone. The title tune, “Fractal USA,” is a remake of a song from the early days, when the “band” was Brett Sova’s solo project, to full-on, no your pants aren’t tight enough rock band. They just needed you to know about the evolution, you see, so go ahead, do some scissor kicks and gurn while they windmill away; you have enough money saved up from not seeing live music to pay the inevitable chiropractor bill. “Caramel” hypothesizes that a Cluster song that’s played twice as loud and twice as long is twice as good; not sure if I agree, but it’s still not bad at all. Maybe you got a little weird after a few months of putting on your best mask for your daily trip to see if the stimulus check was in the mailbox? The Brenda Ray-meets-Old Black mash up, “(Don’t Wanna Have That) Dream,” is proof that while you were alone, you weren’t alone. If you’ve made it this far, you don’t need to have the fourth track described, so let’s just say that it’s longer.

Bill Meyer

Mattie Barbier — Three Spaces (self-released)

three spaces by mattie barbier

While perhaps best known as half of the trombone-centric new music duo RAGE Thormbones, Mattie Barbier is a member of several other combos and a sonic researcher under their own name. Three Spaces, which is a single, album-length sound file, has the air of experimentation about it. “What do I do,” one can imagine Barbier asking themself, “when I can’t play with other people?” Make music at home, and out of what’s at home, is the obvious answer. But doing isn’t the only point here; the outcome also matters, and while what Barbier has accomplished with Three Spaces sounds quite different from the RAGE Thormbones live experience, it registers quite strongly. Barbier has combined long tones and melodic fragments played on euphonium, trombone and reed organ, that were recorded both inside and outside of their home. Carefully layered, the source material combines into a sound rather like a bell’s toll, which over the course of nearly 39 minutes swells and recedes, but never quite decays; it ends with an imposed rather than natural fade-out. The sound is as deep as it is expansive, inviting the listener to let themselves fall ever father into its realm.

Bill Meyer

Beneath — On Tilt EP (Hemlock Recordings)

On Tilt EP by Beneath

One of the more pleasant surprises this year is the resuscitation of Untold’s Hemlock Recordings imprint. A vital voice in the post-dubstep fracas at the turn of the ‘10s thanks to releases from Hessle Audio’s Pearson Sound (when he was still Ramadanman) and Pangaea, James Blake, FaltyDL and Hodge to name but a handful, the label went dormant following a Ploy 12” in 2017 before the surprise announcement of Londoner Beneath’s On Tilt, which sounds every bit the sensible alliance in practice it looks on paper: These are low-end rumblers with irregular rhythms and spare melodic tics that worm their way into your brain in the best bone-humming fashion (see “Shambling” or “Lesser Circulation” for a good example). Who knows how long the return will last, but for a certain stripe of DMZ-damaged devotee and pretty much no one else, it’ll feel good to have some Hemlock in your life again. Tilt back, pour in.

Patrick Masterson

Black Spirit— El Sueño De La Razón Produce Monstruos (Infinite Night Records)

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More metal comes from South America than Spain, but these Europeans clear the high bar set by Latin America scenesters. The album’s title states that it was inspired by “El Sueño De La Razón Produce Monstruos.” That can testify both to lasting influence of Goya’s art and to the laziness of the current culture which seeks inspiration only from the most popular pictorial art of the past. The track “Ignorance and The Grotesque” perfectly captures the whole mood of the disc: it balances ignorant speeds, undecipherable vocals and grotesque parts with piano interludes and doom-ish atmosphere. It would be better without the grotesque, but that’s probably part of the baggage.

Ray Garraty

Burial + Blackdown — Shock Power of Love EP (Keysound Recordings)

Shock Power of Love EP by Burial

You might worry, occasionally, that Burial was becoming a victim of diminishing returns. Here, as ever, he uses a narrow palette to create tracks that few can emulate. However, even though the music has its rewards, it doesn’t clear the very high bar that his previous work has set. Thus “Dark Gethsemane” rides a 4/4 beat, angelic murmurs, vinyl crackle and a tightly ratcheted build that morphs into a sermon led by the repeated invocation “We must shock this nation with the power of love.” As his vocal samples become more explicit, the mystery of his music fades. This is all promise and no real resolution. “Space Cadet’ likewise sounds both gorgeous and minor with its soul gospel refrain “Take Me Higher” over an old-school jungle beat. At six plus minutes it would have been enough. It continues another three with an almost cartoonish second movement that lacks the subtlety that characterizes Burial’s best work.

Andrew Forell

Colleen — The Tunnel and the Clearing (Thrill Jockey)

The Tunnel and the Clearing by Colleen

While COVID messed with most people’s lives, it was both an endgame and an opportunity for Cécile Schott, the Frenchwoman who records under the name Colleen. She was just coming out of a series of health and personal dislocations, which resulted in her being newly healthy but alone in a new town just as the lockdown came down. Clearly, this was not a time for half measures, so she selected an entirely new instrumental set-up and settled in to make a record that reflected what she’d been through. Out went the viola da gamba and melodica that have figured prominently on her last few albums; in came a Moog synthesizer, a Yamaha organ, a tape echo and a drum machine.

Colleen’s voice, of course, remains the same. Airy and precise, her delivery doesn’t match the gravity of the experiences her songs describe. But that sense of remove is, perhaps, a reflection of one of adversity’s lessons; if you don’t stay stuck, you can wind up somewhere quite different. Between the keyboards’ cycling melodies and the drum machine’s fizzy beats, the music on The Tunnel and the Clearing imparts a sense of motion that carries her light voice along for the ride, dropping painful sentiments and letting them fall behind.

Bill Meyer

Current Joys — Voyager (Secretly Canadian)

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Nick Rattigan has been releasing music under the name Current Joys since 2013, and Voyager is his latest offering. It’s a dramatic and often brilliant collection of songs, bringing to mind the urgent rhythmic drive of Spoon, the dour grandeur of The Cure and the unapologetic emotional heft of Bright Eyes or early Arcade Fire. On Voyager’s standout, “American Honey,” a simple strummed backing and Rattigan’s vocal delivery are potent enough, but it’s the string section that proves devastating, cycling around for multiple punches to the gut. While more stripped-back songs such as “Big Star” and “The Spirit or the Curse” offer some respite along the way, Voyager does prove a little unwieldy. With 16 tracks clocking in at nearly an hour, the album’s execution doesn’t quite live up to its ambition. The wonky tom-tom rhythms of “Breaking the Waves” are more distracting than interesting; a serviceable cover of Rowland S. Howard’s “Shivers” feels more like an acknowledgment of influence than a striking interpretation; and the combined six minutes of the two-part instrumental title track may have worked better as shorter interludes. Nevertheless, plenty of Voyager’s tracks demonstrate Rattigan’s knack for a raw, emotive indie-rock tune.

Tim Clarke

Ducks Ltd — Get Bleak EP (Carpark Records)

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Toronto duo Ducks Ltd celebrates signing to Carpark with an expanded re-release of their 2018 debut EP Get Bleak. The pair — Tom Mcgreevy on vocals, rhythm and bass guitars and Evan Lewis on lead guitar — bonded over a shared love of 1980s indie bands. Their intricately constructed guitar interplay carries the DNA of Postcard and C86 over meaty bass lines that evoke Mighty Mighty as much as Orange Juice and McCarthy. The sprightly music belies the miserablism of the lyrics that focus on FOMO, poor decisions, screen induced isolation, the corrosive impact of gentrification and gig economies. Mcgreevy and Lewis don’t wallow, however. Their jaunty jangle is a paean to the joys of jumping about and singing along with those new favorite songs that suddenly mean everything and will stick with you long after the world’s shit slopes your shoulders.

Andrew Forell

Field Music — Flat White Moon (Memphis Industries)

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It’s easy to take Field Music for granted. Since 2005, the Brewis brothers have been making smartly composed and tightly executed guitar pop with obvious debts to The Beatles and XTC, and all their albums have fallen somewhere along the continuum from good to great (my personal favorites are 2010’s Measure and 2012’s Plumb). Album number eight, Flat White Moon, features the usual balance between Peter’s more pensive, bittersweet numbers with greater focus on piano and strings, such as “Orion From the Street” and “When You Last Heard From Linda,” and David’s funkier, more staccato cuts, such as “No Pressure” and “I’m the One Who Wants to Be With You.” Twelve songs, 40 minutes, tunes for days — what’s not to love? If you’ve yet to get acquainted with Field Music, Flat White Moon is as good an introduction as any.

