Switched on Pop - The Oeuvre of Taylor Swift

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

We uncover the common songwriting techniques and chart the musical evolution of Taylor Swift. Featuring songs from her early country period, transitional indie period and her latest pop album, 1989.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. So the other night, Taylor Swift

descends on Hollywood and shuts down the main boulevard to promote her new album on late night television. I know. I watched it. Yeah. And how did you feel? It was a profoundly moving experience. Yeah. And of course, I had to get VIP tickets in front row. I had to see what the spectacle was all about. And there were people a mile back trying to just catch a glimmer of Taylor Swift. And there I am near the front a bearded adult man amongst teenagers with T-Swift t-shirts and signs professing their love. Yeah, I was I was looking for you in the audience, but no luck. I had the sign T-Swift be mine. That's very creepy. I know. And what a spectacle it was because everybody was there including the LAPD, private security, you had your hype man and of course plenty of corporate

sponsors. And she only played four songs, but they were expertly choreographed with shining production for live television. And what I thought was really fun was that the crowd got to see a hint of what it was like to be a mega pop star. Which is? It's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of obsessing about your hair. At one point, the TV host even goes over to adjust her hair, which I think is in clear violation of some union rules before she runs off to see her true hair stylist who fixes everything up. Her hair looked great, by the way. Her hair did look good, new cut. And can you blame her? There were over a thousand cell phones just in these front rows, just a few feet away from her. Capturing her every move.

And, you know, those are going to end up on blogs. Yeah, it's going to end up on your Taylor Swift-themed Tumblr, I'm sure. Don't tell her audience. It got me thinking, how is it that at 24 years old, this proclaimed underdog living in a big old city, was able to shut down the most famous boulevard in the world? The answer to that, my friend, is brilliantly written pop music. Welcome to episode two of Switched on Pop. Today, we're going to explore the life, the career.

and the musical oeuvre of one Taylor Swift, probably America's biggest pop star at the moment. But unlike most people who when they talk about Taylor Swift discuss, A, the various men she's dated, or B, whether she's in a fight with any of her girlfriends, or C, the moment that Kanye West interrupted her during her, I don't know, MTV Music Award. The most important award of all music, of course. We are going to talk about the craft and, as Charlie said, the brilliance of Taylor Swift's approach to songwriting and how that's changed over the years. So today on our sophomore episode of Switchdown Pop, we're going to look at Taylor Swift's music from two approaches.

First, we're going to uncover the common elements in her songwriting, her lyrical tropes, her melodic sequencing, the song structures. Next, we're going to chart her musical evolution. Is it Taylor's hair going from curly to straight that mirrors her musical evolution from country? to pop, we'll find out today. So to kick us off, let's take a listen to some of her earlier music back when she was firmly in the world of country. We're going to take three songs from Taylor's early country period to see what it is that makes her such a great songwriter.

We're going to do Love Story and You Belong With Me from her second album, Fearless, and mean from her third album, Speak Now. So what is it that we want to be listening for? Taylor is all about theme and variation. She introduces something, and just when it becomes familiar to you, she changes it in a way that's so fresh and exciting that it grabs your ears and keeps your attention. Yeah, I absolutely love that because I feel like in so many ways that's when pop music is at its best, when you take what we know so well and then change it to surprise us. Yeah, exactly. At the same time, we're going to see how throughout these changes and throughout the larger changes in Taylor's style, there are core elements of her songwriting style.

that remain and we're gonna try and pick those out for you. One that I just want to mention right from the top because we're gonna see it again and again and again is something that I like to call the Swiftian suspension. I might call it the T-drop. And what's happening here, it's just a move from the fourth note of the scale that we're in. So say we're in the key of E major,

it's a melodic move from the fourth down to the third. And then sometimes she'll be, follow that up with another note like the root, or something that's so Taylor Swift is to follow that up with the sixth of the scale like this. That's the big drop. That's what I'm talking about with the T drop. That's the T drop.

