Every Single Album - 'Lover' | Every Single Album: Taylor Swift

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Taylor Swift has emerged from the darkness of 'Reputation' and into the light and happy phase of 'Lover.' This is Taylor in love. Nathan and Nora talk about the singles that lead this album, some of the music that potentially inspired songs like "Paper Rings" and "Death by a Thousand Cuts," some of Taylor's first overtly political songs like "Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince," and what music on 'Lover' foreshadows what's to come on 'Folklore.' Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringer's music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs for the 90s that define the decade. Rob is joined by a variety of guests to break it all down as they turn back the clock. Check out 60 songs that explain the 90s exclusively on Spotify. Hello and welcome to every single album, Taylor Swift. I'm Nora Pinciotti. I'm a staff writer at The Ringer. I am here with Nathan Hubbard, who is covered in butterflies and pastel hearts and rainbows and unicorns because we're here today. to talk about lover where Taylor Swift emerges

from the darkness. Nathan, how are you? You can't spell awesome without me, Nora. God, we're already on that, are we? I mean, oh. So this album comes out

in August of 2019. Earlier than she usually puts out a record, we should say. Right, we're in the summer. Everything is fun. Everything is bright. We've gone through this process. of just aggressive Easter egging

of the seven palm trees in the first Instagram post that had the same color palette for the seventh album. And we have songs like me and you need to calm down that are peppy and there's marching bands and kittens.

And tonally, we are in a very different place than we were on reputation. This is Taylor deeply, confidently in love. She's in love. love with Joe. She's in love with her fan base coming off the reputation tour, which had broken all kinds of records for highest grossing tour in North America. And she's in love with her business

situation because she's now on a new deal where she owns her masters. And I think this one felt like a life preserver. It was received warmly by the fan base. It was received warmly by critics. I mean, one critic called it satisfying pop that snatched elements from all over her past, going for a clear new sound like she did on her previous album. She wasn't doing that. And instead, the result was this dreamy record that makes good use of stylistic freedom. And that critic was you, Nora Princiotti.

Oh, my God. This is so embarrassing. I'm called out. Wow. Do you stand by these words? Yeah, you know what? I really do in some ways. There's an asterisk with that.

Because I loved what you said about this record being a life preserver, right? Because we're coming from reputation. And reputation is dark and combative. we talked about that. I love reputation. A spoiler here is that I actually think reputation is a stronger record than lover. But reputation needs your energy. It takes a lot out of you. You kind of got to be in the right place for that. Lover, it doesn't ask anything of you other than to put it on and feel good. And the cool thing about that in the context of the transition from your reputation to lover is that she's

doing that. She's not totally, you know, laying her armor down. She's not learning. She's not learning. that the way to be happy and fulfilled is to never fight any battles. She is involved politically in a substantial way for the first time in this album cycle. Yes.

This is the first album that she owns herself under her new record deal and she is vocal about her displeasure of the sale of her old label, big machine.

It's not that Taylor Swift is no longer a fighter, right? She is sort of lashing out on reputation and in some ways that is no longer the case here. But what's more important to me about it is that she's picking battles much more effectively here. And that's in her public life, but it's also in the music, right?

Because this is the album where we get songs like, you need to calm down, the man, Miss Americana that have quasi-political statements involved in them. And we can talk about which ones of those are effective and which ones are ineffective. But it is cool to see her. And I think that is part of the lightness and the relief that she can still be, you know, Taylor Swift, the fighter, but in this way that does not feel petty anymore. And I think that, that quality is what I was responding to in that piece more than anything else because it was a comfort to me to feel that way, but also to know that she could sort of take these different styles and filter them through the Taylor lens. Like we hear so many different genres in this. I don't know that she knew where she was.

she was going with it. In a lot of ways, this album is kind of read all over again. The first chapter was debut, Fearless Speak Now. It was that country drifting into country pop. Red was that transitional album that bridged the two genres that helped her sort of get out of the Nashville box. And now we had 1989 reputation and lover really being the last of that pure pop cycle. And you can hear, just like we talked about on Red,

and to a lesser extent speak now, that she was pushing at the edges of these genres and not running out of ways to do it, but we were starting to hear things that we'd heard before. I just think there's something about the sheen of the pop that she did with Jack and with Joel Little that was easy to eat but hard to digest. And this album, to me, felt like the mere image to reputation.

It's hard to process initially reputation is, but then you connect with it. This one, we just grabbed on, to it out of the gates because it was so great to see her in this position and hear her in this position. I'm not so sure that this is a whole lot of people's

favorite album or that it gets a listen front to back. Do you agree? Well, I think it can get a listen maybe not quite front to back. There are a couple skips, but it's it has that easy to listen to quality that I think people put this one on and play it. I think

it depends where you fall. I think you're right that among the core fans, this isn't that many people's favorite album. But for some people, we can't underestimate how important it was for her to just say, yeah, I can still do this. Right. And she does feel really settled and confident. And she starts, you know, doing normal press again.

She does magazine covers. She goes on Jimmy Fallon for her first late night thing in years and her mom pranks her by giving them footage of her on pain meds recovering from Lasic surgery. If anyone hasn't seen that, it's like the funniest thing in the world. I wasn't the one I wanted. Stop. You can't cry. That's not supposed to be what you're doing.

I try to get this one. Okay. I'll get the other one for you. Okay. But what are we doing with this now? I'll leave it. I'll leave it. It's mine.

But it doesn't have a head. Honey? It's fine. But one of the things that, you know, you say she's very herself on this album. And one of the things that I think is satisfying and fun about it is that she's herself in ways that she was already herself in the really early stages. So if this feels like emerging from the darkness of reputation, you can get these little messages where it's like, and I still have these core elements that are the same. So I haven't been forced to completely remake myself.

You know, it's like she still has that solid quality that harkens back to her early days. And you can even see that in like, she's still doing a traditional. album rollout in a way that a lot of pop stars in 2019 just didn't really care about anymore. Yeah. There is at this point in time a lot less pressure on how your album actually does. I mean, this was the biggest selling album

by a solo artist in 2019. It still debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. But they didn't do as many of the shenanigans that they had on the previous albums to try to drive a million, you know, in first week sales, because that's a thing of the past. At this point, the digital music revolution is here. Revenues in the industry are starting to re-accelerate.

And so instead they start focusing on servicing the super fans and creating these unique packages that get distributed at retail, that get distributed through her website, so that if you want to get pages from her diary or a bunch of other really interesting packages, you can do that. they're less concerned about how this music sells. And in truth, listen, worldwide, it does 75% of what reputation did. Reputation had done 45% of 1989. So we're talking about, like, this album sells like a third of what 1989 did, but that isn't really what matters.

