#but 1989 came out before i had streaming or anything

[fiercestpurpose]

i am SO defensive of the non-deluxe versions of the albums, like ending with "hoax" or "mastermind" or "evermore" because i think those albums deserve to stand as their own perfect beautiful works of art, EXCEPT for 1989 because that album is 16 songs long and ends with "new romantics"

#m.txt #like i understand 'clean' as an ending point #but i had the deluxe cd #and unlike earlier cds (like red) the deluxe versions were on the same disc so they naturally played next #but 1989 came out before i had streaming or anything #so i was listening to the disc. whereas folklore evermore and midnights are all very firmly streaming era #so even though i have the deluxe discs it matters less #taylor swift

[likeadaydreamorafever]

Mischa Sunday Telegraph Interview

Why Mischa Barton said yes to surprise role on Neighbours

She was the star of the hottest teen drama of the noughties, but The O.C’s Mischa Barton shocked everyone when she signed on to the revival of Aussie soap Neighbours. Now she exclusively reveals to Stellar why she gave up work in the US for a show she’d never seen in suburban Melbourne.

After starring in the hottest teen drama of the noughties and being idolised for her every fashionable move, Mischa Barton surprised everyone when she signed up for some suburban drama on Australia’s most famous cul-de-sac in a revival of Neighbours. But then the British-born, US-based actor – who started her career on the stage and in soap operas – has never relished the role Hollywood chose for her. In an exclusive interview with Stellar, the 37-year-old recalls being cast in The O.C. because she “wasn’t anything like the other young blonde girls going in and trying out” and reveals how she’s taken charge of her own narrative.

Craning her neck forward, Mischa Barton lets out a squeal of excitement as she hears the first bars of Neighbours actor Stefan Dennis’ 1989 single ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good’ emanate from a mobile phone. “I’m adding that to my playlist!” she exclaims with a throaty laugh, before plotting how she will tease Dennis on the Neighbours set the next day, her first suggestion being that she might just broadcast the tune loudly in her dressing room.

While Barton was a fan of Kylie Minogue before joining the Neighbours cast, she was far less familiar with the era-typifying swerve into pop music made by Dennis (who has been playing the show’s “villain” Paul Robinson since 1985), let alone its reputation for turning out future Australian music superstars. As such, she can confidently say it’s “very, very unlikely” that her 10-week stint on Ramsay Street was motivated by a secret desire to follow in the footsteps of Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Delta Goodrem or even Dennis.

So if not music, then what did prompt the former star of the early 2000s teen drama The O.C. to say yes to a stint in suburban Melbourne working on a show that she has never seen, and that has no cultural footprint in the US, where she lives?

Certainly for Network 10, adding Barton to the cast was a shrewd move to create buzz when the series returns later this month, resurrected just over a year after its 37-year run came to an end and also airing for the first time in the US and Canada via Amazon’s streaming service Freevee (as well as streaming in Australia and New Zealand on Amazon Prime). For Barton, who wasn’t yet born when Neighbours debuted in 1985, it was a serendipitous chance to try something new, as well as reconnect with some old friends in Australia.

When Stellar spoke to Barton in June, a week before she returned to the US, she explained the role had “come at a really good time, because while I was loving living in New York, there’s a writers’ strike on. And it’s [Northern Hemisphere] summertime. So there’s really not that much work going around for a lot of my actor friends.”

Of course, the Hollywood actors’ strike – which was called in mid-July – has also compounded the issue for Barton’s fellow actors. However, practicality and picket lines aside, the real lure for Barton was the role of Reece Sinclair, a wealthy American who arrives in Erinsborough under the guise of doing business – but in reality, has a much more personal agenda to fulfil. “And then she falls for a guy,” Barton says with a smile. “It actually just felt like a very good fit for me in terms of a role I could really play. And I don’t always feel that way with television.”

Her sentiment is understandable given the 37-year-old’s most high-profile project since leaving The O.C. in 2006 was her surprising gear-shift into reality TV on The Hills: New Beginnings. A sequel to the popular MTV series that followed the daily lives of TV personalities Brody Jenner, Audrina Patridge, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, it was sold to her as an opportunity to let people see “the real Mischa Barton”. Ultimately, she felt let down by the process.