So we're going to hear the T drop throughout all of her genre transcendence throughout her career. But let's take a listen to Love Story. The country feel of the song is established from the very beginning. We've got banjo. We've got pedal steel guitar. You got your electric guitar, your drums. And later on, I think we might even get a little bit of fiddle. I love that it's so strongly narrative.

We can really follow along with this classic story of Romeo and Juliet, superimposed onto an actual relationship. Charlie and I have both noticed that Taylor likes to drop out the bass and drums. Oh, yeah, around the end of the song, sort of the last chorus coming up, everything drops out. And then it's going to build back up right here. It's coming. Are you ready for it?

Oh my God. Okay. Okay. So what I love that she's doing here is that you're taking this love song, this story that we all know, that Romeo and Juliet, and defying the expectation of a source material that we all know can understand and relate to and then totally change it up at the end. The father figure says you can go pick out a white dress and you're going to get married to surprise us.

And I really like how she does that musically, not just lyrically. Nate, do you want to tell us a little bit about what she's doing to modulate the music up a whole step? So like we were saying earlier, what Taylor's great at is establishing a pattern and then twisting it and tweaking it and surprising you with some variation on what she's already established and what you think is coming versus what actually happens. This is a great example because after this buildup, we get another statement of the chorus, which goes like this. key of D major and we have this progression D major to A major to B minor to G major to A major. To A major and then at this moment you don't need to know anything about music to have the feeling that we want to go back to that D major chord here. This A major chord wants to go to this D major chord wants to go to this D major. major chord resolves all the tension and build up. Ah, of course.

Yes, classic. People have been doing that for hundreds and hundred and years. And is that what happens, Charlie? No, not at all. In fact, she totally blows our minds. No. What happens is we go from this A major chord to this E major chord. A whole step up from the D major tonality of the song up till now.

So basically we've just moved the key from. D. Yeah, we've pushed it a whole step up to E. And so you have that space. You're going up and you have that feeling of elevation. And so through that modulation, which is sometimes done very cheesy ways. I think she's done it really expertly here. The way that it lands, everything drops out and then boom, and you feel elevated. And the lyrical content actually maps to that modulation. It's a really crafty way of playing with our expectations. Okay, Charlie, can I tell you something that's going to blow your mind? Yeah, please. So in 1935, Prakofiev, the Russian composer, created a ballet version of Romeo and Juliet, which is still performed today. It's a very famous piece of his.

But what you might not have known is that it was recently discovered that Percofiev's original version of that ballet, like Taylor Swift's love story, took the Romeo and Juliet tale and gave it a happy ending. No, get out of here. where it turns out that Juliet hadn't taken poison, it was a sleeping potion, and she wakes up and they dance together in a pot-a-da-da and then...

Shakespeare is rolling over in his grave. So that was Prokofiev's original version, and guess who said, you know what, that's not going to cut it. You have to keep the original ending. Ooh, tell me. Joseph Stalin. Oh, geez. Wow. So even Stalin thinks that Taylor Swift is, it's a little much what she's doing right here.

She's playing with one of the most sacred source materials of Western literature, and one of the worst dictators of Western history just happens to defend it. Now I feel very confused about my previous analysis of Taylor Swift. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot to process. I think it's best that we move on before we get too dark here. Yeah, I think that's wise. And I would like to go to, I think, as you put it, probably one of the best written songs of all time.

Yes. Not to be hyperbolic. One of the best modern pop songs, perhaps. You belong with me. He drops. Swiftian suspension. So right there, what we heard is that suspension in her voice where she's playing this note that's not actually in the chord and it resolves back down. So I have to say my favorite part of the song is the ending.

And she's so good at taking where we think it's going to go and totally change it. First, she's going to drop all the instruments out. We just got the drums, a little big guitar and banjo here. She's going to build it up. Wow. That is, again, a perfect pop song. Let's do one more of Taylor's country period. Classic period, you might say.

