Comments on The Cure for Bedbugs: It's Taylor Time

Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m ...

2010-11-12T02:12:25.098-08:00

Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!

In saying "I was too young to know," I t...

2010-11-10T07:17:13.000-08:00

In saying "I was too young to know," I think there's an implied judgment -- that she knows something now she didn't know then -- but I don't buy that this judgment is actually founded on any new experience, just a sense that something went wrong then and it was due to naivete. Maybe I'm just projecting from my own experiences, but "naive" isn't quite the word I'd use to describe myself at fifteen -- foolish, maybe (she gets some of that) and certainly bold (she gets some of that too). The tone, explaining it to us in the second-person-that's-actually-the-first-person just strikes me as a little "let me tell you how it REALLY is." "When you're fifteen, you just don't KNOW yet."

Now, if she'd said instead "when I was fifteen, I just didn't KNOW yet," I might read it slightly differently just in that small change of tone. But I would also ask the follow-up question of *why*, the implicit answer without clarification being the insufficient "because I was too young to know yet" (insufficient because clearly Taylor is capable of knowing an awful lot when she was fifteen -- what's different about this situation?) What does she actually know now that makes her reflect on those experiences in this way (by contrast, on Speak Now I have the distinct impression of her knowing very little about most of what she's talking about with some authority, from "Innocent" to the strange "she's getting older too" line that rings false from "Never Grow Up")?

Meanwhile, the descriptive aspects of the song, the ones that capture direct experience, the rush of that time period, how it *felt*, are much stronger. But that's in part because Taylor-at-19 didn't have as much to say about it beyond "can you see it?" And we can see it, pretty vividly, just as I can see the pick-up truck in "Tim McGraw."

I don't mean to knock "Fifteen" too much for what I'm inferring in its tone, since that tone is more suggested than felt through the song. And certainly plenty of people found this tone in exactly the wrong places, like the scene with Abigail -- that's another "can you see it?" moment. Still, I feel like the tone is there in the subtext, furrowing its brow remembering (watching?) Taylor-at-fifteen go through some of this stuff again.

Anyway, love the premise of the piece, and your ow...

2010-11-08T14:07:04.000-08:00

Anyway, love the premise of the piece, and your own self-description; don't think I agree with your analysis of "Fifteen," however. I don't think "Fifteen" does right by the complexities and sophistication of her actual fifteen (as detailed in the Liz Rose-aided album Taylor Swift), but I don't see Taylor as judging herself for not knowing who she was going to be or believing in the guys etc., or telling us that she shouldn't have. All she's saying was that she was too young to know, and too young to have a good idea of what she didn't know.

"Fifteen" is great for catching the promise and excitement of those hallways and its senior boys and being in the car with one of them and it's like flying - a feeling that she'll probably never repeat, as it depends on a prior car-deprived sense of restriction - and finding a friend with whom you can giggle at the cool kids' pretensions, etc.

Still haven't spent more than one listen to any of Speak Now but the promo singles; but if you're right and the words are relying so much on context, then they're not doing their job, which at the least is to engage and observe and have attitudes towards the context. But I said that already on Tumblr.

And if the production is better but, say, the singing and the melodies and the words aren't... well, then the album's not as good as her previous two. But if the singing and melodies are as good or better...

I don't sense that my corner of the musicwrite world is emphasizing production over the rest, or emphasizing context much at all. I think people are mostly liking the melodies and sounds and liking/disliking a lot of words, and still in the midst of finding out what they're listening to.

Still think that the loud guitars on the chorus undermine "Mine." Maybe that was Chapman trying to do a Shanks and not quite hitting it (though the song's a decent-sized hit, and the album of course is mega).