Tim Clarke

Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Jacob Felix Heule/Kanoko Nishi-Smith — Non-Dweller (Humbler)

non-dweller by gabby fluke-mogul, Jacob Felix Heule, & Kanoko Nishi-Smith

With Non-Dweller, we have a trio of Bay-Area improvisers who certainly do not reside in one place for very long. There is an agitated freneticism about their interactions here, the performers acting like electrons seeking to release energy and break out of orbit. Each player brings a unique collection of timbres to the party with their implement of choice. Heule is a percussionist by trade yet focuses on extended techniques — mainly friction-based — as he wrests an unholy wail from the maw of his bass drum. Fluke-Mogul’s violin sways between tone generator and noise source. Nishi-Smith is a classically trained pianist who here is bowing and plucking the koto, or Japanese zither. The trio spend most of their time in sparring mode, their energies unleashed with synchrony as if in an elaborate dance. It is clear they have collaborated before. Heule and Nishi-Smith have been at it for over a decade; Fluke-Mogul joined the party in 2019. The most gorgeous moments happen when all three players are focused on friction: Heule slides across his drum, Fluke-Mogul soars with their violin and Nishi-Smith gracefully bows her koto. The energy is focused and particles collide, creating waves of tone. The players wrestle intensity into submission, and the ensuing sonorities are unmissable.

Bryon Hayes

FMB DZ — War Zone (Fast Money Boyz \ EMPIRE)

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Ever since FMB DZ got shot and moved out of Detroit, he has continued to release angry music. (He may not be more productive after the assault, but he’s certainly not less so.) War Zone is his latest effort, along with The Gift 3 and Ape Season, and DZ is back in his paranoiac mode and ready for vengeance. That’s hardly unusual in this type of music but DZ stands out because he’s a bit angrier, a bit more pressing and a bit more gifted than the next man. He doesn’t outdo himself in this tape, but rather mostly follows the blueprint of Ape Season. The standout track is “Spin Again.”

Ray Garraty

Ian M Fraser — Berserk (Superpang)

Berserk by Ian M Fraser

Ian M Fraser is kind enough to provide details about how he created and edited Berserk, although relatively few listeners are going to really know what “nonlinear feedback systems and waveset synthesis” are, let alone “sensormonitor primitives auditory perception software”. And fewer still will be able to focus on what that might mean while Berserk is actually playing, because the output of those programs and systems is immediately, viscerally clear. If a computer were actually capable of going rabid, feral, well, berserk, the human mind might imagine it sounds something like this. Over four shorter tracks and the relatively epic 8:26 of “The Cannibal,” Fraser either coaxes or allows (or both) his tools into the equivalent of something like what someone who knew very little about both genres might imagine is like a power electronics act playing free jazz or vice versa. It is absolutely viscerally thrilling (albeit probably easier to repeat at this length of 16 minutes than, say, 50) and will do the track the next time you feel like your brain needs a good hard scrub.

Ian Mathers

Human Failure — Crown on the Head of a King of Mud (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Crown on the Head of a King of Mud by Human Failure

It’s tough to figure out if the band’s name is meant specifically to apply to D. Cornejo (sole member of Human Failure) or to the general field of human failure, which grows ever more capacious. Whatever the intent, Human Failure makes thoroughly unlovable music, pitched somewhere on the continuum that runs from the primitivist death metal to stenchcore to harsh noise. This reviewer is especially fond (yep, somehow that’s the only word for it) of the title track of this 10” record: “Crown on the Head of a King of Mud” sloughs and slogs along for two minutes, sort of like one of the ripest zombies in Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), wandering about and slowly falling to pieces in Florida’s tumid heat. Just as that last bit of flesh is poised to slide from bone, the song unexpectedly breaks into a run. Where is it going? What’s the rush? No one knows. Things eventually bottom out into “Disassembling Morality,” a static-and-distortion laden electronic interlude that might squeak and spark for a bit too long — but then “Your Hope Is a Noose” shambles into the frame. That zombie seems to have found some equally noisome and truculent friends. They djent and pogo around for a while, and the song has a lot more fun than seems called for by the band name. Cornejo might be pissed off by the myriad manmade disasters and outright catastrophes that burden the earthball (he’s sure angry as heck about something…). But the record ends up being sort of successful, if deafening, grinding, growling stench is on the agenda. All things considered, why wouldn’t it be?

Jonathan Shaw

Insub Meta Orchestra — Ten / Sync (Insub)

Ten / Sync by INSUB META ORCHESTRA

Ten / Sync was recorded in September, 2020; not exactly lockdown time, but certainly not out of the pandemic woods. It’s no small task to keep any 50-strong orchestra going, let alone one devoted to experimental music. So, if you already have one, then having it perform during a pandemic is just another challenge among many. So, the Swiss-based orchestra assembled three groups of musicians, numbering 31 in all, and assembled their contributions during post-production. While this did not provide the social experience that IMO’s gatherings usually impart to participants, an outcome that just isn’t the same seems awfully representative of the time, right? And since one Insub Meta Orchestra subspeciality is making music that sounds like it was performed by many fewer players than were actually present, this collection of sustained chords concealing tiny actions and apparently disassembled passages is actually very representative of the ensemble’s music.

Bill Meyer

Amirtha Kidambi & Matteo Liberatore — Neutral Love (Astral Editions)

Neutral Love by Amirtha Kidambi & Matteo Liberatore

With her own group, the Elder Ones, and in Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, singer Amirtha Kidambi shows how far you can take a song while still giving the meanings of words and the boundaries of form their dues. But Neutral Love, like her two tapes with Lea Bertucci, explores the territory outside the tower of song. The main structures for this improvised encounter with electric guitarist Matteo Liberatore seem to be a shared agreement to exclude certain options. Song form and overt displays of chops are right out; the patient manipulation of sounds is where it’s at. Liberatore opts mostly for swelling and subsiding resonations, while Kidambi spends a lot of time finding out what’s hiding at the back of her throat, drawing it out, and then tying it into elaborate shapes. Patient and eerie, these four tracks find a place adjacent to Charalambides at their most abstract, and make it their own.

Bill Meyer

Kosmodemonic — Liminal Light (Transylvanian Recordings)

KOSMODEMONIC - LIMINAL LIGHT by KOSMODEMONIC

NYC outfit Kosmodemonic is among the recent wave of metal bands attempting to effect an organic-sounding synthesis of numerous subgenres: a slurry of sludge, a bit of black metal, a dose of doom, and a hit or two of the lysergic. When it works — as it does on a number of tracks on the band’s long new cassette Liminal Light — it’s an exciting sound. Songs like “Moirai” and “Broken Crown” manage to couple tuneful riffs, dirty tone and a muscular bottom end in ways that feel thumping, groovy and pretty weird. You’ll want to bump your butt around even as you’re looking for something to break. But the tape is pretty long, and the further afield Kosmodemonic gets from that mid-tempo groove, the more middling (and sometimes muddled) the material sounds. “With Majesty” can’t quite find its rhythmic footing in its more technical passages, and the song’s sludgier sections feel like compromises, rather than interesting maneuvers. But the record begins and finishes with really strong songs. Both “Drown in Drone” and “Unnaming Unlearning” embrace scale, letting their big riffs rip. When “Unnaming Unlearning” slips into complex sections of blackened and distorted dissonance, the drama surges. Formal experiment and manipulation of mood fold into each other. The song gets interesting, even as it’s reaching for a peak. And then it ends, suddenly, violently. It’s pretty good. Your impulse is to flip the tape and hear it again, which is just what Kosmodemonic wants you to do. Well played, dudes.

Jonathan Shaw

Sarah Louise — Earth Bow (Self-Released)

Earth Bow by Sarah Louise

Asheville-based songwriter Sarah Louise wants to be your personal nature interpreter. The titles of her recordings, from her debut Field Guide through Deeper Woods and Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars are like planetary signposts pointing to a more intimate relationship with our planet as a living organism. With each successive release, her music has also become more and more organic sounding, culminating with Earth Bow, in which Louise herself is arms deep in humus, communing with birds and insects. Recordings of creation feature prominently; katydids, spring peeper frogs, a creek and various birds are credited as providing additional singing, augmenting the artist’s own mellifluous voice. For a recording in which the track titles and lyrics are focused on nature and Louise’s experiences therein, there are a lot of digital elements. Her 12-string guitar is prominent in places, but synths are everywhere: in the background, bouncing around like shooting stars, and mimicking the various fauna that they accompany. Yet the earthly and the machine-made are not juxtaposed, they are blended. The vocals, which center the recordings, tie both elements together nicely. Earth Bow is a tasty concoction, in which a variety of ingredients are married in botanical bliss.

Bryon Hayes

Le Mav — “Supersonic (Feat. Tay Iwar)” (Immaculate Taste)

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Nigeria’s alté scene has been bubbling for a couple of years now on the backs of guys like Odunsi (The Engine) and Santi, and Gabriel Obi bka Le Mav is no stranger to the fray, having produced Santi’s “Sparky,” Aylø and a recurring favorite of his, singer Tay Iwar. The two have already collaborated at length (for songs off Iwar’s debut album Gemini in 2019, as well as the entirety of last year’s Gold EP), so the comfort level here is established. It shows: Iwar’s smooth-as vocals match Le Mav’s breezy piano descent and gentle rhythmic shuffle in an easygoing song that matches anything you might hear coming from Miguel, Frank Ocean or the Sun-El Musician orbit. “If it feels right, touch the sky,” Iwar suggests early on. Well, don��t mind if I do.