Yeah. Like many of the great composers, we can already. see that Taylor's work falls into a early middle late period. The early is the immature, somewhat derivative, but still showing sparks of genius. The middle is the transitionary state. She's introducing new kinds of material, new genres. And then the late period is traditionally the experimental and avant-garde phase of a musician's career. The hint of what's to come. So we're not there. We're not there yet, but I'm very excited to hear Taylor Swift's late phase. So in Love Story, we saw Taylor's penchant for introducing harmonic variation, as with that modulation up a whole step from DDE at the end of the song.

In You Belong With Me, we saw Taylor's melodic variation, where every time the verse returns, there's a slight twist on the original melody. And in Mien, we're going to see that Taylor is also adept at creating rhythmic, metric, structural variation. Here we've got just acoustic instruments, your mandolin, banjo, guitar, drums, and bass. And hand claps. I forgot about the handclaps. But pay attention to the first transition into the chorus. Fast forwarding into the second verse, Taylor is going to add metric variation. adding measures that we haven't heard before playing with our expectations.

Ooh, there it is. Yeah, a little T-drop. Moving from Taylor's songcraft now, we want to look at her evolution as a pop star. From the first record simply called Taylor Swift to the one that is on the precipice of coming out as we record this. We are in eager anticipation, 1989. So every two years, Taylor Swift has released an album, and every two years it's been a very different Taylor Swift that's met the American public. Obviously, she's known as a country star moving over into pop.

And I think we'll get into a little bit more of the details of that. I'm curious, what is it that defines country for Taylor Swift? Well, we can break that down along a few lines. The first thing is the instrumentation. We've been pointing this out in songs like Mean and Love Story, and you belong to me. We've got what, banjo, mandolin, fiddle,

even some dobro and pedal steel slide guitar. Yeah, these are very, you do not hear banjo in Nelly, for instance. That was a strange example. But, and the minute you hear these instrumental textures, it puts you in the country mindset. Yeah.

The other thing is, lyrically, her early songs have a specificity and a narrative that country music really specialized. in. So these are stories. Yeah, of course, we have our blue jeans, our trucks, and our Tim McGraw. Yeah. So we have these, we have these lyrical signifiers like the jeans and the trucks and the country singers. And then we also have these stories, ballads that go from point A to point B and describe a journey. Right. So we're going to see an evolution of all these things. I'm particularly interested in when some of these themes transition into hard newer music.

But we'll start with instrumentation. Take a listen to Red. The same. off of her last album, Red, I think more than Fearless, moves into this interesting duality of both country and its evil twin bubble gum, pop, and dance music. Yeah. With Red, we start to introduce new songwriters. And this is where new songwriters and producers, and this is where we start to hear a big shift. So here we get Max Martin. And if you don't know Max Martin, Max Martin is basically popular music of the last decade.

We have Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys, Pink, Aver Levine, Katie Perry, Celine Dion, Kelly Clarkson. He has written pop songs for every major artist, and he's the collaborator here on Red. He's bringing in a whole new sound. Red, the single, is interesting because we have both the vocal twang, the fiddles, and the banjos, but also this sort of four-to-the-floor drumbeat orchestral strings, And then all of a sudden, we have this DJ scratch vocal in the chorus that read. And we are going into a new genre. She's blending right here.

And it really is, this is where I think she fully passes over from country into pop. And this is definitely one of the few songs that has any allusion to country on the album. Ah, interesting. But moving beyond red and actually going into her new phase of taking on the pop moniker, her. We want to listen to one of her best songs, State of Grace. So let's take a listen to Nate. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what's happening in a state of grace that demonstrates not just her great songwriting, but also how she's moved beyond into a new style and it continues to defy our expectations. So I think the first thing to notice is what's missing. Yeah, great

point. There's no banjo. Clearly no banjo, which is very disappointing to Nate as a banjo player. Yeah, it's very sad. There's no mandolin, which is disappointing to Charlie as a mandolin player. It's very sad. There's no fiddle. Tragic. There's no d'obro. There's no pedal steel. In fact, if anything, the palette we're using is 80s rock. Yeah, I swear they must have hired the edge to play the guitar on here because it sounds like straight you two. And this is Taylor Bono Swift right now.