Artists now make 80 to 90% of their money from the road. She is coming off the reputation tour where she did $350 million in sales and broke the all-time touring record in North America. in terms of gross sales. That's like, that includes the Rolling Stones, YouTube, Madonna, all the biggest tours that have ever existed. She beat them in North America. And so she starts to take the focus away from the counts. You know, she's a creature of lists and of data and numbers. But she gets away from how many actual albums did I sell and just starts making music

because it services all the other parts of Taylor Swift, Inc. And as we'll talk about later on, Taylor Swift, Inc. is going through a big change based on who a record label is now. Right. And that's that's the master's situation. And that's going to be a huge part of this conversation. But let's just kick it off and get to our categories. And we start with biggest song. And this is going to be, I think, another instance where we have to talk about lead singles and how we are introduced to a new chapter. Do you want to go first or should I? Please. Please go. All right. Well, so it either has to be me or you need to calm down. I agree. The two lead single, the two first singles that we heard from this. I actually think that it goes to you need to calm down because it had the bigger deal

music video. And I do think it's a slightly better song. But let's talk about these two songs together because they both got to number two. Might have gotten to number one if they hadn't run smack dab into a little ditty called Old Town Road. And these were the songs that Taylor chose for us to hear first to represent her new chapter. Why? I think she's just screwing with us at this point. Sometimes I'm like, you just think it's funny to watch everybody's sweat.

I think it is. I mean, these are both produced by Joel Little, who had worked with Lord. And we're going to hear some Lord stuff through this album in a bunch of ways, in particular the Archer, which we'll come back to that. All I can think of at this point, having gone on this journey with you, Nora, is that she looks at these first singles as ways to push the reset button. And the first single is almost designed to shock you into, oh my gosh, what is she doing? While the rest of the album then is a little bit more accessible. But me was an interesting video.

At least she gave the first verse to herself on a collaboration, instead of to the man that she's singing with? Yes. What else can we say about it? So to your point about the reset, I buy that argument for this album if we're talking about I forgot that you existed

as the first track. Me and you need to calm down do not sound like the rest of this album. Like they... No, not at all. I guess they're a big blaring we're doing happy pop again. sign, but they are sonically inconsistent with the rest of what we hear in this very jarring way.

I think you need to calm down is actually kind of fun. I think the video got way too heavy-handed and that's a miss. But me is just not a good song. Was Look What You Made Me Do a Good Song? Yes. But was it consistent sonically with the rest of the album? No, and she does this a lot. But here's what I think.

I think, look what you made. Me and Me Do did a greater disservice to the album that it was on because I don't think me freaked people out in quite the same way. Yeah. But me is a worst song. Well, you hated gorgeous because she rhymed face with face. I don't hate gorgeous. And I think you hate me because she rhymes you with you and me with me.

And as a writer, you just can't stand it. I just, it's more that it just sounds so, like, it sounds like it sounds like it. It is two cranks away from actually being satire of what a pop song is, but they don't quite get there. Like, if they'd somehow cranked it up a little bit more, it might have even just been this, like, ridiculous thing. And I still wouldn't agree with it as a lead single choice. But, like, you need to calm down, I think works because it is so over the top extra. Right. Me, I cannot tell if she isn't on the joke or not.

This is such a hard conversation to have for me because Cruel Summer was sitting right there. It was right there, Taylor. What happened? How could... This should have been the song of Summer 2019. Everybody in a vehicle moving more than two miles an hour should have had the windows and the tops down playing this song.

I'm never going to... It is the most underutilized asset on an album that's ever existed. This song is bad fucking ass, and it was put on mothballs. I don't get it. I'm never going to get it. It was right there. I will never understand it. The first time I heard this album when this album came out after a Patriots preseason game,

and I was listening to it in my car driving home, it's like pitch blackout. I screamed. in the car, like, just was like, I can't believe a song sounds this good. I nearly pulled over. Like, genuinely, I was like, I don't know if I should be operating a vehicle right now. It holds up.

Why didn't we get that in April? I will never understand. I won't either. And the only explanation is that because she released this album in August, she was not going to tour until the following summer, and she had Loverfest plan. and maybe they were going to release it then to make it the song of 2020.

Oh, the irony. But that would have been way, way too long to wait to put this thing out. This song should have dominated 2019. It probably would have kept coronavirus away. Everything was ruined by not releasing this thing. Yeah, if they'd release this thing in 2019, I am very confident that it could have been

the song of the summer then and still held up the next summer. Because guess what? we're almost to summer 2021 and I am very confident that it will still hold up and hold up for summers very long into the future.

So, all right, cruel summer therapy, we had to get that out of the way. But the only thing I can think of is that because so much of the rest of the album lyrically is more aligned

with the song that follows Cruel Summer, which is Lover, the title track, that because it's, this is more of a heartache, you know, unfulfilling love-themed song, that it just didn't get the focus from her because it wasn't totally pastel-y. I don't know.

But it's badass. And this was a miss. And I resent me. And I don't really resent you need to calm down because I'm with you. I think it's a good song. And yay, we made up with Katie Perry. Yeah.

So I actually really like this song. I think it's really good. I think it's really fun. I think the music video, got a little heavy-handed in a way that's a... Well, so it looks awesome, right? I think it's an aesthetic success. But she had all of essentially her new gay besties,

and she's having fun and bringing all of these, like, celebrities into the fold and celebrating. But it was taken by some as an equation of Taylor having a feud with Katie Perry and then making up or getting internet hate. with like essentially homophobia, which is a little bit of a miss. I don't think that's how they intended that. And it's unfortunate because, again, like, there's just something so fun about that song. And I don't want people taken,

sort of taken out of that. Because those deliciously condescending moments, like, just making that sign must have taken all night is like so good to me. You would rather be in the dark age. Just making that sign. Must have taken all night.

All right. Track five, should we do it? Let's do it. This is The Archer. As a stand-alone song, it's okay. I mean, it sounds a lot like supercut by Lord. Yeah.

There's just a lot of Lord in general on this. There's a lot of Lord on this. I mean, Rolling Stone called this her 11th best song, and that didn't really resonate with me. I really like it in context on the album. Because it feels like a coda to the man, which is the song that comes before it. And there's a vulnerability to it and a self-awareness that just really is a nice sort of closing chapter. So I like it, but this is where I feel like there's something a bit too formulaic about the way these songs stack up on this album.