Patrick Masterson

Sugar Minott — “I Remember Mama” (Emotional Rescue)

I Remember Mama by Sugar Minott

At some point after Lincoln Barrington Minott had left Kingston and his early dancehall and lovers rock legacy with Studio One and Black Roots behind for cooler climates and the old world of London, he ran into producer Steve Parr at the Wackies offices. Story goes that the two decided to start up Sound Design Studio with the intent to record and mix for ads, film and music — but scant evidence of this idea exists beyond “I Remember Mama,” released on 7” and 12” in 1985 and reissued for the first time since via Stuart Leath and his long-trusted Emotional Rescue imprint. Parr does most of the work on the recording (Andy MacDonald shines on tenor sax and Paul Uden guitar in the original credits), but it’s all about the sweetness Sugar brings to the table: With backing from two accomplished performers in their own right, Janette Sewell and Shola Phillips, Minott’s naturally relaxed delivery shines through on this. “Sound Design” is a dubbier instrumental version that retains Sewell’s and Phillips’ vocals, and Dan Tyler (half of Idjut Boys) provides an even spacier, handclap-laden 11-minute remix, but while both variants are excellent, the boogie of the original is unassailable. Look for the vinyl to hit in July.

Patrick Masterson

Jessica Ackerley — Morning/mourning (Cacophonous Revival)

Morning/mourning by Jessica Ackerley

It makes sense that Wendy Eisenberg wrote the liner notes to Morning/mourning, since they and Jessica Ackerley are bound by a shared commitment to string-craft. Both have a deep idiomatic foundation in jazz guitar, but neither is willing to be confined by what they’ve learned. In the case of Morning/mourning, that means that patiently paced ruminations upon Derek Bailey-like harmonics sit side by side with frantic but rigorously scripted forays that sound a bit like Jim Hall might if he input the contents of his French press intravenously. This album’s nine tracks observe passings and new beginnings, since Ackerley pulled the recording together while in quarantine, shortly before leaving Manhattan for Honolulu, and titled some of them in tribute to a pair of guitar teachers who were taken by 2020. But in their attention to tone, harmony, velocity and structure, these pieces, like Eisenberg’s records, speak as much to intellect as to emotion.

Bill Meyer

Nadja & Disrotted — Split (Roman Numeral Records)

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It makes a certain kind of sense for Nadja and Disrotted to tackle a split together; although both bands traffic in a particularly foreboding strain of doom metal, they also share a weird sort of comfort. There’s a sense more of horrible things happening around you than to you, like you’re in the eye of the storm or maybe in a bathysphere plunged to crushing depths. There is a precision to the menace, a measured quality to the noise. And they get there when they get there; as Dusted’s Jonathan Shaw pointed out in his review of Disrotted’s Cryongenics, “Pace seems to be the point.” This excellent split doesn’t shy away from these commonalities while still highlighting the distinct timbres of each act, with Nadja settling into and then returning to one of their indelibly titanic bass riffs throughout the 19-minute “From the Lips of a Ghost in the Shadow of a Unicorn's Dream” and Disrotted somehow conjuring the feeling of a massive structure corroding and collapsing on the 15-minute “Pastures for the Benighted”. When the latter slams to a half, one last hit echoing away, the listener may find themselves feeling equally relieved the onslaught is over and kind of missing both sides’ pulverizing embrace.

Ian Mathers

Nasimiyu — POTIONS (Figureight)

P O T I O N S by nasimiYu

Nasimiyu’s songs bounce and shimmy with complex rhythms, her background as a dancer and percussionist for Kabells and Sharkmuffin coming through in the intricate interplay of handclaps, breathy beat-boxing, rattling metal implements, all manner of drums and, not least, her lithe, twining vocal lines. “Watercolor” blossoms out of a burst of choral “la”s, each note allowed to flower briefly before behind cut off with a knife-edge; these are organic sounds shaped with mechanical precision. Against this background, Nasimiyu herself enters, her voice fluttery and syncopated, a bit like Neneh Cherry. The mix is full of separate elements, the backing vocals, a synthesizer working as a bass, handclaps, Nasimiyu’s singing, but the song remains light and translucent. “Feelings,” sings Nasimiyu, “I am in my feelings,” and so, for a moment, are we. Nasimiyu is half Kenyan and half Scandinavian-American, and you can hear a bit of East Africa in the surging sweetness of choral singing on “Immigrant Hustle.” But there’s a post-modern gloss over everything, as the singer brings in sonic elements from jazz, electronica, dance, pop and afro-beat. Yet however many layers are added, the sound remains bright and clear, a bead curtain of musical sensation whose elements click faintly as they brush together, but remain essentially separate.

Jennifer Kelly

Carlos Niño & Friends — More Energy Fields, Current (International Anthem)

More Energy Fields, Current by Carlos Niño & Friends

Multi-instrumentalist and producer Carlos Niño latest album which straddles and largely crosses the line between spiritual jazz and new age ambience features friends from both worlds including Shabaka Hutchings, Jamael Dean, Dntel and Laraaji. Niño, who plays percussion and synthesizer, edited, mixed and produced the album from recordings made in 2019 and 2020 in a variety of settings. The results are largely low-key soundscapes designed to assist meditation on the fields and current of the title. Much evocation of the natural world, chiming eastern influenced percussion and layers of acoustic and synthetic keys that are lovely but tend to lull. It is the slightly disruptive reeds that prick the ears here, Aaron Hall’s plangent tenor on “Now the background is foreground,” Devin Daniels’ alto phrasing on “Together” and Hutchings’ expressive duet with Dean on “Please, wake up.”

Andrew Forell

Shane Parish — Disintegrated Satellites (Bandcamp subscription)

Disintegrated Satellites EP by Shane Parish

The normally ultra-productive Shane Parish didn’t put out a lot of music in 2020, and none of what did come out was recorded that year. It turns out that he was busy giving guitar lessons via zoom and moving from North Carolina to Georgia, but we’re well into a new year and he’s back in Bandcamp. This three tune EP doesn’t declare a new direction, of which Parish has had many, so much as an integration of his interests in American folk music and far Eastern tonalities. Simultaneously familiar and alien, but above all propulsive, it serves notice that the time for reflection has passed.

Bill Meyer

Séketxe — “Caixão de Luxo” (Chasing Dreams)

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The thing that gets your attention about Séketxe is… well, everything: how many of them there are (i.e., how you can’t really tell who’s in the group and who isn’t), how they’re all propellant, a musical bottle rocket bursting out of your speakers, confrontationally in your face on camera — and how much fun it looks like they’re having. Somewhere out there beyond the reaches of kuduro and Mystikal lie the Angolan barks and rasps of this youthful sextet, who trade verses (and a soothing harmony drizzled right across the madness at around 1:40) among one another over an Eddy Tussa sample on a beat by producer about town Smash Midas. What are they on about? My Portuguese is nonexistent, let alone my Luandan slang, but even I can tell that title translates to “luxury casket.” Anyway, it’s bonkers and if you’re looking for a jolt your morning joe doesn’t deliver anymore, Séketxe oughta do it. You’ll never catch me thanking an algorithm, but I guess it’s true the maths can serve it up right every once in a while. Séketxe is the proof.

Patrick Masterson

Tōth — You and Me and Everything (Northern Spy)

You And Me And Everything by Tōth

The title of Alex Toth’s solo debut, Practice Magic and Seek Professional Help When Necessary, alludes to his belief in music as therapy — that there’s an alchemy in the process, yet one that can’t necessarily be depended on to pull you out of an emotional hole when that hole gets too deep. On his new album, You and Me and Everything, all of his recent personal struggles are out in the open. There’s the tale of when he was so fucked up he couldn’t play trumpet at a family funeral (“Turnaround (Cocaine Song)”); there’s leaning on songwriting as a means to process the pain of heartbreak (“Guitars are Better Than Synthesizers for Writing Through Hard Times”); and there’s his ongoing battle with anxiety (“Butterflies”). While such heavy emotional terrain could prove hard-going, Toth approaches everything with a playfulness, a lightness of touch and a gentle haze to the production. Plus, he gets a helping hand from Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), who lends backing vocals to standout “Daffadowndilly,” which taps into the woozy gorgeousness of prime Robert Wyatt.