Of T drops. Ah, the T drops, yes. Or Swiftian. suspensions. So I think this is my favorite parts of the song is where you have this bass line just playing these root notes. Same thing you've heard over and over again. And all of a sudden, it's going to just completely defy our expectations by dropping

down to something we've never heard yet. Charlie, listening to it, it's not dissimilar from what she does at the end of you belong to me, actually. That's right. Yeah. It's another bass vocal counterpoint, which is very cool. And now, the background vocals from earlier in the song, uh, uh, oh, oh, oh. are layered with the melody at the same time.

Underneath comes in a third section of the song, all stacked up on top of each other. She kind of ends here on the bridge. It's a very strange way to send us out. The best part of that song is absolutely the ending where we have three different parts of the song overlapping, material that we've heard sequentially moving into the song and then all overlapping at the very end.

This incredibly large moment of material. And what's cool here is that this is not just a technique used by pop songwriters. In fact, it goes way back. Attention Spotify. Has arrived at the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera. A fragrance intense with character

gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized and tonka-tostada. A combination that seduce from the first instant and doesn't a waya. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute hypnotica irresistible.

Discover it a day and let you'll involve for its essence. Well, if you're a fan of one Wolfgang Amadeus, Mozart in particular, this is so reminiscent of the end of one of his most famous symphonies. In fact, the last symphony wrote, Symphony 41, the Jupiter Symphony and C major.

We've heard this melodic material. So all those things that you hear one after the other, now you're going to hear all happening at the same time. The last moment of the last movement of the last piece of Mozart is something very similar to what Taylor Swift is doing here because he takes these moments, these melodic moments. Different parts from the verse and the chorus and the bridge and then she puts them together. Yeah, exactly. Rather than hearing them one at a time like we've heard them so far, we hear them all simultaneously. So we've got the melody line, and I never. And then at the same time, we've got the backup fogos. Do do, do, do, do, do.

And then we've got the third part. Neither of us know the lyrics, but it's, And I'm on my son the mom-mane. Like, a mom-mom-na-man-ne. And so altogether, that sounds like, And I'm on a-m-sell-the-mom-a-da-da-da. That's maybe offensive, but really a great example of what's happening here. Thank you. Thank you. I think we have to acknowledge the craft that it takes to do this

because this material, which we've heard previously, we just hear it on its own, it's independent, it's strong music, and we never expect that it's actually going to all line up perfectly. So it was done with great foresight. So we've heard state of grace. We got a bit of our T-drop in there. We moved on and heard some Mozart. So let's move past her development period into her mature and experimental period. We'll lead off with her first track off of her album 1823. I think that's Mozart's last album. No, he was long. He died in 1791, so. Nate would know that. 1989, when Taylor Swift was born, that's the name of her new album. And she leads the album

with the song, Welcome to New York. And she in real life has made a move from Nashville, the hub of country music, up to New York City, and she adopts a very modern urban sound. Let's take a listen to Welcome to New York. We've definitely moved from the country to the club. Her voice here is just fully, thickly produced. You have your delay and reverb, auto-tune, synthesizers in the background.

