Switched on Pop - Taylor Swift’s Beethovian Blank Space

Episode Date: March 26, 2015

Taylor Swift’s Blank Space is about emptiness of the heart. This motif of Blank Space is contained through the entire piece: from the drums, to the melody, to the lyrics. We pull away the sonic structures to show how Taylor recreates that empty feeling and explores the predictable devolution of fiery romance. FEATURING Taylor Swift – Blank Space NY Magazine – Why You Keep Mishearing That Taylor Swift Lyric This episode first broadcast on the Very Loose Women podcast on Resonance 104.4FM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. This episode was first broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM in London on the Very Loose Women Show, which you can find at Resonancefm.com or on the iTunes store. Hope you enjoy. Welcome to a very special Switch done pop singles where we listen to one song and uncover the hidden genius in pop songwriting. I'm your host Charlie Harding. And I'm Nate Sloan. And today we're going to be taking a look at Taylor Swift's blank space. Still one of the biggest chart smashes right now.

It feels like every time I turn on the radio, it's playing. And I feel, you know, Charlie, in our last episode, episode two, all about Taylor Swift, this song wasn't out yet, so we didn't get a chance to talk about it. So this is unfinished business for us, I think. Absolutely. And whereas others might focus on Taylor's celebrity, today we're going to focus on her music. what she does so well here is marrying the form and content exquisitely that every musical chef bolsters her lyrical narrative.

Totally. Yeah, Charlie, this song to me is all about controlled chaos. It's about the dizzying psychological state of being in love and knowing it's going to flame out but being unable to turn away. This song is a delicate detonation that takes. takes a whole minute and a half to properly explode. That's a long, that's a century in pop music. Taylor is a great songwriter where other writers,

such as Megan Trainor, might give you the chorus right away. Yeah. Because you know I'm all about that bass, about that bass, no trouble. Taylor has us wait for it. One thing that's brilliant off the bat from this song is the title, Blank Space, is the kind of the guiding principle

the whole and we start with this very with an open canvas right right like what are you hearing at the beginning of this song charlie to start off with we're given really little to respond to we have these bell like keyboards this sort of low xylophone this other high ethereal cloud like beautiful thing on top and then basically a very simple snare and kick drum but there's not a lot of material here for us to respond to there's no bass even the vocals are are uh Very sparse and simple. It feels like there's an emptiness in the middle of this, the musical texture. Right.

Between the drums and these high sort of synthesized marimba sounds. That's foreshadowing the song to come. Right. So she begins with this seed of blank space, and it's this musical seed which is going to sprout throughout the entire song in a very Beethoven sort of way. Yeah. I totally agree, Charlie, because just like in the fifth symphony, Beethoven takes that, single melodic motive that's just two notes. That in turn becomes sped up and inverted and transposed.

And that single phrase, that generates all the melodic and harmonic material of that movement more or less. Taylor does something similar. And it might be funny, but it's true. There is intentional songwriting going on here. My favorite thing is in the first verse. And I want to pay attention to these drums.

Yeah. We might, it's the simplest beat, right? Nothing much going on these drums. But if you turn it up really loud, you can hear something special. Yeah. What is that? It sounds to me, like I don't know how to describe it, like kind of crunchy, kind of distorted, kind of like, almost they're being played through a telephone. phone speaker or something.

That glitchiness, that thing you're hearing, that thing which sounds so inauthentic, it's called a noise gate. Okay. All right. This is going to get just a little bit technical, but it's worth it. I promise you. Yeah. Lay it on me.

Okay. So a noise gate is this effect that producers use that says, hey, if something's too quiet, don't let it through. You shall not pass. Right. So that's what a noise gate is. When something is quiet, they will say, you shall not pass. You can only come.

through if you're loud. And the thing with the drums is there's points where there's really loudness. And then as the sound of the drum is reverberating through the room, it's quiet and you just hear the sort of the echo of that drum. Well, what we're doing here with this gate is they are cutting off the drum as soon as it makes that hit. So instead of hearing like a you're hearing a, okay. Oh, because the, because the decay of the drum is too quiet to make it through the gate. Exactly. It shall not pass. It doesn't make it through the gate. Because these drums Maybe I'm thinking now are like kind of a metaphor for the relationship that Taylor Swift is depicting here. They're both really big and really brief and get cut off.