Tim Clarke

Mara Winter — Rise, follow (Discreet Editions)

Rise, follow by Mara Winter

For people with busy performance schedules, 2020 posed a problem; how do you stay busy and creative when you can’t do what you usually do? Mara Winter, an American-born, Swiss-based flute player who specializes in Renaissance-era repertoire and instruments, used it to forge a new creative identity. In partnership with experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist Clara de Asís, she began exploring the commonalities between early, composed music and contemporary approaches and developed a platform to disseminate documents of that research into the world. Rise, follow, the inaugural release of Discreet Editions, is an hour-long piece for two Renaissance-style bass flutes played by Winter and Johanna Bartz. The two musicians played long, overlapping tones with contrast attacks, pushing on until they grew so tired from hefting those woodwinds that they just couldn’t play anymore. Effectively the performance unit is a trio, since the two musicians had to accommodate or collaborate with the reverberant acoustics of Basel’s Kartäuserkirche. The church’s echo threw sounds back at the player, turning pure tones into blurred timbres. While the instrumentation is antique, the ideas about sound combination and endurance have more to do with Morton Feldman, Phill Niblock and Aíne O’Dwyer. The result is music that is simultaneously meditative and as heavy as a bench-pressing competition.

Bill Meyer

Wurld Series — What’s Growing (Melted Ice Cream)

What's Growing by Wurld Series

Some reviewers of What’s Growing, the second album by New Zealand’s Wurld Series, have managed to avoid making Pavement comparisons, but it’s hard to fathom their restraint. Brief opener “Harvester” feels like you’re being dropped mid-solo into a random Wowee Zowee track; the guitar tone on lead single “Nap Gate,” on the other hand, sounds like it's nicked straight from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. And while singer/guitarist Luke Towart doesn’t attempt to match Malkmus’ flamboyance in the vocal delivery department, their voices and wry lyrical observations bear a distinct resemblance to one another. “Caught beneath a dull blade / What a mess that would make” he sings on “Distant Business” before the song reaches its finale where guitar solos blast off from atop other guitar solos in an array of complementary textures. But besides being a ridiculously fun guitar pop record, What’s Growing is also threaded through with a British psych folk vibe replete with Mellotron flute — and the two styles blend seamlessly together thanks to Towart’s partner in crime, producer/drummer Brian Feary (Salad Boys, Dance Asthmatics). So, whether you're looking for a great summer indie rock record or you’ve ever wondered what the Fab Five from Stockton might’ve sounded like if they’d stuck to short songs and had more flutes, this one’s for you.

Chris Liberato

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lt2archive · 3 years

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The former One Direction star and solo artist reveals his plans to manage woman rock bands, and tackles those pesky One Direction rumours

24 November 2020 • 4:05pm

“I’ve just watched loads of s___ TV,” he says after a long pause. “The Undoing is decent, isn’t it?”

He's getting ready to rehearse an exciting one-off gig that will be live-streamed from a secret London location on December 12, announced today exclusively via the Telegraph. The proceeds of the night will be split across four charities: The Stagehand Covid-19 Crew Relief Fund and Crew Nation, Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice and Marcus Rashford’s charity FareShare, to help end child poverty. Tomlinson will also be donating money to his own touring crew, many of which have been out of work since March. “I've been incredibly worried about them and felt incredibly powerless, so wanted to give something back.”

The gig also means a great deal to Tomlinson on a personal level. His first ever tour as a solo artist, to promote his debut solo album WALLS, was cut short back in March after just two concerts in Spain and Mexico. It was an album he’d spent five years working on: a guitar-led project that ruptured with the preppy pop anthems of One Direction, inspired instead by Tomlinson’s love for Britpop.

Was he left reeling, I ask, unable to perform at such a crucial moment?

Sure, I say, but the last year can’t have been easy. Didn’t he feel like his purpose had popped?

In return, Tomlinson is good to them. Last month he even promised some new music, saying that he’d written four songs in four days. Does this mean that a second album is on the way?

It must be draining, I say, the weight of expectation in both the media and across his fanbase, to be a spokesperson for grief and hardship. To have tragedy prelude everything he does and says.

“Honestly, it’s part of being from Doncaster as well, I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. That’s the last thing I want.”

Too many incredible memories to mention but not a day goes by that I don't think about how amazing it was. @NiallOfficial @Harry_Styles @LiamPayne @zaynmalik . So proud of you all individually.

Has he spoken to Frusicante?

“I f______ wish,” snorts Tomlinson.

Surely someone as well-known as Tomlinson could easily get in touch?

“No, honestly, I think he’s too cool for that. He’s not into that kind of thing.”

So: might 2021 be the year of resurrection?

Tickets for Louis Tomlinson Live In London are on sale tomorrow from 4pm

#lt live from london #nov. 24 2020 #press #the telegraph #nov 2020

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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

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makistar2018 · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

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In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

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Vogue

#taylor swift #vogue #september #2019 #cover girl

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hearyourheart · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

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drunkonnjealousy · 7 years

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My Reputation Secret Session Experience

(an abbreviated version to keep confidentiality)

I got a DM from Taylor Nation before the London SS had happened, so I honestly had no idea what the “secret event” was. They called me and said the event was in Rhode Island, and I mean the only thing there is her house but I didn’t know what the event entailed. Knowing Taylor, I was like she’s gonna make it so fun and so detailed and so personal whatever it is.

I was not able to focus on anything for two weeks because I was just thinking about taylor and rhode island. I took a train from NYC to Rhode Island the night before. Wednesday October 18, 2017 was such a GORGEOUS day. The water was SO BLUE. THE SUN WAS SHINING. and there was a helicopter hovering in front of taylor’s house which annoyed me but yeah I’ll try to get over that. Fast forward to being at her house. First of all, her security detail is hilarious. They are so nice and funny and were cracking jokes the whole time. The very first person I talked to was none other than Scott Swift, the man the legend, wearing a striped sweater only a dad would buy and his pockets overflowing with 1989 guitar picks. I spent a good chunk of time chatting with him on the deck he’s amazing—we stan forever. Also I legit hung out and excitedly mingled in Taylor’s kitchen so long that I forgot it wasn’t normal to be in her kitchen. There was a huge spread of Chick-fil-a nuggets, pizza, chips, custom Rep cookies and M&Ms, Smart Water and Diet Coke. *side note i’m a vegetarian but if taylor would have offered me a nugget i would have forgotten my vow against meat* I was so comfortable and having so much fun that it just felt like I was at my friend’s house party, which I was. But then like every 30 minutes it would hit me that to the outside world, she was THE Taylor Swift, and I was in her kitchen… Fast forward to Andrea coming down to also hang out and mingle with us. She smelled amazing (so did the entire house). She came up to me and Sol and said hello with a huge smile on her face and then pulled us both into a tight hug at the same time and said “YOU BEAUTIFUL SOULS.” and honestly I just wanted to hug her ten more times and be like THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE MADAM PRESIDENT. Side note, the kitchen has adorable childhood pictures of Taylor and Austin and pictures of the family on the beach and its all v cute. Also I saw the mermaid, I MEAN THE MERMAID that taylor and selena posed by and i was like wow this iconic. ALSO as many of you know i’m not only a taylor stan, but a huge todrick stan, and i have been for years. so i died a little when i realized that i was leaning against the same kitchen counter that they were sitting on during thanksgiving and i was like wow its cool i’m fine we’re fine EVERYTHING IS FINE. Fast forward to Austin also coming downstairs to mingle. He’s adorable and I love him. I didn’t get to chat with him bc it was kind of crowded but he was smiling and laughing and looked genuinely happy to be there. Tree was also floating around the kitchen here and there and let me just say she’s GORGEOUS. (also she was the MVP later when I needed to pee) Okay fast forward some more and it’s time to move into the living room. There are cushions on the floor and I’m sitting with all of my friends, including several of us who are from NYC. There are people setting the room and Andrea, Scott and Austin just look so excited that we’re there and that made me so happy. After what felt like centuries of people opening doors, stomping upstairs and shutting the curtains, it was time for the queen to make her entrance. The door to my right flew open and that tall drink of water in black thigh high boots and blonde curls and a huge smile entered the room and collectively we all made noises that probably sounded non-human. She said “Hi, I’m Taylor” as she sat down in this throne of a chair and crossed her legs that are collectively longer than the great wall of china. She said “you’ve done your detective work right (my detectivey heart fell out of my detectivey ass) and you are at the Reputation Secret Sessions”

**and that’s where the cone of silence comes on and what happened for the next several hours at the secret sessions STAYS at the secret sessions.**

So after I DIED because she obviously played us every track of the album. It was time for picturesssss. As I walked in to see Taylor, I didn’t even make it to her yet before she strutted toward me and scooped me into a hug so tight that I said “hey i’m kelsea” into her hair ;askdjflskfj She pulled away and was like “yeah I know, and you spell it S-E-A right?” AND LEMME TELL YOU i’ve gone my entire 24 years of life with my name spelled wrong, even people I’ve known for years will spell it Kelsey. and I replied to Taylor, “UM YEAH” and she got so excited she fist pumped and then put her hand up for a high five and we literally had the most epic high five of my entire life I’m pretty sure they heard it in Australia. ok. At this point Sol walked in and I introduced her to Taylor too. She loved Sol so much. so so much. Then I asked Taylor if she found me on Tumblr or Twitter, and she immediately replied “Tumblr” with a nod. and then she goes “I KNOW you love TODRICK, and I LOVE that.” and I’m pretty sure that was the moment my brain short-circuited.

and i was like “OKAY well TN contacted me via Twitter and I was real confused because my handle is @ toddyownsmyass” and her face lit up, her mouth dropped open, she grabbed my hand and laughed and said “OH MY GOD HAHAHHA”.