Here again, it feels like she needed a track five and therefore it's here. in the same way that Delicate was track 5 on reputation but felt out of place a little bit. Archer for me might have been more, I mean, it could have even been the last track on the album. How do you feel about this song? I'm pretty much with you in that I think some of the lyrics are really stunning. You know, I think the you see right through me,

the I see right through me is really spectacular. It is. And it builds in a nice way, but it feels half finished to me. It feels like it doesn't really go anywhere. It feels like, you know, when you go out in the ocean, you go out to right before the waves are going to start crashing and you look out and you think you see what's going to be a really big one coming,

and then it gets there and it just kind of like blends in with the rest of the water. That's what the end of this song feels like to me is like I'm waiting for what the chorus and the bridge in Cruel Summer do where the song takes shape. Again, it needs a little bit of shape here. Yep. I'm not sure it's enough song. She says that on some of the making of videos where I'm not sure that's enough song. That's how I feel about The Archer.

Yeah. On a lot of other albums, we could have had a debate over which song should have been a track five. I don't know that there's another one on this album that you'd say, oh, that could have been a track five. Cornelia Street? It's all too well. It's literally the same key and chords, C, G, A, Minor F. It's a redux of all too well. Tell the stories about she was thinking

All too well. Very famous track five. God damn it. You're right. Can I ask you one more question about the Archer? Yeah. How do you feel about the Humpty Dumpty reference? I don't like it. I don't like it.

I don't like it. It feels, I mean, too many people have used it before. Yeah, it felt like an easy route for one of the great songwriters of a generation. She is incredible at taking cliches and twisting them just enough to give them freshness. Yes, she loves that. Clches, old references. Like, that's a great Taylor trick. Death by a thousand cuts, yes.

Right. I too am not positive that the Humpty Dumpty reference really lands. And this is one of those where I think as we get into the next couple of albums and she lets go of the need to check a box, do I have the arena rock thing? Have I opened this properly? And just sort of creates a collection of songs that are sonically consistent. The album flows better.

This one feels like a structure that she fit songs into. Oh, well. Let me ask you this. Would this have been a better sort of palette cleanser, opener than I forgot that you existed? I forgot that you existed.

It isn't love, it isn't hate. It's just indifference. No. I like, I forgot that you existed in that position. I did. Because it's bright, it's fresh. You know, so many of the vocals on this album she did in one or two takes just to keep the freshness and the sounding of, of, you know, the real core feelings that are in it. Once you get inside an album and you just do it over and over and over again and you punch spots up and like by hour three of doing a vocal track, you just have lost the plot. And I can hear the excitement and the newness of the vocal parts here.

And that's one of my favorite parts of the album. And it's just such an easy song to fall into. And it tells you, we're out of the darkness of reputation. We're into the light of lover. Let's go on this journey. Oh, I'm glad you said that because I feel that way about that song too. And I think critically, it got mixed reviews because I think some people took it as, well, did you really forget because you're writing a song about it and are we still kind of

mired in the controversy of reputation? I don't hear that because it just sounds so bright and fluffy and wonderful. And I think if you take it as no, like we are, we're turning the page and she always does this. She always sets the stage. I think that song is good for that. But I do think the Archer could kind of work for that too. Yeah, it could. I mean, the other reason that I really love, I forgot that you existed is that she gave us the voice memo. from when she first, first, first was working on the song. Like, it's really early. And she's playing the piano.

She's missing a bunch of notes. But the coolest thing is you can hear her, if you go back and listen to that, you can hear her breathing as she's trying on lyrics. And she's like, and she's breathing rhythmically using her, like, lungs as the drum track as she's sort of playing piano to try to work it out.

You can just hear the way that she pieces lyrics and rhythms together through the breathing that she's doing. That part was fascinating. There's no other artists who give us that much insight into where something started. Because if you listen to that track on a standalone basis, you go, oh, this is never going to go anywhere. Right. But underneath it, you can hear the gears just churning in her head as she's layering on what the rest of the song is going to sound like, even as she's botching notes on the piano. Well, and it is kind of cool to think about what comes after this, because when we get to, of folklore and evermore.

One of the things that I love about those albums is that she's clearly gotten so comfortable with letting us hear her breathing and actually turning it into an asset

and something that makes songs sound really cool. So sometimes you get little hints of that on those voice memos. And it's very cool.

I wonder if the archer will ever have a will ever be sort of it seems like it would be a hard song to kind of mash up. But if you could put it with something else,

like again, it's not quite enough song for me, but there are a cool. elements to it. It leads to a thing that we seek sort of consistently through this album, and we've talked about it now, which is that there are a lot of songs on this album that sound familiar. And if we go to Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, for example, not my favorite song on the album. It is definitely a political protest song. Oh, I love that song.

It sounds a lot like stuff from Pure Heroin by Lord, but it is definitely a reframing and reshaping of so it goes from reputation. It's in the same key and everything. The choruses of these songs are almost identical. She then goes into paper rings. There's this stretch of songs. Then paper rings. Which is totally you're the one that I want from Greece, right?

Yeah. I mean, I'm surprised that they didn't actually make a songwriting attribution for it because it just sounds so strikingly similar. Then Cornelis Street, which we talked about, is all too well. And then Death by a Thousand Cuts, which I love. It's one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs of all time. And there are a lot of similarities to its quiet uptown from Hamilton. They say he walks the length of the city.

You knock me out. I'm all apart. And like just musically listen to it, the chorus and the verse, like there is a lot of Hamilton. Even when she gets into the United We Stand, you know, our country, guess it was a law. There is some Hamilton in that song. And then she goes to London boy. Which is like the we didn't start the fire of places in London. And it interpolates Cautius Clay's Cold War,

but it's totally a repeat of this is why we can't have nice things. So there's just this stretch in the middle of the album where you're like, wait, that sounds like, oh wait, that is exactly like, and lyrically it's great and sonically it's delicious, but it's nothing super new like we've heard on the albums leading up to this. And so you're left with that same feeling that you had on Red, which is she's anxious to go somewhere else, isn't she?

London boys, this is why we can't have nice things when it just got back from study abroad and wants to talk about it all the time. But yeah, this does feel like part of her process where she puts on all the different hats and tries things on and sends them out, receives the signals coming back, tries to see what works. She gets excited about stuff, right? Like, I think he knows was one of the songs

that I latched onto originally from this album. It sounds a lot like stuff off Janel Monnet's Dirty Computer. That didn't bother me. I actually thought it was cool. It made me feel like Taylor was listening to that album and enjoying it. And so what I want to ask you here is like what exactly are we even talking about when we call something derivative, right? Is that is that a problem? Is that a good thing? Like what does it mean if a song is coming from another song? I don't think it's a problem at all. It's fun to dive into the musicological roots of these songs.