“Would I do it again? Probably not something like The Hills,” Barton tells Stellar. “I think they’re even continuing to try to do it, but it just wasn’t really all the things that were promised around it, like clearing up any misconceptions or getting people to know you. There are just people putting

on too many fronts and they’re not being themselves. So if people aren’t being themselves, it’s impossible because I’m used to having a script. That middle ground is just too trying for me. It’s partially scripted but it’s not, but they can’t really say that. So it wasn’t my favourite experience.

“But I’ve never been attracted to that kind of fame, either,” she adds. “It’s not something that I chase. I actually veer away from it.”

Fame has long been an uncomfortable by-product of Barton’s chosen career. Asked whether she’s grateful to have become a celebrity in an era when smartphones couldn’t capture her every move, Barton sighs wearily. “You can always play the grass is greener thing, and I just don’t feel that way,” she says. “I mean, in a sense, it would have been much easier for me if there had been social media to combat all the ludicrous stories in the press. Now, kids can really show their own narrative. You can use your own social media to be whoever you want to be.”

She qualifies her reply after a brief pause: “At the same time, I don’t really love social media. So I’m fine with having come up in a time when it wasn’t around and things were, in one sense, a lot simpler.”

That’s why, rather than opting for a luxury hotel suite, Barton relished staying in a relatively humble cottage nestled behind Melbourne’s bustling Chapel Street for the duration of her time filming Neighbours. There, she could cook meals for friends, do her own laundry and, when her schedule allowed, walk to the Prahran Market to pick up fresh fruit and veg. She also found time to indulge in a bit of shopping, and admits that she would be going home with far heavier suitcases than when she arrived. “I really liked a vintage store I found there,” she says of Chapel Street, which is known for its eclectic mix of high-end boutiques and second-hand clothing markets. “I did a lot of damage in there.”

Filming in Australia meant such excursions could be enjoyed without being recognised or photographed, and added a layer of protection for Barton, who has learnt the tricks to staying incognito – the easiest being to steer clear of bars and clubs where people inevitably want selfies.

Avoiding unwanted attention wasn’t always so easy. When The O.C. first aired in 2003, it catapulted Barton and the rest of her young co-stars into a searing spotlight of adulation and attention. For someone who had been acting steadily since she was eight – making her screen debut in the US soap opera All My Children in 1994, and going on to appear in two of the biggest films of 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller The Sixth Sense and Richard Curtis’ hit romance Notting Hill – the sudden and frenzied interest in both The O.C. and her personal life was a shock to the system.

“I was 17 or 18 and it was a very specific kind of fame,” Barton recalls. “Most actors, they can work their whole lives and have a very normal level of notoriety or fame. But, for some reason, The O.C. was just one of those things. It was a time and a place, and it just took off in a very different direction. It was kind of an uncontrollable beast. But I’ve been in this industry for a long time and managed, for a large portion of it, to get away with just living a very normal life.”

Both Barton and her character, rich girl Marissa Cooper, became fashion icons of the time, with the actor regularly centre stage on red carpets and front row at fashion weeks, while young girls everywhere mimicked her onscreen style of low-slung jeans and spaghetti-strap tops.

Recalling her time in the fashion spotlight and the pressures to look a certain way in Hollywood, she says she’s “learnt how to get away from it. I don’t really live in LA anymore, so I don’t put myself under that constant scrutiny and pressure. I’ll only dip into [the Hollywood scene] when I feel like it’s healthy and something I want to do.”

Even so, Barton recalls how a “bizarre amount” of people found it hard to separate the British-born and New York-raised Barton from the quintessential Californian teenager she portrayed. “People were obsessed with Marissa Cooper,” she says. “I’d get sent a lot of [scripts] that are rehashes of her. And I was always like, ‘Do you not realise that’s actually not something I like to play?’ I didn’t really enjoy having to play that character. I had to find my own version of Marissa and I think the real reason I was cast is because I wasn’t really anything like the other young blonde girls going in and trying out for it.”