Next I told her about our annual NYC July 9th party. I was like listen taylor, the entire reason i met sol is because we’re tumblr friends and we have this party every year at sofia’s apt in the upper west side where we stay up until 1:58 AM listening to Last Kiss and then she was like “AWWWW” and I remember her face just looking at the two of us in pure amazement. OKAY now it was time for pictures and Taylor was like “we’re gonna take a group shot first and then we’ll do individuals ok?” and during our group photo she hugged both me and Sol so tightly.

She looks at me and I put my hands together and I’m like “Okay, I want to recreate a photo you and todrick did on the couch” and she got so excited she was like “GREAT but I’m not doing the splits again” as she walks over to this gorgeous white couch. and i was like “nah girl i CANT do the splits, i wanna do that back to back one” and she was so invested it was adorable. It took us a few minutes of sitting back to back and discussing our knee placement, our hand placement, and both of us kept turning and looking over our shoulders to make sure we were matching and coordinating our bodies right. and then right before the picture taylor goes “what should we do with this hand? oh i know lets hold hands” and she grabbed my hand and held it so tightly. i’m pretty sure you can see in my facial expression how much that meant to me—i’m BEAMING. out of all forms of social interaction, hand holding is one of the most intimate,it’s not something we do with very many people if you really think about it. after the picture is taken, we are still sitting back to back on the couch, holding hands, and she turns to look at me and goes “that’s the cutest pose i’ve ever done” and i’m all “Awwww thanks!” thinking she’s just being a sweetheart. and then her expression is happy but a little more serious, and she goes “No, I’m being serious, like I’ve never done anything cuter.” and ladies that’s probably the moment I was like “HI I’M KELSEA AND I WELCOME DEATH WITH OPEN ARMS”. It was going to be time to leave because we had already taken our pictures but Taylor grabbed me and Sol again and squeezed us and gushed “you little FLOWER buttons” and at the time my brain was like ???? I thought maybe she was going to say we were flowers, and then halfway through changed her mind to buttons…well ANYWAYS she reblogged that photo of us later and clarified that she believes sol and i embody the aesthetic of tiny adorable little flower-shaped buttons and now i will no longer look at flowers nor buttons the same way and Sol and I text each other randomly “FLOWER BUTTONS” just to make each other cry it’s great. okay moving on… It was time to leave and right before i walked away, I yelled to her “TAYLOR, YOU’RE INVITED TO OUR JULY 9TH PARTY ANYTIME, UPPER WEST SIDE, NYC, SEE YOU THERE!” and i did some mix between dabbing and pointing that can only be attributed to all of the time i spent in college with frat boys. and with this big grin on her face she yelled back “THANKS! LOVE YOU GUYS!” and i stumbled out of the room to pick up the Reputation merch bag Taylor gave all of us (GET YOU A WOMAN). As her security guard let us into a van to be taken back to our car, I asked what time it was and it was so late Sofia and I had missed our train back to Manhattan. We didn’t care. We were stranded in Rhode Island but WHO CARES BC TAYLOR SWIFT LOVES US. Ali from TN was like, “you guys have friends at your hotel right? like you have somewhere to go?” so sweet i love ali– we stan her forever. Sofia and I went back to our hotel, which we had already checked out of mind you, and sat in the hallway, dazed and happy, from 2-4am. Sofia posted a photo of us on tumblr and taylor liked it and i was like wow taylor knows we’re stranded that’s hilarious i bet she’s laughing. We ended up calling a car service to pick us up in rhode island AND DRIVE US BACK TO NEW YORK CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I got back to my apt on the upper east side at 5am and took a nap and then got up for work and tried to be an adult but it was a very sad attempt. This is a very abbreviated account of what happened that fateful day Taylor welcomed me into her home for 8+ hours. A lot of it has to stay secret and confidential until the album comes out on Nov 10. Even more of it will likely never leave the walls of that gorgeous house by the sea. I will cherish these memories always and I know I am forever changed as a person from the Reputation Secret Sessions.

Thank you @taylorswift for EVERYTHING. I’m so proud to call you a friend.

#reputation secret sessions #secret sessions #rhode island secret sessions #rhode island #long ass post

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hiphopscriptures · 4 years

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Fresh Artist Fridays: Alex Harris Interview - DRAFT

Like most of us, Alex Harris’s life underwent some severe changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had to reevaluate his process for making music and hone in on the message he wanted to share through his work. His latest EP titled Frequency is his gift to humanity, an attempt at bringing positive vibrations and good feelings to a dark world. Read Hip Hop Scriptures’ interview with this week’s Fresh Artist Friday Alex Harris below.

conducted by Willow Rose, transcribed by Priscilla Guadarrama

My name is Willow Rose and I’m an intern at Hip Hop Scriptures. I’m focusing on PR and social media management. I know our audience may or may not be familiar with your work so I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your background. When did you become interested in music and realize you wanted to perform and create new music?

Willow thank you so much for having me on the show. Yeah so basically I started music when I was 7 years old. In my family, we are a big family - five boys three girls eight of us, and I'm in the middle. I've been singing and doing my thing with entertainment since I've known pretty much I could communicate with people. But I started in my parents' church. My father is a pastor of a small congregation in rural Georgia, in the city of Manchester. Over the years my brothers and I, and my sisters initially (the sisters were a part of the group, the family group), and then it evolved to just only being the brothers. And we were known as A7, we called ourselves Inspiration Urban. We travelled all over and then as time progressed, each brother got called to do something very specific, whether it was in the law or authoring books. {two of his brothers continued in the music industry as well}. My roots run deep into music, all the way back to Manchester.

That’s brilliant. You started to touch on my next question. I read that you graduated from Boston University with a masters in Theology and Social Work. I wondered how your background in Theology influenced your music?

What I do - I call it new age soul music. And I think my background, both in social work and I have a minor in psychology undergraduate and a theology degree, which was focused on ethics - that eclectic exposure in learning beyond the roots of Georgia and Manchester, all that experience pours into how I interpreted the power of music. How I use its power and how I allow it to also speak to me and through me to the world. That is the reason why I call what I do new age soul because it is embedded into more of a spiritual element of music itself. I think that we are all spiritual beings, every human experience, and so I think that music is one of the three powerful elements of the universe. Fire and water being two, music being the other because that is how our life begins - with the beat of the heart.

I love that philosophy on the three powerful elements. Listening to your EP, Frequency that just came out, I really felt there was universality in your lyrics and a lot of passion. It is so clear in how you are forming your lyrics and the beat. Would you say that your religious influence and growing up in Georgia - is what drew you to the soul genre?

I think so. I think that was my initial introduction to soul because soul music as a genre, as we have known it, was developed as a combination of gospel, R&B, and some rock and roll too because it comes out of the African American experience as well. But as I grew, because all we listened to was gospel and quartet and gospel choirs and then later people like Al Green and his gospel music and Pastor Shirley Caesar and Caravans and all the groups that our parents loved. But as I became a teenager I started to explore other genres of music: jazz and country music. Georgia has a lot of country stations. And once being introduced to Ray Charles’ story, his country album - music has no boundaries. Regardless of your faith, you don’t have to have a particular sound to do a style. You could bring yourself and your own experience to that particular genre and allow it to evolve to whatever it evolves to. And so it really started to open my thought around how can I bring my whole self, my personal experience - African American, growing up in Georgia, in the rural South, from a big family, from a Gospel background, singing with my brothers, academic experience - what is it that I can bring beyond just saying, “Oh I can sing, oh you can sing” and sing a song or write a song because I’ve been entrusted with a gift to do so? But how can I utilize this gift for the better good of the human experience? So that's where I really come from. And what you hear on the Frequency EP is with intentions to raise our frequency - and not just my own in creating it with the great producers I worked with and writers - but also to those who listen and to be invited to this experience together. So it is not just me sending out waves through the frequency or the vibration of the music itself but also it’s an invitation to the hearer to participate in this rising of positive vibrations that are exhumed from us. That’s what the record is all about.

That’s brilliant. I love the idea of raising vibrations. I feel like this is a tumultuous time for a lot of reasons and having positivity out into the world is something that we need right now. I was reading about the background of the EP, that it was born out of personal experiences. Would you say there was a particular experience that kind of started the creation of the EP as a whole?