I mean, we have been for 70 plus years doing the traditional rock verse chorus verse 145 chord format. Like at some point we are at the edge of what is really possible to create without it being derivative. So it's fun to dive in and see where there are the ghosts of songs past that resurface in some of this work. She certainly is adding her own flavor and a bunch of uniqueness in her words on top of it. There are only just so many structures that you can put together within this format and create something that's truly unique. So it's fun to look at the roots of these things. And we can tell when Taylor's doing this with more frequency that she is looking for something new.

She's at the edge of the forest of what she can do within this format and there is change ahead. One of my biggest questions when I heard this album was like, okay, which of these directions? I like a lot of them. I like most of them. But which one is going to be the one that she picks?

And I think, as we'll see, that kind of got disrupted by the circumstances in which she ended up recording her next albums. But it left me with this like, all right, what is going to be the thing that gets taken from here? Yeah, I mean, on red, we at least knew where she was evolving to. On this one, we don't really know. And I'm not even sure she necessarily had a plan.

I think she was just digging out from the darkness of reputation and knew that she needed to present a brighter, you know, just a brighter set of songs. When it's over, you can tell at a macro level, she's leaning back towards some more acoustic-based, strip-down stuff, even the mix on the more produced songs here. Her voice is sort of central. We're getting more hand-played instruments here.

So you have a sense that we're leaning back in that direction. But I'm not sure she was like, I'm definitely going to make an indie pop record next. Right. let's talk most important collaborator because I think that's that illustrates that point. A lot of these songs are with Jack Antonoff and he is a through line for a long time, as we know.

But a lot of the other people who are involved don't really come back around. So yeah, she did, me need to calm down, Miss Americana and the man with Joel Little, who, you know, had done royals and worked with Loretta a ton. And then she has Louis Bell and Frank Dukes to help on,

I forgot that you existed. afterglow and it's nice to have a friend. They'd worked with Camilla Cabo who opened for the Rep Tour. They'd done a bunch of stuff with Post Malone. None of those people end up really reappearing, or at least to date, they haven't really stuck with her. Yeah, I don't know that any of those songs were people's favorites. Right.

What was people's favorite was Cruel Summer, and that's why her most important collaborator is St. Vincent. Is Annie Clark who co-wrote it? Yeah, I had that. That was actually going to be my, that was my first one that I wrote down until I realized that, isn't it Idriselba for doing the ridiculous? We can go driving in on my scooter? You know, just around London. On my scooter? Oh my God, that's so embarrassing. I can't believe you just did that. You know, Taylor's Katz co-star. He'd done an appearance on James Gordon's show and they used it.

I think it's really, really special. Anything that preserves the memory of cats is not a good thing from my perspective. So it's a cute moment, but it's St. Vincent for me because... I agree with you. Cruel Summer is just a powerhouse. I totally agree with you. And if I have any sort of core critique of the jack songs from this era in general, it's that some of them do, like the Archer, lack that shape.

Like, sometimes the best thing about them is that they have that sort of propulsive quality where you're in it the whole time and you feel the song moving, but then it never kind of explodes. Well, what does Cruel Summer do and what do a lot of St. Vincent tracks do? Like, boom, you have the moment. And so I think she was really important as a co-writer on that. Yeah, the production on this album overall is a little more sparse, but it's still, Jack still holds a lot of bass down low, which is a carryover from what we heard on reputation. And so even in like Death by a Thousand Cuts, there's that heavy, low end, even if the middle ranges sonically are a little sparser.

We should mention just that she features the chicks on Soon You'll Get Better. Yeah. Which is, you know, important musically and also symbolically, right, because she's identifying them as this group that really freaked her out when they got quote unquote Dixie-chicked and it scared her from being more outspoken politically and then she puts them on this very, very, very special and moving song about... And a political record, or at least a record that has as much political commentary as

she's ever made. Right. And I love Soon You'll Get Better. I find it hard to listen to, but I think it's beautiful. Yeah, it's something she just had to do. It's really hard to listen to because you know how painful it is and you just worry about, you know, she's afraid. she's going to lose her mother. And that's uncomfortable for anybody to hear. I wonder if she'll ever perform it.

Well, she did perform it. Right. She did it for that big... For the Gaga stay-at-home concert. But I can't imagine that she puts it in a live show. Live show. Because I don't know how you could possibly sing it. Unless Andrea is doing great and completely cancer-free and, you know, has been for five years, I certainly wouldn't be able to sing that about my mother. Yeah. No. It's really, it's hard. And it, I think it speaks to the sort of poignancy of involving the chicks in that, that that personal of a song is where she has them in the fold. And then the last one is just that in, it's nice to have a friend.

They use backup vocals from this youth choir at a school in Toronto, which is very cool because it has this sort of like childish sort of dark whimsy to it. Is that a good song? I think it's cool. It's weird. Yeah. I just like when she gets a little weird. Well, we might come back to it. It's towards the end of the album,

and we know that some of those songs towards the end of the album give us on occasion some previews into what's ahead. But what is difficult to do with this album is to identify the most purposeful Easter egg. Because there are so many Easter eggs all over this project.

It's a giant egg salad. I can't, it's impossible for me to identify. Is it everything that's in the man video? Was it the seven palm trees? Like, it goes from being these little, like, capital letters in the liner notes to, holy shit, it's like a beautiful mind. You have to piece all these things together.

I start to worry that I need like a decoder ring for all this. This is, we were talking about this. It's been helpful as we've gone on this journey together to remember that in the beginning. Like, I think I've sort of internalized Easter eggs as such a Taylor thing that it feels like, well, of course she was doing these from the very beginning. And then you go back and it's like, yeah, she's always been super clever about this stuff. But in the beginning, she was basically just putting little secret messages in liner notes. Now we're like every comma placement in an Instagram post, every, okay, are there 61 stars in the photo? What are the pins that she's wearing on the jacket

when she's on the magazine cover? Like, what do they mean? What color are her nails in the vertical video on Delicate on Spotify because they're pastel and that was a foreshadow. It's like, what? I don't have time for this. Right. It's like, I love that she does this and it also makes me be like, Taylor, like, please relax. Leave me alone. Like, you're ruining my life. I know. I know. And she, the scavenger hunt piece is so fun because it engages the core. But man, now it's like I have to look at every single piece of content that she creates. You're like, oh, shit, we have to count the words in that tweet because that might tell us the day that the fourth album is going to come out

assuming it's sunny. And like Ellen DeGeneres gets a cruel summer tattoo and you need to calm down music video. Like this woman is out of her mind. Yeah. I don't know. Probably not. Is he licensed to do that?

I'm going to say no. But neither was the actor shooting the arrows in that video. So who knows? All right. But there's almost too many to pick from, which is why I sort of went in a slightly different direction with this, which is the diary entries. Because this is maybe a little bit more transparent than the average Easter egg. But in conjunction with the release of this record, she has all these different physical hard copy materials that people can get if they're really motivated. And they include these snippets from what she says are her diaries over the year.