Barton left the show in its third season in 2006, when Marissa died in a shocking car crash. The series’ creator Josh Schwartz recently told Vanity Fair that he regretted killing off her character, saying he wished he’d found a way to give Barton “the break she needed and wanted that still would’ve allowed for that character to return”.

Fans say The O.C. never recovered from Barton’s departure, but the death scene – in which Marissa’s body is carried from the flames by her longtime love Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) – is etched into TV history.

“I’ve only just rewatched that scene recently,” Barton admits. “I never watched it after I did it because there was really no reason to, but I just did the podcast [Welcome To The OC, Bitches!, hosted by her former co-stars Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke, who played her best friend Summer Roberts and mother Julie Cooper] and we rewatched it together, and it was weirdly emotional. I was like, ‘Oh, I forgot the car is on fire.’ And I forgot there’s no music playing for once in the show. It was done in a really interesting way.”

Despite the enduring affection the public still has for the series, Barton isn’t sure that a reboot of The O.C. would work for audiences today. “It’s not like it hasn’t come up before, but obviously, I’m dead,” she says with a smile. “Honestly, it’s more likely to work as an offshoot of it or something based around those characters that’s not exactly the same, rather than trying to simply resurrect them. You’d have to think outside the box if you want to resurrect The O.C. culture or characters.”

And while The O.C. featured former Neighbours co-star Alan Dale, who played his screen dad and is one of his good mates, Dennis had never seen the US series. He was only aware that Barton – or, as he knew her, “the vomiting girl from The Sixth Sense” – was coming to Ramsay Street.

“[I thought], ‘Oh, here we go, they’ve cast a Hollywood hero to show us how it’s done,’” Dennis admits to Stellar. “There was a cautious shyness initially as she was alone on the other side of the world, thrown into a building full of people she didn’t know and working day-by-day in a show she didn’t know or understand the way it worked. This cautious shyness was misread by me. I now like to think we have cemented a long-term friendship.”

Another castmate, Annie Jones (who rejoined the show in 2020, reprising her 1980s character Jane Harris), was equally impressed by Barton, enthusing that she brought a “beautiful, serene calmness to the set. It’s great for the show to have someone of Mischa’s calibre on it. She was gorgeous. Everyone loved her.”

And while Barton may be back in the US as Neighbours returns to air, she tells Stellar she remains excited that – unlike her very final departure from The O.C. – the door has been left open for a return. And the plot wheels are already turning in her head, as Barton teases, “Reece might pop up on FaceTime from New York.”

#mischa barton #the oc #marissa cooper

[kurumeki]

This will be long and personal, so you can feel free to scroll past it.

Good things of 2023:

Grandmother’s 80th birthday; we had a celebration in a restaurant with family and her friends. Almost 50 people!

Morrie’s live stream Flesh Odyssey at his birthday (4th March)

My best friend @vinidra visited in March and I remember getting wasted and listening to Black Sabbath and Def Leppard till 3am. And watching that one 1989 Aerosmith live! Wasn’t there Dir en grey stream on GALACAA? I think we got access from a friend and watched that too.

On April 1st Morrie’s fan club Reveries opened on BitFan application – with foreign fans finally being able to join. It is a pricey affair, but the consistency and amount of content he brings every single day is so worth it. I love being a Reverie and having near direct contact with Morrie and the fans. So grateful for this community.

Right after Easter, on April 12th, we got BUCK-TICK’s new album. No one would predict it would be the last release before Sakurai passing away… It’s a solid record and ワルキューレの騎行 will forever be one of my favourite songs.

April was such a good month for me – on 18th I got the news I got promoted to a team leader. So, following a big raise for 2022 performance, I got another big raise with role change. Feeling like I’m finally getting the money I deserve for my hard work. The role is difficult and very challenging, but also satisfying and I enjoy what I do. It helped me a lot with improving my communication skills, standing up for myself and feeling confident with my decisions.

End of April was my friend Karin visiting, we went to Metallica symphonic concert in philharmonic and had amazing time overall during the long May weekend.

In May I came out to my co-workers and I was met with so much support I’m still overwhelmed. Being able to feel like I can be 100% myself at work is amazing. You don’t realise you need it until you get this freedom.