I had been writing with several writers (LA, NY, Nashville) over the last couple of years, with them developing a body of work. However, the personal experience, as we all have experienced, but each had a different take on it, was the national lockdown/pandemic. This is when I really start to hunker down. I started to hunker down, the team did. But at the same time, before hunkering down and really honing in on what was created and the opportunity I had to create, there was this enormous wave of, ‘Ahhh!’, of fear come over me, and I was sitting in my living room and all kinds of thoughts - what’s gonna happen, afraid to leave the house - I mean we didn’t know what was going on, no one knew. We only knew what was being fed through the frequencies of popular media and social media. It started to control my environment, my own climate, and I had to settle down and say ‘be still my soul, be still everything my mind and everything about me’ and really say ok - what is it that I can do? Where can I draw from? How can I draw from what I have to create something positive? I reset my own thought process and start to re-engage my team and start to write new music. And really look at the different experiences I had personally participated in or personally observed. It’s really about finding love, being in love, social justice. The song “Humanity” was written and released on Juneteenth and re released on the Frequency, as it relates to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the many senseless -isms: racism, sexism, ageism - that exist and how I felt that at some point in time I had to play by the rules in order to be accepted, especially growing up in Georgia, in the rural South, and I start to say this is what I have to do and start reflect on other people’s stories, friends and of my family as well. It kind of drove the narrative for that piece, “Feel Some Kind Of Way”, the senseless killings in schools and it’s just so much that we’ve seen all the time and we’re saying that there is peace. Peace can be with us. Peace can be in our environment. Unless we start to allow that exude from us and reverberate in some way or another then I don’t think we will ever experience it in a person. But we can’t wait on some external force to do it. We have to bring it to the environment, the universe, to ourselves.

Listening to the EP, my favorite track was “Humanity”. I love that you were going in depth on you reasons for writing it. How has the pandemic shaped the creation and production of your new music? I think the universal condition of all of us being in this situation together is a unique opportunity.

It’s a very unique experience for us to really reflect and to value the humanness of humanity. Just look at all the losses. It was an awakening to say, you can be this way, feel this way, or be in this place and then in the next moment, the next day, the next 24 hour period, everything is taken away, or everything is paused. And it was really an awakening moment. “Falling For You” comes from that space where we can be vulnerable and fall in love again and again and everyday allow and discover something because all we have is this moment. Allow time to stand still and it really helps to encourage to love who you love and love hard. Don’t be afraid to do it because we never know what the next moment will bring. This was very awakening. It’s a very emotional record around everything that was going on and everything that is going on.

Do you have a favorite track on your EP?

That's very hard because I think it just depends on a lot of things — because I think when we chose the body of work it was like out of all the writing I’ve done over the last couple of years, I was trying to develop something to create this body and not really creating it until the lockdown. Ordering equipment and having it sit on the porch for a while and the patio and then come back and get it cause we weren’t sure if we were supposed to touch it or let it sit out there. So all those things but also, each represent me in so many different ways, and my thought process around the human experience. It’s a very hard question but if I absolutely had to I think it probably would be “Humanity”. I think because of where we are. Second to that would be “Falling For You”. I love love.

I can relate. I think with “Humanity”, obviously it is presently relevant but I feel like it’s timeless in the sense that we all need to have strength within us to then stand up and speak out for things that are important to us. What has been your most impactful moment in your music career thus far? Have you had any moments where you were starstruck of just surprised at everything going on?

I don’t think I’ve been starstruck but I have met some stars- cause we grew up in the industry around since we were younger so it became a part of our way of life, my brothers and I and sisters. However, I think certain opportunities are amazing, I’m so grateful. I’m always grateful but sometimes the gratitude is in a different category. When I think about that I came from a small town, I was born in a trailer that my dad bought when he first started teaching, and then he got married, and then that trailer burned, and we moved in with our great aunt for a short while until he was finally able to build a house. So just the struggles and challenges of the path that we’ve taken. And then to ride with our parents really promoting education and faith and music in our family. It led to all of us graduating from high school, all of us going to college, two or three times. I think among the family there are over 20 college degrees. I know that it is not the path for everyone. It doesn’t have to be but it is special to me because it’s a testament to my parents who were the first to be educated, to receive post-secondary education in my family. It really is important to me that I share that and I value that experience and it speaks to where I am today.

I can definitely relate to the idea of just getting an education. I’m in school at the moment and I’ve read recently that just for undergraduate degrees only about 30% of Americans even finish their bachelors, let alone going into higher education. I think that’s really amazing that so many people in your family have been able to get an education.

My family and I have been very blessed and with lots of gratitude and humility. We are a testament because I share often how my parents, my father and mother, were the first to go to college, receive a post-secondary education. For them, education, faith, and of course the arts (music), were the elements of our development. I know the impact of the arts and music first hand on not just my life but on my siblings. I’ve seen it also on my foundation which I think my background certainly is the foundation of my thought process, so I try to share that experience not just through my recordings but also with the foundation that I have in helping a lot of underprivileged, underserved young people and teenagers in our community.

How long has the foundation been around?

The foundation has been around for more than two years. I started that in the interim of the brothers to figure out my own rhythm and sound and the direction I felt very passionate about.

Do you have any final message to tell our audience regarding your work or a cause that you’re passionate about?

I thank you first, again. Let me just say thank you again in my last words to you for having me on. I want one of those who are listening to of course check out the record Frequency. It’s a 6 song EP and I’m really super excited about it. It’s got a vibe and the vibe has all to do with raising the vibrations and love, romantic life. Also a raise in vibrations around social justice, raising vibrations around just loving family, whoever and however you view family and close friends, biological connection. It comes from those three angles. The intention is that we all find another place or space to love ourselves and those around us. A space and place for healing and a space or place of hope. This kind of soul revival or renewal of the human spirit is what the Frequency EP is about. So far, it’s getting great reviews. I’m really super excited about it. We were just number 1 on one of the largest stations. Also we are doing well in Europe. We went number 2 last week on the largest soul/R&B station out of Italy. So we are super excited about the response we are getting and we just want to keep raising the frequencies and the vibrations through the music. Please follow me on social media. You can go to my website and find all my social media handles there at alexharrisofficial.com. I’d love to connect and be a part of a global community making things happen through positive work.

ABOUT ALEX HARRIS:

Alex Harris is a modern soul singer with Gospel roots and is revered as one of the leading creative architects and performers of ‘New Age Soul’ music. ‘New Age Soul’ music offers a spiritual revival to uplift humanity ensconced in healing, hope, renewal, freedom, and love. “I believe that music is one of the three most powerful elements of the universe because it has the power to raise the frequency of humans through rhythm, melody, and sound.”

Alex runs A.C.T. (Arts Conservatory for Teens) and lectures worldwide. He has shared the stage as a performer with Al Green, Aretha Franklin, John Legend, H.E.R., Brandy, and Lionel Richie. Label Cross The Line Music, Ltd is a joint venture between 2 producers -Richard Gottehrer (Blondie, The Go Go’s, Raveonettes) and GRAMMY Award winning producer and songwriter Swagg R’Celious (H.E.R.). His “Frequency” EP is available now on all streaming platforms, and is a unique sonic blend of southern soul, alternative grooves, and Gospel grit.

STAY CONNECTED WITH ALEX HARRIS ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

Instagram - Facebook - Twitter - SoundCloud- Spotify - YouTube - Amazon

STAY CONNECTED WITH HIP HOP SCRIPTURES ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

#alex harris #frequency #fresh artist fridays #georgia #new music

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moviesmakethegirl · 6 years

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IT (2017)

Directed by Andy Muchietti, this movie is my favorite movie of 2017. I'm a huge horror nerd, as of lately, and this movie really hit a nerve within me that made each viewing of this movie brand new. Stephen King is a mastermind, and this is probably his most thought out and imaginative of his works that I'm familiar with. I've never read the behemoth of a novel that is IT, but my boyfriend has listened to it and has told me all the difference between the book and the movie and honestly, this remake is pretty true to the book. I love that. So without further ado, let's get started.

