MASTERPOST
This will be a constant work in progress but you’ll be able to find most of Taylor’s interviews through these links. You can find them on my blog’s main page under link ‘Taylor Library’.
More you might like
Taylor Swift talks to CMT’s Paul McGuire about her album “Red” (October 20th 2012)
“Taylor Swift is in the middle of a massive 99-date world tour, but she’s still managed to squeeze in a lot of him to her newest passion: American history. ‘I just read a 900-page book called The Kennedy Women, which dates back to the lineage of the first Kennedys coming from Ireland in the 1800s,’ Swift says in the new issue of Rolling Stone, on sale tomorrow. ‘This morning I bought books about John Adams, Lincoln’s Cabinet, the Founding Fathers and Ellis Island.’ During downtime from her tour she even attempted to visit the New York Historical Society. “But it was closed,” she says. ‘I almost cried.’ Instead, she went to the Museum of Natural History. 'We saw the dinosaurs and stuff,’ she says. 'Which was a close second.’”
— Taylor Swift Reveals Newfound Obsession With American History (X)
Why does Taylor Swift write so many one-note melodies?
BBC - 8 November 2017
Taylor Swift has dozens of melodies that centre on a single note. BBC Music reporter Mark Savage finds out why.
It’s easy to get distracted by her celebrity, but Taylor Swift is a once-in-a-generation songwriter.
From the very beginning, she’s displayed a knack for melody and storytelling that most artists never master.
Take, for example, her first US number one, Our Song.
Written for a high school talent show, it’s a fairly typical tale of teenage romance until the final lines: “I grabbed a pen / And an old napkin / And I wrote down our song.”
That’s smart, self-assured songwriting for someone who wasn’t old enough to vote. Notably, the lyrics insert the musician directly into the narrative - something she developed into a tried and tested trope.
But Our Song also establishes another of Taylor’s trademarks: The one-note melody.
These static vocal lines, where she sings at one pitch for a sustained period, crop up on all of her her albums - and increase in frequency when she switches lanes from country to pop.
You can hear it on all four songs she’s released ahead of her new record, Reputation, which comes out this Friday. It’s most apparent on the lead single, Look What You Made Me Do, where the entire chorus is delivered in a sinister monotone.
But it’s less of a cop-out than you might think, and here’s why.
Taylor Swift’s career is built on being accessible. She might have 10 Grammy awards, but she recently invited loyal fans to an album playback at her oceanfront mansion in Rhode Island. In 2008, when she was 18 years old, she accompanied another fan, Whit Wright, to his prom in Alabama. She regularly delivers handwritten notes and gift packages to her Instagram followers.
Repetitive melodies that centre around a single note are part of that appeal. They emphasise her relatability by mimicking the cadence of speech.
It helps that her lyrics are effortlessly conversational and vernacular. “We are never, ever getting back together” is a clumsy song title but it makes perfect sense in Taylor’s brand of teen-speak. The impression is that you’re hanging out with a friend, chatting about boys (and it’s almost always about boys).
Taylor uses the device most often in verses, shifting the chords beneath her voice to give the melody a sense of movement, in the same way that moving a light around the room casts different shadows.
When the chorus soars up the musical scale, it’s like a rush of energy. The emotional highs become even higher. And, as I am not the first to point out, she has a flair for melodrama.
Taylor didn’t invent these one-note melodies, of course. Gregorian chant, one of the earliest recorded forms of Western music, was predominantly monotone.
“A lot of that had to do with understanding the text - because this is religious text and they want people to understand the words that they’re singing,” said musicologist Scott Interrante in a podcast on the phenomenon of one-note melodies.
“That’s important to think about in our modern pop songs,” he added. “It might have a lot to do with the words”.
Let’s scrub out the word “might”. Taylor really, really wants us to pay attention to her lyrics.
“I wouldn’t be a singer if I weren’t a songwriter,” she told Billboard in 2014. “I have no interest in singing someone else’s words.”
If you believe the tabloids, she spends most of her time warbling about famous ex-boyfriends and feuds with fellow pop stars - but if you pay attention, Swift’s catalogue is full of deft lyrical minutiae.
In fact, she has the rare ability to tell a whole story in the space of a sentence:
- “She wears short skirts / I wear t-shirts / She’s cheer captain / And I’m on the bleachers” (You Belong With Me)
- “We’re dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light” (All Too Well)
- “I never saw you coming/ And I’ll never be the same” (State of Grace)
- “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” (Blank Space)
- “Remember when you hit the brakes too soon? / Twenty stitches in a hospital room” (Out Of The Woods)
That last one is particularly interesting. The car accident was real, and Taylor sings the (one-note) melody with uncommon urgency over a turbulent backing track.
“I put it in the song knowing it was an evocative lyric,” she told NPR in 2014. “And it was almost like this very strange, subtle clue to the media that they don’t know everything that happened in that relationship, and they don’t know everything that happens in my life, and I can have something really major and traumatic happen to me and they don’t know about it.”
On this year’s Look What You Made Me Do, she uses the one-note melody in another way - to convey anger and defiance.
The target here is Kanye West, who stage-crashed her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and has dogged her career ever since.
“I don’t like your little games,” she spits, “The role you made me play / Of the fool / No, I don’t like you.”
Her delivery is clipped and defensive. The conversational tone is replaced by a threat. (Incidentally, that’s probably why the song took such a battering in the media: Bitter Taylor isn’t as appealing as unlucky-in-love-but-shaking-it-off Taylor.)