May 23rd was Boris live in Warsaw. I reconnected with an old friend and had amazing time with him during the gig. The show itself was everything I ever wanted from Boris – perfectly heavy and fast. Being front row surely contributed to that. My mission was to wait for the band after the show and talk to Atsuo and I succeeded! Got a picture with the band ant all. All possible thanks to a mutual friend of the band and mine.

May 31st – Def Leppard and Motley Crue in Krakow! Again hanging out with @vinidra and his friend. The show… let’s say Motley Crue was meh, though visual and female dancers were incredible. But Def Leppard was there to save the night, it was incredible and I had so so so much fun! Can’t wait to see them again live.

In June I visited Karin in Krynica Morska. It’s a very thin piece of land with sea at one side and huge lake on the other. I loved the beach walks there and hearing the waves at night, when falling asleep.

Also in June my close friend had a major surgery. So brave of her to decide to undergo it and I’m even more happy that she’s made steady recovery, now having no regrets.

June 20th was the day Josh Kiszka of Greta Van Fleet came out! I’m always happy learning that musicians I love are just as queer as me.

And by end of June DEAD END has re-issued all four albums from 80s: DEAD LINE, Ghost Of Romance, shambara and ZERO. Got them all, in true collector spirit.

July 21st Greta Van Fleet released a new album. I wasn’t stoked about it at first but of course – the more I listened to it, the more I fell in love with it. It’s probably my favourite album of the year.

I didn’t do anything special for my birthday on August 12th, but the following week I was flying to Cologne for a week to stay with my best friend. We did a lot of furniture and home decor shopping for the new house she moved into. We went to cinema to see Metallica’s live stream, and otherwise just had good time being lazy. Oh! And I helped her pick out and buy her first guitar. Love the visit in huge 4-story music shop in Cologne.

In September I’ve volunteered to take dogs from a shelter for walks for a day. I want to do it again.

On September 27th Morrie released another solo album Solitudes I. I feel like I didn’t listen to it enough this year, but this is miles better than Ballad D to me.

October 15th was election day in Poland and this was incredible – how many people showed up. For the first time I had to stand in the queue to vote. And we won. Fascist right wing government was overthrown. I have some home things will finally get better in my country.

Fast forward to November 5th – after a lot of trouble I made it to Hamburg and met with a friend I’ve know for years, but never had a chance to see in person. Had amazing time! It’s incredible to have such dedicated Morrie fan so close and be able to talk about music for couple of hours without feeling tired.

November 6th – I also finally met my close friend, we’ve never seen each other before. She’s such a lovely human being. She introduced me to Greta Van Fleet, so it felt only right to gift her a ticket to their show. The live was amazing, the most beautiful show I’ve ever been to. I will never get over how talented those young guys are.

From Nov 7th to 11th I was staying with my friend in Bielefeld. Met her cutest Siamese cat Bibi!

And last thing worth mentioning – I got the courage to go to company winter party and I actually had fun. I don’t remember when was the last time I simply wanted to have fun and when was the last time I danced. My whole body hurt after that night, but I really loved it. Oh, and I stole the neon flamingo lamp. Worth it.

#personal #i have a good life i think

[mywifeleftme]

212: Blaze Foley // Live at the Austin Outhouse

Live at the Austin Outhouse Blaze Foley 1999, Lost Art (Bandcamp)

I wept over Blaze Foley’s grave. I didn’t expect to. I was visiting Austin at the beginning of a roadtrip, and my friend asked if there were anything around the city I wanted to see before we set off west toward Big Bend and the Rio Grande. It occurred to me that maybe Townes Van Zandt might be buried somewhere in the area, and I thought it’d be nice to go say my respects. It turned out that Townes rests in Tennessee, but the subject of doomed country singers and their graves brought to mind a story I’d heard about Townes and his friend Blaze, how after Blaze was murdered in 1989 Townes had had him temporarily exhumed in order to get at the front pocket of the suit he’d been buried, where there was a pawn shop ticket for a guitar the dead man had hocked shortly before his passing. I figured I wouldn’t mind seeing the place, so we drove down to the little green cemetery in Manchaca where his small stone faces a pasture of grazing longhorn cattle looking like myths or advertisements, and then I sat there and cried. I cried over the magpie offerings on the stone, earrings and poker chits and an empty beer can (literal trash elsewhere, but respectful in this context and careful placement); I cried at the big cows; I cried over the inscription of Blaze’s face and a guitar with the titles of his best-loved songs; I cried because I was hungover, and because I had done a bunch of fucked up things in the preceding years, and I was so full of shame, overwhelmed by the weight of amends; and I cried because this man had been fucked up and he was dead and people still loved him. I guess at the time I needed a sentimental image of a damaged man who does right more than I’d known. And so, the tears came.