This story starts out on a rainy day with the most melancholic piano medley I could possibly imagine. Like, the mom couldn't have picked a more upbeat song to play? It's raining, you have two sons, it's the 80s, play some fucking Ray Charles or something. Bill and Georgie are upstairs making a paper boat. It's adorable because Georgie keeps calling the boat a "him" and Bill keeps correcting him. In my mind, Bill is such a feminist. Bill is sick and doesn't want to go out into the rain to play with Georgie so he takes a literal rain check and sends his little tiny brother out into the world to play all by himself while his mom is still playing that scary ass song on the piano and basically doesn't notice that her son is out in the rain all by himself. DISCLAIMER: FUCK THE PARENTS IN DERRY. So of course like any young lad would, he loses control of his boat and surprise it goes into a storm drain. Unlike every other kid in the goddamn world, Georgie looks into the drain to try and save the boat. Now, who shows up out of thin air? IT aka Pennywise the DANCING clown ahahahahah. Look, yes it's terrifying that a clown just appeared in a storm drain but this clown is played by the not so surprisingly talented Bill Skarsgard. Now, if you're like me, you spend the majority of your adolescence being obsessed with Alexander Skarsgard as Eric Northman in True Blood. So, when I found out his little brother was gonna play one of the most iconic roles in horror history, I was stoked. Talent runs in the veins of all the Skarsgard's who have turned into this generations Barrymore's. SOOOO now Pennywise has been introduced and he's scary as hell. He's drooling, he's smiling all sinister like, and asking Georgie if he can smell the popcorn. I feel like that is strike number 2 on Georgie's part cause even as a kid, you know that popcorn doesn't belong in a fucking storm drain. So, Pennywise is all I HAVE YOUR BOAT and Georgie is all YEAAHH GIVE IT TO ME and Pennywise is like TAKE. IT. (honestly a great line I repeat all the time) an so little naive baby Georgie reaches in and gets his goddamn arm bitten off by an inter-dimensional being dressed as a clown. But see, my biggest issue with this scene isn't Georgie's complete lack of stranger danger that was pounded into my being as a kid, but it's this goddamn old bitch lady who is outside the ENTIRE TIME Georgie is talking to a clown in a storm drain. This bitch sees a young boy talking to a storm drain and shrugs it off. And it's raining, so apparently the sound of the pouring rain is supposed to drown out the noise of Georgie screaming while crawling in the street without an arm? BULLSHIT. This bitch and her dumbass cat do NOTHING and I blame her for every missing kid in Derry. (If some of you reading this have read the book, you completely understand why the elders of Derry are such assholes, but that doesn't make me any less pissed off that all of them are fucking idiots.)

Ok, so now it's the end of the school year. Bill and his bffs Richie, Eddie, and Stanley have officially left their last class of the day and are excited to start summer vacation before the 8th grade. This is my favorite cause these children actors are the best part of this movie. Bill is played by Jaeden Lieberher who is so convincing as Bill that I legit thought he stuttered in real life. Eddie is played by the charismatic and humorous as fuck Jack Dylan Grazer. Stanley is played Wyatt Oleff, who is a very good voice of reason for dumb teenage boys. But the best character and best actor in this movie is Finn Wolfhard who plays Richie. And maybe I'm biased because I'm a die hard Stranger Things fan, but seriously, Richie is a scene stealing character who can only be played by someone as engaging as Finn. Literally, couldn't love a group of actors more than the ones who play the kids in this movie. All of them, pure perfection, nailed their performances, and were the light in such a dark story. So moving on, while the boys are being boys and talking about their private parts and the other missing children of Derry cause yeah, it's totally normal for a town to always have missing kids. So the other main antagonist besides all the adults in this town and Pennywise, is this bully named Henry Bowers and his goons. Now, bear with me here, but this movie would be nothing without Henry. He's your typical small town bully who just pulls backpacks and bless his heart, gave Bill the year off of being bullied since he lost his little brother. But now that the school year is over, Bill is fair game again. Henry's father is the town's sheriff, so there's a sense of "my father is an asshole and all hyper masculine and I have big shoes to fill" blah blah blah bully shit. So after we see the losers get picked on we are then introduced to the CUTE AS FUCK Ben. Ben is played by a boy named Jeremy Ray Taylor and this kid has got such a bright future. I wanna hug and mentor and hang out with this kid so bad. So Ben is the New Kid on the Block who you guessed it, listens to New Kids on the Block. He is approached by Beverly Marsh, who earlier was being bullied herself by the female version of Henry Bowers who honestly isn't super important and I'm not gonna waste any more time writing about her right now. Beverly puts her charm on 10 here and signs Ben's yearbook after finding out no one else did. She gives him shit for listening to NKOTB, which HEY NKOTB is a national treasure and how dare anyone make fun of anyone for listening to them. Ben then walks home with his headphones dragging behind his bike cause he's so enamored by Beverly and it's just CUTE.

Then we meet Mike Hanlon, who we actually probably meet before the last of school. He works on a farm with his grandpa and theres a scene where he has to kill a sheep but can't do it, cause he has HUMANITY! Mike makes deliveries into town and that's where we see him next. He goes into an alley behind the butcher, only for Pennywise to get his kicks. It starts with Mike seeing smoke come out from the door and then burned hands start trying to open the door fully but can't. Then the door is thrown open and there's a silhouette of a clown in chains trying to escape only to STAND THE FUCK UP AND STARE AT MIKE WHILE HIS EYES GLOW. Mike just fucking stands there staring back like RUNNNNN MIKE!!!!!! Thankfully, maybe not, but Henry Bowers and friends pull up and scream at Mike to leave their town and throw their cigarettes at him, but when Mike looks back into the door only the butcher is there asking if he is alright. It's a short scene but by god if I don't scream my little heart out for Mike every single time I watch it.

So now the kiddos, Stanley, Bill, Eddie, and Richie, are all down at the Barren's to try to find where Georgie went missing. Eddie, the hypochondriac, is complaining about the piss water that they are standing in and refuses to go in. Richie makes fun of him and it's honestly, hilarious. I'm gonna use that word a lot. Even though this is a horror movie, it's actually one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. And not in a it's funny because it's so cheesy, it's funny because it's young teenage kids being scared and dealing with that fear by undercutting it with humor. GOD I JUST LOVE IT! Anyways, during this time, Ben is in the library being a little bookworm. The librarian kind of gives him shit for not having friends and he should be playing outside which is bullshit since basically every older woman I've ever met as a kid was always like "you kids need to calm down" and "you should read more" blah blah blah. It just seems like every generation has a problem with a younger generation and honestly, fuck that but that's a conversation for another time. So, Ben starts reading about the history of Derry which is HORRIBLE! There was a huge fire on Easter which killed a bunch of children and he sees pictures of children's heads in trees like, fucked up shit. AND while he is reading all of this, there's another old bitch standing behind him, almost off screen, STARING AT HIM THE WHOLE TIME. The first time we saw this in theaters, David pointed this out to me and I was like "that's creepy" and the more I see this scene, the more it freaks me out. Some people overlooked this part, but it's probably the scariest part of the movie. So now that Ben has unlocked the town's secrets, he is lured to the basement by Easter eggs that are smoking. Down in the archives, he sees someone walking down the stairs and guess what it is? A HEADLESS CHILD cause if children weren't already scary enough, let's just not give them heads, right??? This headless bitch chases him through the archives and then you hear my second favorite line of the entire movie. Whispered is, "HEY EGGBOY." And Ben turns around to find Pennywise chasing him. Ben runs into the old librarian, and then runs away crying and of course, she doesn't ask what is wrong. Poor Ben just can't catch a break cause once he gets outside the library, Henry is waiting for him. The boy band take the sad, scared Ben out to a bridge where Henry says he's gonna carve his name into Ben's stomach, which is so fucked up, but so totally Stephen King, I get it. Of course, adults drive by while Ben is screaming for help and they don't do anything and it makes me want to cut their break lines but whatever. Ben totally escapes though, but not before having an H carved into his little squishy belly, and follows the creek to the Barrens where he finds the other boys. The boys being perfect take Ben back into town to try to clean him up. While they are doing that, Henry and his back up singers are searching for Ben in the Barrens. One of the goons, Patrick, goes into the sewers with a lighter and hairspray, only to find all the dead kids that Pennywise has eaten and then died himself which thank fuck. One down, three more to go.

While Ben is bleeding in an alley, Eddie is complaining about medical questions while Richie won't stop talking about penis'. They run into a pharmacy to get stuff for Ben only to realize they don't have enough money so in walks sweet Beverly who is scared to buy tampons for the first time. She flirts with the old gross man behind the counter and knocks over a tray of something so the boys can run out of the store with their shit. She also grabs a pack of cigarettes for herself cause she's amazing and should be my best friend. The boys thank her, and she becomes "one of the boys." Her home life though, guys. It's horrible. Her father is grade A creep status and is all mad that she is buying tampons cause he wants her to stay his little girl forever and she gets all emotional and cuts off all her hair in retaliation. So, the next day, all the boys are at some cliff about to jump off it into the lake below but are all being chicken about. Beverly comes through in new hair do and jumps off the cliff, showing all the boys up, while Richie yells "FUCKING HELL" and it's comical and amazing and you're lying if you don't think Beverly Marsh is the coolest girl you've ever seen. She also looks EXACTLY like Amy Adams, if Amy was 13. The kids have a fun day in the lake, playing chicken, being young teenagers. Ben then brings up the history of Derry and brings the kids back to his rooms which is covered in old pages of books with old pictures and maps about Derry. There's also a huge NKOTB poster on the back of his door that only Beverly notices. Ben describes the history of Derry to the kids, which is every 27 years a bunch of random kids go missing and no one does anything about it!