And they're really interesting. And it's impossible to not read them and sort of read them with an eye towards, all right, these seem like they were chosen to kind of one by one address a bunch of trending Taylor topics. But they also feel so like you can hear her voice in them. And they feel very true. And some of them are not, you know, it's not all peachy. Like one of them that's really compelling.

is she talks about the night before the Grammys when Red didn't win. She says she's like never been so sure, never been felt so good about their chances before. And you know how crushed she was when that didn't win. Yes. She was on the floor of her bathroom being held by the people around her just distraught. It was. And you get context for that where it's like she felt really, really, really good about that one. And then, you know, there's one from the summer of 2016.

which was what inspired the front half of reputation where she just says this summer is the apocalypse and it's very dramatic, very mood board. But there's also, she has early ones where she talks about like she's really young and she's already very conscious of like how many calories are in frozen yogurt. You get little insights like that.

There's also a lot about Scott Borchetta and her old label. And it's all, like the thing that's striking about it is that it's all good. And it ends up being this very interesting bridge to the masters and the record deal situation that she was suddenly talking about and embroiled in because basically what she's laying out in these is like, this is where we started. Like think about where we are now. This is where we started where she's calling him passionate and talking about. about like wanting to put her trust in him and all this stuff. And the liner notes of debut album have the words,

I love my record label. Right. So it's kind of like, it makes you, it makes everything that she was talking about at the time hit harder, which is important because by the time we hear this album, we know like scooters bought Big Machine. Yes. And lover has been presented as the quote unquote healthier option for people to listen to because Taylor owns it and feels secure in that.

Yeah. He bought Big Machine in 2019 for $330 million. And Big Machine basically is Taylor Swift. And so she was shocked and angered, says Scooter's bullied her and that Scott Borsheta had betrayed her because she'd been wanting to buy that back. but she had been getting deals that were sort of designed to force her to stay at Big Machine. And she felt like she was being, you know, trapped into not being able to own and control her art. And then later that year, leading up to the AMAs, she comes out again publicly and says that Scooter and Scott are blocking her from playing her old catalog on the AMAs and that they won't let her release stuff to Netflix. And she asks her fans in that moment. And this is something we should talk about

because she asks her fans to let Scooter and Scott, and even the artists that Scooter manages, know how they feel about them blocking this stuff. And it leads to Scooter making the first really public comments that he has about this, which is saying, my family's being threatened. We're getting death threats.

Please call off the dogs. And let's have a private conversation. Nora, was it okay? that she set the troops loose on other people? Yeah, look, I'm not a fan of weaponizing the internet because I don't think that you can control a mob, so I don't think that you should create one. And she's done this a couple times, right?

There was an element of that with the Ginny and Georgia thing that happened, where she hated the joke that they made about her, which was totally fair to disagree with in the Netflix show. but then by posting about it, it's just a mob. It's just a mob has unfun consequences. And I'm a little bit more comfortable with that when it's Scooter and the Carlisle

group than I am when it's like a young budding creator of a television show. But I think in general that's tricky territory to be in. I certainly don't mind her speaking up publicly and clearly and straightforwardly. about her displeasure with these situations. There is something I'm a little bit uncomfortable with about hello, you, all of my millions of incredibly dedicated fans who would do anything for me.

Go get him. Well, it sure seemed like Scooter didn't like what was happening because of what came next. In November 2020, Scooter sells it because it's just enough already. And he sells it to a private equity firm called Shamrock Capital. And Shamrock very much wants to partner with Taylor Swift.

But at this point, with the last 18 months in the way things have gone, Taylor is off and has decided that she's going to go re-record her catalog come hell or high water. Now, I know that behind the scenes, Shamrock was making a very concerted effort to try to engage Taylor, but they made a mistake in the deal that they did, which is that the catalog still pays a royalty, a smaller one, but a royalty to Scooter Braun. And Taylor just decided that was a non-starter. But we do know that Shamrock would be willing to buy out Scooter if Taylor would work with them. But those conversations just aren't happening because I think she's just so deep and ensconced in 2020 at this point in folklore and Evermore and the re-record and she's having fun redoing this stuff.

So it's a very complicated set of business negotiations that she is, playing a part in both with her public comments, with the way that she's releasing music and so forth, it is changing the way that artists interact with their labels. She is fighting this fight very publicly and purposefully to try to change labels owning the art of artists. And a lot of that stuff is going down in the present now, but a pretty important step in that was,

her new deal with Universal, right? And some of the terms of that where she was going to own the work. Yeah. She believes, and I think there's a strong case for this, that artists should create their art, own it outright, and license it to a record label, so that the key negotiating points are just, how long am I licensing this to you?

and what royalty am I paying you for the work that you do to promote and market my album? And what kind of, like, what does that mean for people who aren't Taylor Swift, right? What did her deal with Universal do that extended beyond her specific terms? Well, what it means for other artists is that there's a chance that if you get big, you don't suddenly have way less control than most artists do today. I mean, if she is successful, and she's not alone in this, ironically, Kanye was fighting the same fight at the time and publishing his deals on social media to try to force the label to come to some reconciliation with how, when this artist has made you so much money, you can continue to insist that you own the art. But I think

if she is successful, she's going to change the dynamic such that artists, never sign away full ownership of their catalog when they are young. Because when they're young and just getting started, they can't possibly have a sense for how their career is going to go. And when somebody steps up to an artist who's living out of their garage and can't afford rent and so forth with a check that is life-changing, a lot of artists don't have much of a choice. And that can be perceived as exploitative,

even though labels themselves would say, hey, we spend a lot of money and a lot of time, a lot of effort in building up the brands of these artists, and we should be compensated for that. And Taylor says, you should be. You just shouldn't own their art in perpetuity. Artists should own their art. And in 2021, even last year in 2020, we have seen through the pandemic as a bunch of artists' income streams got shut down because touring wasn't happening. And we talked about the fact that now artists are making 80, 90% of their money from the road. So without that income stream, we started. to see a lot of older artists

sell their catalogs, Bob Dylan, the Crosby Stills and Nash guys. That is a choice that you should be able to make when you are a 40, 50-year-old artist. But to take that away from a 13, 14, 15-year-old artist

in perpetuity is what Taylor is foundationally fighting against. Now, we should say this. This schism had been building for years. Her catalog and Big Machine, which sold to Scott Borchetta, they had been circulating a deck trying to get somebody to buy it in 2014, 2015.