My Blaze fandom has always centered on Live at the Austin Outhouse, the low-slung 1988 two-night stand recorded barely a month before his death that first saw wide release (in excerpted form) on CD in 1999. (The full four-hour-long tapes just hit streaming platforms this year.) Foley’s discography is brief, and all of it worth the listen, but he was never in better voice, or more warmly recorded, than he was at the Outhouse. If you’ve heard Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, the experience is similar: amid clanking bottles and bar chatter, the most desolate, acoustic songs of yearning sit side by side with wry character sketches and a helping of the dumbest, most adorable stage patter yet recorded. The predominantly solo album is a showcase for Blaze’s remarkable abilities as a country blues picker, and that unmistakable worn, lorn baritone of his.

Though Foley lacked Van Zandt’s overtly poetic predilections (e.g. “Lungs”; “Silver Ships of Andilar”), at his best he was Townes’ equal as a romantic and his better as a wit. For my taste, there isn’t a more genuinely moving love song than “Oooh Love,” a song that sounds like an old junkyard dog surprised to find himself being stroked after years in the rain. There’s brilliance in the slow reveal of its opening verse, his lover complimenting this big hairy man on his “pretty blue eyes” rather than the reverse:

Blue eyes She said pretty blue eyes Said I had pretty blue eyes See me again She wants to See me again She's such a pleasant surprise

It puts the masculine speaker immediately in an unfamiliar, vulnerable position, the one feeling the wonder of being unexpectedly chosen. On the other side, there’s “Officer Norris.” Foley does the best job anybody’s done of lambasting the cops since Kristofferson’s “Best of All Possible Worlds,” dressing down the titular officer for everything from cribbing free coffee cakes to chasing after married women to being abandoned by his mother because he was an unlikable baby. Blaze gives us “If I Could Only Fly” too, a quintessential (and rendingly) sad country song, and “Christian Lady Talking on the Bus,” a wholly unsentimental look at faith and self-delusion. And above all, there’s “Clay Pigeons,” a song of disappointment and humour and endurance and crooked optimism that strikes something true in me like almost no other song has. As someone who’s started over quite a few times at this point, it’s become an anthem, and more than anything else, it’s why I convinced my pal to take me out there south of Austin to pay my respects in person. Music has never fixed anybody, but it can bring who you are into focus. Lord knows I needed that.

A note on the versions of this recording

Blaze played nearly 30 songs over the course of his two nights at the Outhouse. I’ve been going through the full tapes today (which contain at least as much audio of the Duct Tape Messiah goofing with his friends in the crowd as it does music). While of the original cassette that was passed around Blaze’s friends and fans in the late ‘80s contained 21 tracks, it’s now clear how much my sense of Austin Outhouse as an “album” comes from the work Lost Art Records did when they put out their condensed 12-song CD edition. Lost Art left in a smattering of the choicer bits of Blaze’s rambles and winnowed the tracklist down, turning what could’ve been a double-live record (or a for-true-maniacs boxed set) into a digestible introduction to the man’s work. In order to keep things on one disc, the 2020 vinyl issue (also from Lost Art) leaves out what stage patter had remained, which makes it a smoother repeat listen for those already well-familiar with Blaze’s bits. Still, the CD/streaming version remains definitive for me because it was how I “met” the man.

All that said, the chance to hear versions of other Foley classics recorded in the same space as the familiar cuts is a thrill. If you’re already a fan, I strongly encourage you to try out the live versions of the two studio cuts from the original, and takes on “Springtime in Uganda,” “Long Time,” “Oval Room,” “Someday” and many more. Be forewarned though; it is beyond eerie hearing Blaze talk with obvious affection about (and even do an impression of) his friend Concho January, the elderly pensioner whose son Carey would shoot Foley dead just a few weeks later. By Concho’s own courtroom testimony, the burly country singer died trying to prevent Carey from yet again robbing the old man of a welfare cheque. It was a squalid, hero’s death, and he deserved better.