Now, each kid has a run in with Pennywise in their own way. And I'm totally going out of order with this movie cause I'm writing this just based off my memory, but somewhere in the beginning we see Stanley trying to memorize stuff in Hebrew. He isn't doing too well so his dad makes him put the book back in his office and go home. In his father's office there’s a scary painting of a woman with a weird shaped head. Stanley doesn't like it, and it falls off the wall. When he puts it back on the wall, the woman is gone. He turns around the woman is standing like 10 feet taller than him and starts to chase him. So, we know that Stanley's fear is definitely this strange painting woman. Ben's is headless kids. Mike's is people burning in a fire, cause we do learn at some point that his parents died in a fire and he tried to save them but he couldn't and that plagues him. Beverly's scene is when she is in the bathroom by herself and she hears voices coming from her sink drain so instead of running the fuck out of the bathroom she grabs her dad's tape measure and pushes it down the drain only for it to come up with blood and hair that then wraps itself around her and sprays blood all over her and the bathroom. When her screams lure her dad into the room, he doesn't see the blood and she's freaking out. I'm assuming that means her fear is blood...but maybe it's just voices of dead kids. So then Eddie is walking home by himself one afternoon and it's his pill time, cause his mom is an overbearing homebody who makes him take pills for everything. He drops his pills because he is walking past a house that is run down and looks scary but has really cute sunflowers in the front yard that make it look kinda kitschy. When he is picking up his pills, he notices a hand helping him and looks up to find basically a zombie leper staring at him. He runs into the front yard of the scary house and is about to leave through a hole in the fence when he notices that a clown is standing with a bunch of balloons by the house. Pennywise shows his face and asks Eddie to play with him, saying the infamous "We all float down here!" Eddie is beyond traumatized and runs screaming through the fence. Eddie's fear being germs and being sick.

So the kids are riding their bikes through the town and notice an abandoned bike off the side of the road next to Henry Bowers' car. They recognize it as Mike's bike and go down to the quarry to find him. Henry and the remaining living boy banders are beating up Mike when Henry gets hit in the head with a rock that we see is thrown by none other than the Queen herself, Beverly fucking Marsh. Richie screams "ROCK WAR" and it starts a very comedic scene of all the youngsters throwing rocks at each other while saving Mike in the process. This then completes the Losers Club: Bill, Richie, Eddie, Stanley, Beverly, Ben, and Mike. MY DREAM TEAM HONESTLY! The most badass group of kids ever besides the Hawkins kids in Stranger Things. They go to Bill's garage where he has slides of the maps of the sewer systems of Derry. The kids are sitting in the dark looking at maps when all of a sudden, the slides start moving on their own and of course Pennywise pops out and terrorizes the kids and audience members by being 17 feet tall. The kids scream and cry until Mike opens the garage door and instead of fleeing for their lives and never talking to each other again like I would have done as a scared teenager, they fucking go to the old abandoned house where the well that connects all the sewers is located. Once there, Bill, Eddie, and Richie go inside the house after Bill gives a huge speech about not being afraid of monsters cause real life is more terrifying than any of that which he didn't stutter at all during and I'm such a proud older sister to all these kids, but especially Bill in that moment. Richie finds a missing kid poster that has his face on it and freaks out, rightfully so. The other boys calm him down and they move on. Eddie gets separated, Bill and Richie are locked in a room with black goop coming out from an old mattress and then Richie gets locked in a room full of clown statues only to have Pennywise jump out and scare him but Bill saves him in time. Pennywise then goes to scare Eddie who passed out from fear and fell through hole in the ground and landed on a table and broke his arm. He comes out of a fridge and rubs Eddie's face in the style of Heath Ledger's Joker. He's then distracted by Bill and Richie who has escaped their room full of fears above and are screaming for Eddie. They find Eddie underneath Pennywise and of course, freak out. But then, here comes my true savior, Beverly takes an old pipe and enters through the back door and stabs Pennywise in the fucking FACE! GIRL YAAAASSSSS!!!! She's terrified but she saves the day. Richie then tries to pop Eddie's arm back into place which then breaks it even more than it already is and it's a very comical part of such a scary scene. Of course Eddie's mom flips a tit and doesn't let Eddie hang out with the crew anymore. The Losers Club kind of disbands for a bit after Bill and Richie get into a fight about how dangerous all this is. Bill wants to keep going cause the closer he gets to figuring all this out, the closer her gets to finding out what happened to Georgie. Everyone ends up leaving Bill, except Beverly but even then they part ways for a little bit.

When Bill has his Pennywise encounter which is totally before all of the stuff I just wrote, he sees a ghost of Georgie running through his house and then into the basement. He follows him down there only for Pennywise to come out of the water and try to grab him which he gets really close to doing but Bill is fast. NOW, while everyone is doing their own shit, Bill goes over to Beverly's house only to find out that she has been taken by Pennywise. Now, before she was kidnapped, her father was being a real fucking douche bag. He was mad at her for hanging out with boys and was chasing her though their house. She hid behind the shower curtain with the top of a toilet and smacked him over the head and killed him. My angel. Immediately after that, Pennywise took her. So, Bill has to save her. He calls everyone to tell them watch happened and they all meet back at the weird house to go down the well. So, during this time Eddie has realized that his mom was giving him placebo pills. He calls her out on him but he says, and I fucking quote this straight from the movie guys, "They're GAZEBOS. They're BULLSHIT!" And if you have a heart, Eddie becomes the world's best character right in that moment. He also had the bully bitch who was bulling Beverly in the beginning sign his cast and she wrote LOSER in big ass black letters. He then wrote over the S and put a big V on it so it would say LOVER instead. So cute. So pure. Eddie forever.

Now, we're at the climax. (I've skipped a lot of little details because if I didn't this post would be too long.) The boys all get into hero mode while going down this sketchy ass well. Mike is the last one to go down but is stopped by Henry fucking Bowers, who previously to this was targeted by Pennywise but not in a scare to death kind of way, in a recruitment way. Pennywise gave Henry his father's knife to kill his father and then brainwashed him into killing everyone else. He even kills his friends in a deleted scene, fun fact. So Henry, all jacked up on killer clown rage, is trying to kill Mike with a gun that's used to killing sheep by shooting a really big like screw-like bolt into their head. Mike, being the hero we all know he can be, throws Henry off of him and pushes him down the well! YAYAYAYAYAYAY! All while the boys are stuck in the well screaming for Mike. But, good prevails and they all go into the sewers only to lose Stanley who has wandered off cause he hears a woman's voice and thinks it's Beverly but alas it's not! It's that skewed bitch from the painting who wraps her whole mouth around his face and starts to suck. Mike shoots something at the creature and it slinks away into the tunnels as Pennywise. Stanley throws a fit cause his friend's ditched him which they DID NOT HE LEFT THEM but still, he was just getting his face sucked by a monster so he is totally ok to have a meltdown. Bill then sees Georgie in the tunnels and goes running after him who then leads him to where Beverly is. Beverly is where all the dead floating kids are. The boys pull her down before she can truly float and they don't know how to wake her up but Ben steps in and kisses her and IT WORKS! So now all the kids are confronted by Pennywise, who takes Bill and says they can all escape if they leave Bill. Bill begs them to leave but Richie refuses and says "...now I have to kill this fucking clown." So all the kids grab blunt objects and start beating the FUUUUCK out of Pennywise. Pennywise then turns into Georgie and Bill takes that bolt gun thing and shoots him in the fucking forehead, which causes Pennywise to change back into clown form and slink even further into the abyss. THE KIDS PREVAILED! SUCH STRONG ROLEMODLES!!!!!

The end of the movie is the entire Losers Club standing in a field promising each other that if IT ever comes back, they will fight it and kill it for good. They take a blood oath and one by one they all start to leave. Beverly and Bill are the last two and they share a cute, albeit gross as fucking moment by sharing a kiss. It's gross to me cause Beverly has blood all over her hand and she grabs Bill's face and her blood is all over his face it's fucking nasty. But everything is ok at the end, but you know that's only CHAPTER 1!

So, as far as IT goes, it's my favorite because I love the kids in it. The kids are incredible actors. They have the perfect balance of humor and horror and it's not over the top for either of them. The director really let the kids bond before filming and it shows. They are real friends so that friendship perfectly crosses over to the screen. I remember being 12-13, friendship was the most important thing to me. I would have done anything to save my friends from a monster. This story gives life to characters who are damaged and real. Stephen King hit it on the fucking nail with these characters. I'm so happy this movie this exists because it's just the beginning. Chapter 2 is about how IT comes back when these characters are adults, and I can't wait until that movie. If I could cast the adult versions, Patrick Wilson would be Bill, Chris Pratt would be Ben, Amy Adams would be Beverly, Bill Hader would be Richie, and I honestly don't know who would play Eddie or Stanley, but I think that Chadwick Boseman should play Mike. That would be the dream. If you also enjoyed this movie, I'd love to hear who you would like to see cast in Chapter 2 and also hear your opinions on it as well!

AGAIN NONE OF THESE PICTURES ARE MINE. I DO NOT CLAIM CREDIT FOR THEM.

#IT #movie #IT 2017 #IT movie #maddy watches movies #horror #stephen king #pennywise #derry

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theloverera · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” REDACTED lol Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

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