It really emphasizes the grandeur of New York City and it's big bright lights. There's another T-drop. We've moved into whole new genres, and she continues to use those melodic themes that we've heard early on in her country career. And Charlie, I have to say, I think that's why fans really respond to her,

because even while she is a perfectly manicured and cross-promotionalized cookie-cutter pop star in so many ways. That's right. She really does have a, a voice and a style that is her own. And you do feel like you're listening to Taylor Swift when you're listening to Taylor Swift. And it's not, you know, Lady Gaga or Christina Aguilera or whoever else. It's only her. No, it has its own sound. And I love that she continues, yeah, she continues to maintain this

message of straddling this pop stardom with being this really relatable underdog. And she stays here that she's just moving in, dropping her bags on her apartment floor, which of course, by the way, is a $20 million penthouse apartment in Tribeca, but she's able to sing it in a way that she's just any girl moving to New York City. Exactly, exactly. Her image that is at once very calculated and very accessible, is supported by the songwriting devices that reappear again and again that make you say, oh, that's Taylor, that's my friend Taylor,

and these lyrics that are so effortlessly conversational and vernacular, like you said, that make you feel like you're almost hanging out with someone. who is at once a pop star so elevated and someone so down to earth and uncorrupted. So we spent a lot of time talking about her shift of genres going from her developmental period in red, shifting into dance and indie rock. And we've now landed in a whole new territory firmly in pop. And we want to point out that it's not necessarily just the role of the songwriter, But there's also the role of the producer.

Earlier we had Max Martin, this is this great big pop song producer, helping out on Red, and he appears again on this album. Nate, who was it that was on Welcome to New York? That was produced by Dr. Ryan Tetter of One Republic Fame, known for their song, Topologize, which I assume is about topography. I'm totally sure. So the producer, they're not just coming in and sort of sit. in the background, what they're doing is really helping Taylor adapt her lyrics and her song structure to fit into new genres. They're going to help bring in the right sounds, those synthesizers.

And it's important to point out, even though it sounds like we're listening to totally different music, there's a lot that's overlapping. As you pointed out, she has this, what we call the Swiftian suspension or the T-drop, this melodic sound, which is very much her own, that she uses over and over again. We hear that. But there's also, sometimes we even hear similar lyrics and song structures. The chords can be made into songs which sound country, or you can use the same chords that sound fully pop dance music.

I really like in her new song, style, which is, of course, only being displayed at this moment in a Target ad. She says, you got that long hair, slicked back white t-shirt, and I got that good girl fig and a little tight skirt. And when we go crashing down, we come back in every time because we never go out of style. Wow. Sounds very similar to something we heard many years ago. In the pre-chorus of You Belonged to Me, Taylor sings, she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts. She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers. When you think happiness, I hope you think that little black dress, think of my

head on your chest and my old faded blue jeans. That's Tim McGraw. And so we're hearing some similar lyrical content in a whole new genre. There's certain sartorial. elements too that reappear throughout Taylor's discography. And really that's the role of the producer. And of course Taylor's helping out. She's a great songwriter. She's bringing in

people to help her move into this new territory. So with the move to New York City, she received a glowing and creative review in the New York Times. Nate, do you want to give us just a little bit of reading about what they said about her latest album?

Writing about her latest album, 19, The New York Times says that Taylor Swift stakes out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest micro-trends and without being accused of cultural appropriation. Miss Swift has many charms, but stylistic envelope pushing has not always been among them. And yet, those songs showed her to be more of a risk-taker than she'd ever been, and savvy enough to know her fans would follow by making pop with almost no contemporary references. So I'm going to jump in and say, I totally disagree with this criticism. Yes, preach, Chuck. I think that her timeliness comes from her full embrace of pop music tropes. What she does is she uses pop music, but then plays with our expectations.

That's what she's so good at. And she's able to do this across genres. And what she's doing here is she's following her listeners. Her listeners are cheating on her. They have their playlists on their phone and on their Spotify, on their iTunes, R&B, dance. It's all right next to country. And she's very happy to move into other genres to go where her listeners are already at. Taylor is an interpreter of meta trends in music. Through the last decade, Taylor Swift has picked up on emerging trends and helped break them into the mainstream.