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, all looked at this catalog. But as we talked about before, you could tell that something wasn't right. You only sell an asset like that if you think the value is going to go down. And the reason that they thought the value was going to go down is because they knew that it was going to be really hard to get Taylor Swift to re-sign. And so this had been building for a long time. I think she was hugely disappointed to not get what she perceived

to be a fair shot at buying it back and when it got sold to Scooter who's an individual at the center of the Kim and Kanye stuff that was hell for her. But she responds by in part promoting lover as a thing that fans could listen to where they would be kind of supporting her

and all of that. And I don't know if that's why this album is as long as it is. it's 18 songs long. It was her longest record she'd ever made in terms of number of songs. But that did feel

like a little bit of a part of it where it was like she was just trying to get other stuff into the water stream. I think one of the products of that is that there are some songs that I would cut off this album. It's 18 songs.

You know you're going to cut something. And you have to, Nora. I don't know. Taylor could make an 18 song album that I would not want to cut anything off of. I believe in her ability to do that. But that's not the case. case with this one. I can cut a few songs. I would cut afterglow. Wow. I think it's pretty,

but when you're at 18 songs, like, I want a little bit more punch. It has the exact same chorus as dress. It's another one of those songs that is derivative and that feels like just repurposing an idea that she didn't totally finish on dress, even though I love the song dress. Yeah, right. We already had dress. We don't need afterglow. I would cut me. Yeah, I'm not surprised. And then I would take you need to calm down off the album. What I would do with that song is I would not have it on the album. I would first, and she's actually done this on a couple of different occasions,

but I would like perform it at some awesome benefits and then turn it into a thing that just pops up live. Because I think it's funny. And I think when you like separate it from some of the heavy handedness of the video, it can be very charming. I would absolutely like 10 out of 10 just like bop to it at a show. I'm not sure that... Why is it disruptive on the album for you?

It's just so cloying. It's like a set piece. Snakes and stones never broke my bones. It's kind of the war is over song though. Yeah, I don't want to get rid of it. Like I don't want to have not heard it. I don't want to not know it. I'm just...

There's 18 songs on this album. They don't all need to be there. And you don't daylight and it's nice to have a friend, you're okay? It's nice to have a friend is very curious to me. But I think it's cool. I think the choir is cool. Would it have worked on folklore? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I think it totally would have. I think they would have produced it a little bit differently, but it could totally fit in there. And I love starting to hear her explore themes of childhood. again, like early childhood, right? Not the teenage years. That's very cool to me.

I really like daylight. I mean, daylight has the reference to red, right? I once believed love would be burning red, but it's golden. It has that spoken word post-log at the end. I want to be defined by the things that I love, of the things I hate, I'm afraid of I'm afraid of. Yeah, and so it's kind of, it closes the album

in the same way that I forgot that you existed, opens it, by sort of defining it as this thing about you are who you love and what you love. And that's nice. I can, I don't know that my favorite thing about that song is the spoken word part, but I love maybe I've stormed out of every single room in this town. Like there's one thing she does super well on lover is that the skillful phrasing and the almost conversational like matching of words to music. And that's a place where I think it really thrives. So I like that song a lot. Maybe you ran with the

Maybe I've stormed out of every single room in this town All right Well, we agree on me I think I probably would have cut It's nice to have a friend It doesn't do much for me there Daylight is what she was going to call this album Yeah

At one point And so it has some of the clean You know, end of album vibes for sure But how do you feel about false God? Oh, I like it. I do too. I actually like it a lot. I like Taylor with a heavy sax.

I do too. The coolest move she ever did, which was such a New York move, was to do that on SNL and have Lenny Pickett, who's the band leader and the sax player, play that with her.

That won me over. It was just like a real hat tip to the sort of institution of SNL. It made me love that song so much more. Yeah. No, that song is cool.

Would you have cut Miss Americana if she hadn't named the documentary, Miss Americana? So I will say, I thought that song would stay with me more than it has. Yeah. I think it's, I really like that song, though. I don't, you and I are in very different places on that song. I think it's, I think that making a sort of quasi-political statement song using the language of high school, for a lot of people would have been annoying.

But for Taylor, like, you know how much those themes have resonated with her in the past. So I really do feel the she's been shattered by things that she's seen happen in the world in that. Like it does, and the dystopian cheerleaders, like, I think it works. Is this with, with you need to calm down. Is it too little too late for you? No, it's not, it's not too little. It's later than I and she and a lot of people would have liked. Like, she is late to the party. But what I do think that we see, you kind of remember that this is a person who, to put it, you know, mildly, is extremely skilled in crafting a message.

Right. So it's almost like we've been waiting for so long for her to engage and for her to just say something that what I'd forgotten until she started doing it was, oh, yeah, the something is probably going to be pretty potent because she wouldn't do it otherwise. Like, this is just not a person who wastes a lot of words. You know, that gets into a broader theme on this album, which is that I liked this album a lot when it came out. And I grabbed onto, oh, there's some acoustic stuff. I grabbed onto, oh, there's some happier songs. I grabbed on to, oh, she's being political,

because we just were sort of desperate for something. And I think it ages okay. But the further that I get away from this album, the less I'm like, I got to go in and play it front. back. Do you feel that way about it? Yeah, I've had the same experience with it too. And that's a good song to illustrate that because I thought the first few times I heard that song, I was like, one, I'm so, because some of Joel Little's work with Lord is like some of my favorite music. And he'd done me and you need to calm down. And I was just like, what has happened?

Get this guy out of here. Like, Joel, like, what are we doing here, buddy? And when I heard that song, I was like, Joel Little and Taylor can make a great song together. And again, I still think it's good. I still think it's a really good song. But I don't,

it has not had the tale for me that I expected to. And that's the case with more than a few songs on Lover that I thought I would be revisiting more than I do. But we can't finish talking about the album title before we talk about the lover himself. Joe. Let's. Also, where are you on the word lover in general?

I feel like that's important to this. It reminds me of the Will Ferrell Hot Tub sketch on SNL. Dave, may I share something with you? I guess. I'm really just trying to... I find when one first enters the scalding waters of the hot tub, it is not unlike your first encounter with a new lover. It bothers me. It bothers me.

It's a weird thing to call someone. I don't like it when people say that in the world. But I do think it works as the album title because this is kind of when we're fully allowed to acknowledge Joe. Who is an actor? Yeah, Joe Alwyn, Taylor's long-term boyfriend at this point, is a British actor who's had a handful of roles. My daughter looked up as IMDB and told me that, like, his fifth credit,

his fifth biggest credit is the three seconds that he appears in the Miss Americana doc. Is he actually an actor? He's an actor. I mean, he was in Billy Lynn's long halftime walk. That was a movie. It was? And he, yeah, and he got a handjob from Emma Stone and the favorite. And he's dating Taylor Swift.