Another of Taylor’s key traits is to shout key lines for emphasis: “We never go OUT OF STYLE”; “Are we in the clear yet, IN THE CLEAR YET? GOOD!”; “All you had to do was STAY (STAY) STAY (STAY)”.
Again, she’s using rhetorical tricks to drive home her point - and by doing so, she’s taking her place in the pop pantheon.
Songwriters like John Lennon and Morrissey, who place equal emphasis on their lyrics, also tend to utilise one-note melodies. And then there’s rap, whose rhythmic ebb and flow exerts an increasingly strong gravitational pull on pop writers.
In fact, static melodies are cropping up all over the place, on Dua Lipa’s New Rules, Post Malone’s Rockstar, and Khalid’s Young Dumb & Broke.
None of this is to suggest that Taylor is incapable of writing a melody. Of her new tracks, the love song Gorgeous is both the most heartfelt and the most traditionally “songy”.
But her masterpiece is a song called Ronan - a little-known charity single, released in 2012. It was written about Ronan Thompson, a four-year-old boy who died of a rare form of cancer.
After reading a blog written by the boy’s mother, Maya Thompson, Taylor turned her words into a song: “I remember your bare feet, down the hallway / I remember your little laugh / Race cars on the kitchen floor, plastic dinosaurs / I love you to the moon and back.”
In other hands, it could have been saccharine and exploitative. It isn’t. Taylor’s delicate delivery, and the sorrowful contours of her melody are simply devastating.
If you ever had any doubts, Ronan settles it: Taylor Swift is anything but a one-note pop star.
staring-at-the-sunsets asked:
Who all were in the photos? Are they famous people or is Ryan the only famous one there besides Tay and possibly Joe? And is that Abigail in the black wig
cages-boxes-hunters-foxes answered:
ok here’s what i’ve got, and obviously taylor didn’t tag on purpose so i’m not really going digging but this is who i recognized on sight:
- ash avignone is gwen stefani
- leah mccarthy is avril
- abigail is posh spice (black wig)
- mccall koenig is nancy drew
- gigi is mary poppins
- blake is dorothy
- jari (i think is her name - she was at thanksgiving 2016) is miss frizzle
- iris apatow is Cinderella
- i believe frida kahlo is the girl in the green hat who was in the candids the other day, and rizzo is the woman who looked like daisy ridley
- inconclusive on steve irwin, mr toad, and audrey, but i would assume they’re london friends
Did Taylor Swift Buy Another Apartment
[excerpt] First, some background for those of you new to Taylor Swift’s real estate holdings on Franklin Street: She owns the 8,300-square-foot penthouse atop 155 Franklin (combined from two units), and last fall, she bought the three-story townhouse next door at 153 Franklin. Now, someone has dramatically overpaid for another apartment at 155 Franklin—and the evidence points toward the musician. It’s far from conclusive, however, and you’re going to have to follow me into the weeds.
“The second-floor front apartment [#2N] sold to an LLC for $9.75 million in an off-market sale,” emailed A. “That’s at least $4 million more than other apartments with the same footprint—and it didn’t have any updated finishes. So could Taylor Swift have bought this apartment as well? And she’s going to bust through the wall of the townhouse? And that will be how she goes from her penthouse to the garage at 153 Franklin? It’s the only thing that I can think of that would explain the super-high price.”
Very wise if its her
people who generally understand taylor swift is a closeted lesbian: lesbians, straight people who aren’t huge fans of taylor swift because somethings always been off about her narrative
people who refuse to believe it or talk about it: literally everyone else
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
“I don’t want to start a weird rumour or anything, but I swear to God, you know because Jack Antonoff’s bros with Taylor Swift because they work together a lot, and I feel like Taylor was like, ‘You should make this a pop song’. I know that she wholeheartedly supported that idea and I think the genesis of the idea was her.”
— St. Vincent about her pop rework of MASSEDUCTION cut “Slow Disco” being Taylor Swift’s idea - NME (June 6th 2018)
☕️☕️☕️
Marc Maron Interview with Jack:
JA: “There’s a better chance that if I’m working with a woman, we’re gonna get along and she’s not gonna say like, ‘this dude ****ing gave it to me last night’ … or, ‘I just plowed through these four guys over the weekend.”
MM:“You’re not gonna have that conversation with Taylor Swift?”
JA: “What? No!”
MM: “Okay.”
JA: “I like women, in particular gay women.”
MM: “Hehe, yeah. Is she gay?”
“Bros”
“I don’t want to start a weird rumour or anything, but I swear to God, you know because Jack Antonoff’s bros with Taylor Swift because they work together a lot, and I feel like Taylor was like, ‘You should make this a pop song’. I know that she wholeheartedly supported that idea and I think the genesis of the idea was her.”
— St. Vincent about her pop rework of MASSEDUCTION cut “Slow Disco” being Taylor Swift’s idea - NME (June 6th 2018)
☕️☕️☕️
Marc Maron Interview with Jack:
JA: “There’s a better chance that if I’m working with a woman, we’re gonna get along and she’s not gonna say like, ‘this dude ****ing gave it to me last night’ … or, ‘I just plowed through these four guys over the weekend.”
MM:“You’re not gonna have that conversation with Taylor Swift?”
JA: “What? No!”
MM: “Okay.”
JA: “I like women, in particular gay women.”
MM: “Hehe, yeah. Is she gay?”
“Bros”
FBI agent that’s assigned to me: yeah can I get a new one I think mines broken??? she just cries about how she loves Taylor Swift and a load of gay stuff??? Sometimes both at the same time???