She has evolved through country into Americana, Bubblegum Pop, and even R&B on her single, Shake It Off. Taylor Swift's first eponymous album rides a wave of country moving into the mainstream in 2006 when it was released. Then we had Carrie Underwood launching with before he cheats right after winning American Idol. Trace Adkins is sending honky-tong, but donka-dunk to the top of the charts. So she's riding these waves. Country is breaking into the mainstream and there comes Taylor Swift. And I love on her second album, she's still very much in the country world. This is where she starts to bring in some of her collaborators.

Her songs on Fearless are particularly strong, but we move into actually a slightly different direction with Speak Now. What's going on there? Yeah, Speak Now, I think most identifies with an Americana sound, which is starting to emerge. Mumford and Sons have just appeared in 2009. The Avid Brothers, also 2009. Dark was the Night. The compilation of top Americana musicians comes out, Arcade Fire, Bonnie Vair.

Taylor is definitely writing this spark. Americana acoustic wave. And then Red, Charlie, talk about this pivotal moment, 2012. 2012 was a really strange time in music. Talking about following musical trends. There was not a clear musical trend going on in 2012, if you ask me. This was the year of Carly Ray Jepson, Fawn, Ellie Golding, Nikki Minaj, Starship, Adele was out there, and of course, LFMAO with their now defunct, I would say, party rock anthem. The party seems to be over, because I have not heard that in a long time. 2012 was this weird year in music of this convergence of hip-hop and EDM and bubblegum.

And I think what's interesting with Red is as she's transitioning, there really is a move into some of this indie rock that we heard on State of Grace. You have EDM, dance music, and even a hint of Debstep alluded on her song, Trouble. And then 1989. Now we haven't heard this whole album because we haven't listened to the illegal leaked Russian pirated version or whatever. So we've only heard the little taste, but each of the songs that we've heard so far seems to be picking up on a current trend in pop music. So we've got first, Shake It Off. What's that referring to, Charlie? So with Shake It Off, we hear obviously a

throwback to Seoul. And this has been coming together for a while now. We've had Narls Barkley a couple of years back, and then Nile Rogers with Daft Punk and Farrell Williams. And We even have this new song with Megan Trainor out on the charts. Soul is very much back, and she is making a clear reference to this song with horns. She's very much in that space on her hit single. And I'd like to argue that Out of the Woods, produced by Jack Antonoff of Fun and Bleachers, is picking up on a trend, which is also looking back, if you look at a band like Heim, who is referencing Fleetwood Mac and other 70s and 80s bands like that,

out of the woods yet is very much in that style. So where the New York Times argues that she does not appropriate genres, she does not find source and that she is just bubblegum pop. Yes. We disagree. We think that she really expertly appropriates genres at a time when her listeners are ready to make a move. And what's interesting is she's not just copying. It's actually a demonstration of her innate talent as a songwriter,

an interpreter of music. She continues to maintain her own style. She has her melodic T-drop, and she keeps playing with the song structures in ways that continue to surprise us. And what's great here is that being an interpreter of songs, crossing over genres, this is not a new thing in popular music. This has been going on for many years. 60 years ago, we had Elvis and the Beatles taking blues music and other forms of black popular music and translating it for a young, new, and mostly white audience, and the frenzied crowds that greeted Elvis and the Beatles

wherever they went do not sound dissimilar from the scene that you witnessed the other night in Hollywood. Oh, wow, was it a scene? This kind of madness, this, this, this, uh, beetle mania. There was, there was a word for it. We should have, we should have Taylor mania right now. It is, it feels like people are manic. It is insane.

to be in one of those crowds. The moment she steps on stage, every arm shoots up with a cell phone, just saying, hey, I'm here. I'm a part of this moment. Did anyone have to be carried away by security because they were just crying? So they had a breakdown? I had to be carried away because I couldn't stand afterwards that I was in such joy. But you know that there is a cure for that pop mania. And it's actually to shake it off.

Ah. So, I know, that was real bad. powerful segue. Thank you so much for tuning in to the sophomore episode of Switched on Pop. I'm Nate Sloan. And I'm Charlie Harding. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.

We'll see you on the B side. See you on the B sides. Boom.