And that's about it. It doesn't seem like he's getting a lot of gigs these days, which, by the way, is exactly what she needs, because all the other asshole stars that she dated seem to be in it for themselves. I love that, you know, she's got somebody who's willing to, A, or wants to stay out of the limelight and keep it private. And let, I mean, we know so little about this person relative to all the other people who have had songs written about them by Taylor Swift.

I think that's the way they want it. But I still want to just challenge you, is he actually an actor? He is an actor. I don't know if he's a good actor, but he's an actor. Okay. I'm sure he's like he's got more songwriting credits than he does film credits. Look, we stand a supportive man willing to take a step back for it. There's no doubt.

I'm so glad that he's a part of this. But it's interesting that the most we know about him is from Taylor Swift songs, not his actual body of creative work on his own. I mean, give him time, you know. Not all of us are writing, you know, Grammy-winning albums or award-winning material in our mid-teens. Like maybe Joe's just a little bit of a late bloomer. That's fine.

But I appreciate him because if he inspired the song Lover, which I love, then we give him credit for that as well. And it just, like, more pop songs should be waltzes. That's my statement on this matter. We could let our friends crash in the living room. Okay. I think it got unfair criticism because it does sound like Mazzie Star, and it does sound like cowboy junkies sort of sonically a little bit,

but really only because it's like a waltz. Is that criticism, though? I feel like people like this song. Yeah, I just think people are like, oh, you know, the vocal sonically, it's those songs. But it's not. It's just that they're in it. It's a waltz. That's it.

Should it have gotten a Grammy nomination for Song of? the year? I really love Lover. I'm totally fine with that. I think it's, again, I would like to hear more waltzes on the, I'm going to say the radio, even though I don't listen to the radio. Yeah. The coolest part of this for me was they released the making of. And right when she plays it for Jack, it's just the two of them. And she's sitting there sitting at a piano. She says, I don't see it as piano. She goes, so it's like kind of dreamy, guitary throwback, but not like camp throwback. And Jack immediately just goes, I know what you mean. It's basically, I don't see it as piano. I think it's that like kind of dreamy guitary throwback,

but not like camp throwback. So. I thought it was the perfect song, which is, which is really interesting because it's almost like even more of a, more of a duty to do it right. And you're like, what? Those are two people completely, how do you get, I know what you mean from dreamy guitary throwback, but not like camp throwback. He's like, I know what you mean. And in two minutes,

they've got the song worked up together. It's really interesting insight. Yeah, they're like talking down the like walk down baseline and it's just like mind melt. Yeah, it's crazy insight into it. They just get each other. And there's creatives who just sync up like that and they don't even need words to make it happen.

He just sort of senses the way that it's supposed to go. So I like the song a lot better when I saw the way that it was created. Okay, well, I know another song that you like a lot on this album is Death by a Thousand Cuts. And can I give you some Taylor tidbits from the internet? Please do. Because one of them has to do with that song.

Okay. So I think this is so cool. That song, Death by Thousand Cuts, was inspired by the Netflix movie Someone Great, which Taylor had watched and it totally moved her. She was crying her eyes out to it. And to the point, it affected her to the point where she started, like, dreaming about the characters and just being totally transfixed by it. So she started writing a song, which became Death by a Thousand Cuts.

But then after she, after the song came out and she explained that, the writer and director of the movie, Jen, Kate and Robinson, was blown away because she had been inspired to write it while just binging 1989. So there is a full circle thing that nobody anticipated with that song, which I think is super cool. I love it so much. It's a great song. Don't worry. We'll give you time on that one. But Taylor told the New York Times that she was originally going to have the lover lyric say, we could leave the Christmas lights up until April or like later than January because

leaving your Christmas decorations up until January is not weird at all or notable, but decided that it was fun to have it be so ordinary and typical. Although I do think that coupling that with the cleaning up bottles on New Year's Day tells us that Taylor is a very prompt post-holiday picker-upper. She's really getting on that stuff. She's not letting it linger. No. She's still drinking on this album.

Oh, yeah. Eight songs. Yeah. She's drinking. It's wild. Make confessions and we're begging for forgiveness. Got the wine for you. You are somebody that I do.

But you're taking shots at me like it's petrom. And I'm just... I'm tired by wine. And you know a Tennessee whiskey. But it's not wild after reputation. Like, we, you know, girl can mix a cocktail. That's fine. You would think with all the Easter eggs and all that that she was doing drugs.

But it's clearly... I don't know. All right. I'm just going to leave that right there and move on. So the song Cornelia Street... reverence is a place that she rented on Cornelia Street in the West Village in New York, which was this crazy townhouse that she stayed in while her Tribeca place was getting renovated. And it was owned by some like Soho House exec who said that he barely knew who she was,

but that her songs were on his running playlist, which just feels like exactly what that dude would say. But she liked the decoration so much that she rented it like totally as is. and it has a pool in the living room and a marble staircase and a master bedroom balcony that has astroturf on it and the roof does appear in the song. Ah, we need a Taylor Swift Cribs episode for sure. Dude. These places, some of them sound beautiful to me.

Some of them frankly sound like they would give me a headache. Yeah, they sound like human hamster cages or something. Yeah, she's not exactly a minimalist. I don't know. So during the like dystopian cheerleader go fight win on Miss Marcona on the Heartbreak Prince, that's that is Taylor's voice. So then here's another one. You mentioned that London boy uses the beat of the cautious clay song Cold War. And the two of them had no contact other than just like reps approving the sample. So he was super confused how she came across the song. But His one theory is that hold for booze. He is friends with John Mayer. Oh, boy.

But the two of them were hanging out in L.A. a few years ago and ran into Jack Antonoff. And so he introduced himself. It was not a long interaction, but that's his best guess for how that sample ended up on that song. Jack works in mysterious ways. Yeah, exactly. So does Taylor, but so does Jack. you mentioned that Taylor said she did most of this album in whole takes, not doing a lot of cutting and pasting.

She also wrote every song on the album for this album, which was the first time that that happened. Like usually there's, you know, one or two that were from a different era and got put on to something else. But this one, every song in Lover was for Lover originally. And then finally, she adopted her third cat, Benjamin Button, after meeting him on the set of the me music video. Is that the one that's always in the like, see-through backpack?

No, no. That's either Meredith or Olivia, but that's earlier. Benjamin Button was the little kitten with the really beautiful eyes. If I do a lineup of cats, can you pick out Meredith and Olivia? I get Meredith and Olivia confused, but I could pick out that's one of Taylor's cats. Okay. And then Benjamin Button is easy. Yeah, I think the cats themselves get confused.