That is exactly what's going on here. This might seem like a tiny little nuance, but it's just a great example of the detail that goes into great pop songcraft. Yeah. At this point, we should probably mention that we're ascribing all the credit to Taylor Swift, but it's dealing equal parts to Taylor Swift and her production team, who in this case, like with a lot of her recent hits, is the Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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to drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE.

When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds So let's keep moving with this song, right? We've heard that, we've heard the introduction, we've heard the verse,

let's get into the chorus. Now, this is the first time that we get any bass in the song And it starts to give us a clue of what's going on But what's so interesting about this base is that it's pretty boring. Yeah, it's really, it's like kind of the opposite of most, bass lines which are bouncy and rhythmic. This is just a big fat

slug just kind of sitting there. Right. Again, intentional. It's not supposed to be dancing all over the plays. Instead, that's what's happening with her words. And the other thing that's happening here is the guitar in the background. There's this subtle guitar, which I think is the only thing

in this entire song which tethers her to her musical past. Right. To the country star. the kind of the ingenue that she started as. And we, of course, can't get through the chorus without acknowledging the Starbucks lovers. Now, you know about this one, Nate, right? Oh, yeah. This is the great misunderstood lyric of our generation.

And we are way late in discussing the Starbucks lovers. If you want to know more, what you have to do is go to New York magazines, why you keep mishearing that Taylor Swift lyric by Melissa Dahl. We'll link to it on our website if you want to know more of why you keep hearing Starbucks lovers, what she's actually saying long list of ex-lovers. Yeah, we're more interested in what happens right after that line when we finally, a minute and a half in like we were saying, reach the end of this first chorus. And she says, but I got a blank space baby and I'll write your name.

And Charlie, what happens right after she says? But I got a blank space baby musically. Nothing. That's right. Silence. It's just such a brilliant gambit that we've had this slow build, gradually adding textures, this phlegmatic bass and then building with guitar and doubled vocals and harmonies. And then just as it's cresting, everything drops away to this momentary blank space.

A long pause. All right. I've got one more very exciting piece. I want you to listen for. Ooh, okay. So we're going to move here now to the chorus, the second time that it comes around. I want you to listen closely here, all right?

Okay. All right, so let's play the clip. Can you give me a hint? So we had talked about the baseline. Yeah. And the baseline here is doing something different. So throughout this entire song, the cores are doing the same thing, right?

It's the same core progression all the way through, this continuum. And throughout that, that very basic base, which just lands on the downbeat, is staying really low in the register. Here we get something different. She actually brings the baseline up. My question to you is, why do you think she's doing that?

She only does it right here, just right here. Yeah, well, it must mirror something that's happening lyrically at that line. Yes, which is the tables turning. Yes, I can make all the tables. turn. And here she is in some ways bragging about her songwriting prowess. She is saying, I can make all the tables turn.

And I'm going to make this one subtle change just to show you that I'm absolutely in control. Whoa. Instead of the bass descending, the base jumps up a big interval of six. That's massive. Right. Totally unexpected. Yeah.

And it even has this long gliding effect. Yeah. So that you're supposed to hear. Portamento is what we call that in in the in the business what is your business exactly My business is writing arcane papers about music that no one will ever read and there's one thing an enduring mystery of the song that I'd like to To leave on which is what Charlie is that sound right before she says And I'll write your name So she says I got a blank space baby

be. And then there's this sound that's like, check, check. Yeah. So what is that? It's like, because it's not, it's, it sounds like it's supposed to signify something, but I can't tell what. Wow, it could be the close of a door. I, that it could. I always heard it as the, the shutter of a camera, maybe capturing this, this fleeting moment between, uh, between lovers. Or could it be as dark as the click of a gun? Whoa. Oh, man. A friend of mine thought it was the stopping a cassette tape,

which is, which might be, seems a little inaccurist to me. Well, it isn't, the album is 1989. The CDs were not that big then. That's true. That's true. Anyway, something to, uh, to mull over. Through the ages, we'll be, we'll be discussing that one. I found in our research of blank space that.

the song has been stuck in my head for the last three days and I cannot get it out. And so for all of our listeners, if you like what you heard, we have a full episode on Taylor and the genius of her songwriting on our website at www.w.switchedonpop.com. You can also find Switched on Pop on the iTunes podcast app on Stitcher, Radio, and on SoundCloud. I'm your host, Nate Sloan. And I am your other host, Charlie. Harding. Thanks for listening. All right. Beautiful.

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