But the, okay, so you think you could identify them. You're just not sure which is which. Yeah. All right. I really, she has a highlight on her Instagram of just the cats doing stuff, and it's really wonderful. It's wonderful watching. What's the Tom Hiddleston Award for showing the work?

So they took out the Hey Kids spelling is fun line for me for the album version. Why did they do it? What was controversial about that? see, this is where I remain confused to this day on whether or not she is in on the joke with that song. Because it feels like people were critical of that song for being ridiculous, not in a good way. And they were like, all right, we could make it a little bit less ridiculous by not having this ridiculous line on it. Which to me, I'm like, if you're going to do it, commit to the bit, guys. I don't understand it.

It's not like it was. do you think that they heard from some groups that it was insulting or something? No, I don't think so. All right, well, I give up there. I really think it was, I think it was second-guessing that song in the wrong direction.

Like, I think that song should either not exist or it should be turned up to, you know, 15. I think it should be up to 15, but we already said that we think it should be cut, so... What is yours? I had the same thing. That's exactly it. Okay, good.

Yeah, we're on the exact same page on that. All right. So then let's get to Peak Taylor because this, I have actually been waiting a really long time to talk about because this just cracks me up to no end. We got to talk about Cornelia Street a little bit more. And I'm not even just talking about the song. I'm talking about the actual Cornelia Street in Manhattan. Tell me about it. It is a block long. Cornelia Street is a single block.

So she says in this song, The emotional impact of this song is that if this relationship doesn't work out, she can never walk Cornelio Street again. Big deal. From a logistical standpoint, could not be less of a big deal. You can Westforth, hang a left on Jones, another one on Bleaker. You have bypassed the whole thing. It would take 90 seconds.

So it is so peak Taylor to me that that is such a distinct emotional loss that she has to do this song that, Practically speaking, you could live your entire life with close to no consequence, even if you lived seconds from Cornelia Street, to never walk on it. Like, you don't need it. It's a beautiful street, but it's just completely unnecessary from a geographical perspective. It doesn't connect anything important. You never need it. Look, if they, it's like Murray's cheese is on the other side. You would need that, but that's not on Cornelius. No, no. You don't need Cornelius Street. It's like mostly town. homes. It's crazy.

For me, that's a pretty good one. For me, it's the end of I forgot that you existed, where she goes, so yeah. It doesn't love, it, it's an hate, it's just indifference. So, yeah. It's just perfect. It's perfect. It's really good. It's everything I want in a Taylor spoken word end to a song.

It reminds me of her clearing her throat at the start of Ready for it. I like it. All right. bladedly best song. I think I know what you're going to pick. Are you picking Cruel Summer? I mean, I have Cruel Summer and Death by a Thousand Cuts, which from this album, which again was this welcome oasis after the storm,

it's faded a bit in its luster in time, but these songs have not for me. These are two of my favorite Taylor Swift songs, so I'm not picking between the two of them. I don't have to. I love, she did Death by A Thousand Cuts both when she did The Tiny Death Show and And then the show in Paris that got turned into TV special, I think that song Live. Saying goodbye is death 5,000 cuts. Flashbacks waking me up. I get drunk, but it's not enough because the morning comes and you're not my baby.

It takes on extra meaning to me in those versions, but I love that song too. I also think we need to give some love to paper rings. Yeah, great song. I might be higher on that song than you are, but I think it's great. It's just so joyful. And it is one that I probably listen to, listen back to more than most on this album. We're aligned on that, no doubt. And I also think just from a quality perspective, like I cannot just go listen to soon.

You'll get better on your average Tuesday. That's not, it's just too much. It's too hard. But that's a spectacular song. Yeah, it's just, it's, it's, and probably deserves a mention here. Yeah, it does. It's a tough listen. It's a tough listen. Yeah. Yeah. It could not have existed on the next album, which is going to be folklore. I think it's nice to have a friend is the next album appetizer. But I put a huge caveat on that because I do not believe that she knew where she was going after this album. I think this is another one where she doesn't know and there really isn't showing of the cards for what's next. I think that's right. The only thing where, and so I have it's nice to have a friend written down to, too. And then I also mentioned death by a thousand cuts for this. And that to me is with both of those,

it's nice to have a friend in terms of how it sounds would be more fitting. But both of those, I think it's important to focus in on the material that she's using to generate ideas. Yeah. And like the widening out of the storytelling lens where it doesn't have to be quite so specific, she's starting to just take ideas from different parts of life and from movies and books and all these different things and sort of be more comfortable. moshing them together in a way where it doesn't have to be this is exactly about this person

and this experience. That translates to folklore and evermore in terms of the origin stories of those songs and ways that she was writing. And then it's nice to have a friend, I think also the sound of it, could have matched.

Yep, I totally agree. What's the best lyric on this album? Oh, my God. So there are so many, for all of the ways in which we've described how Lover has not quite sunk its nails into either of us in the way that maybe we would have thought it had, I just, I think there are a lot of incredible options for this here. Shade never made anybody less gay. No, no, no, no, no. that's not it. I think for me it's, can I go where you go?

Can we always be this close? I'm lover. Like, it really just does something. For me, it's gave you so much, but it wasn't enough. But I'll be all right. It's just a thousand cuts. That's really good. I also, another one that I really like is,

then you called, showed your hand. I turned around before I hit the tunnel. I just love the cadence of that. I love how it sounds. And also, like, there's no, you know, there's no coming back from the Lincoln Tunnel. Yeah. It's interesting.

We really disagree on you need to calm down. I'm okay with that song. It's very interesting how you feel about that one. I am a fan of that song. Not a huge fan. I like the song. No, I don't know that that's right. I like the song.

I think the song is, I actually think the song gets a bad rep. Yeah. Yeah, it was just like, I'm just not sure that someone getting dragged for their sexual orientation is the same thing as someone saying, like, Taylor Swift isn't cool. That is true. Well, let's see if we agree on the overall grade on this album.

All right. Nora, I just want to remind you, you're on a Taylor Swift curve here. I know. So there's no bad grade. There's no bad grades. I know. So I didn't think I was going to, I gave this album of B plus. That's what I have. And I think when it came out, I was in the A minus territory because there were songs on here that just grabbed me right by the head. Now we get to the next chapter, which I think is going to be really interesting when we talk about folklore and evermore, which we'll do next.

because lover still fits into that normal process of kind of pushing the outer limit and figuring out what works and trying on different styles. But the next thing that we get is just this big disruption in how she works and how she makes music and who she does it with. So that'll be really cool. Nathan, see you when we talk about folklore. I'm ready. Thanks for listening to every single album, Taylor Swift.

For Nathan Hubbard, I'm Nora Preciati. we just got done going through Lover. Join us again on Thursday on the ringer dish feed wherever you get your podcast where we'll be talking about folklore.