212/365

#blaze foley #outlaw country #country folk #finger picking #the duct tape messiah #townes van zandt #tales from the tour bus #'80s music #'70s music #vinyl record #music review #texas country #texas music #austin

[natromanxoff]

The Sun - November 28, 1991

Credits to Louise Belle and Queencuttings.com

ELTON’S SAD FAREWELL

ELTON’S SAD FAREWELL

[Photo caption: Tears… grief-stricken Elton is consoled by Queen’s guitarist Brian May / Picture: ARTHUR EDWARDS]

Thanks for being my friend.

I will love you always

ELTON JOHN said farewell to Freddie Mercury yesterday with 100 pink roses bearing the message: "Thanks for being my friend, I will love you always."

The tribute came as rock's most outrageous performer was cremated at a service for just 35 close friends and family.

Elton was first to leave West London funeral, tears streaming down his face. Asked if he would say anything he bit his lip and said softly: “No, I’m sorry.”

Other mourners included Freddie’s long-time love Mary Austin and his mother Jer father Bomi and sister Kashmira.

[Photo caption: Loved… Freddie]

I can’t tell my Ricky his uncle Freddie is dead

Singer doted on Mary’s little lad

By DAN COLLINS

[Photo caption: Farewell… from Mary and Dave]

FREDDIE Mercury’s heartbroken ex-lover Mary Austin cannot bring herself to tell her young son Ricky the star he idolised is dead.

Toddler Ricky loved to visit “Uncle Freddie” and would run from room to room of the Queen singer’s mansion to find him.

Mary, 38, who is expecting another baby, said: “He doesn’t know what has happened. I haven’t broken the news because he’s only 20 months old.

“But I’m sure the next time Ricky goes to the house he will be looking for him, and that is going to be a very hard thing.”

Freddie — who became Ricky’s godfather when he was born in 1989 — doted on the youngster and often played with him at his £4million home in Kensington, West London.

Mary went on: “They always got on very well together. But I realise that my next port of call will be to introduce Ricky to an empty house.

“I don’t know when that will be. It will be whenever the moment feels right.

“I worry about the effect Freddie’s death will have on Ricky, but I’d like for him to look back on this with a smile and not with sadness.”

Mary had a seven year live-in relationship with Freddie before they broke up in 1980.

Lovely

She remained the only woman he ever loved and was at Freddie’s bedside until 10 minutes before he died from AIDS on Sunday.

Yesterday she spent an hour in the empty house and left in tears after reliving her memories.

She went there with Sixties star Dave Clark after attending Freddie’s cremation service.

Dave said: “It was a very lovely service and a very emotional one. I think Freddie would have appreciated it.”

In contrast to the flamboyance which was Freddie’s stage trademark, his farewell was a low-key affair.

Only his family and close friends attended. 

The 20-minute funeral was conducted by two Indian Parsee priests in the Zoroastrian faith of the star’s parents Bomi and Jer Bulsara.

It was performed in the ancient tongue of Avasta which dates back to 1,500 years before Christ.

Traditionally dead Parsees are left to be picked clean by vultures, but in Britain they are buried or cremated.

Way-out

The 14 family members gathered earlier at a chapel of rest in Kensington for a 60-minute service of their own.

His illness and death united them in grief — following reports that his parents disapproved of his way-out life style.

Freddie’s last journey was by gleaming black Rolls-Royce.

Five more hearses followed — each packed with bouquets of flowers from friends and fans.

A fleet of seven Mercedes limousines carrying mourners swooped in minutes later — a line broken only by Elton John’s green H-reg Bentley.

Four pallbearers gently carried Freddie inside the chapel watched by his grief-stricken parents.

Mourners wept as the chapel echoed to the music of soul singer Aretha Franklin and opera star Montserrat Caballe, with whom Freddie recorded the hit single Barcelona.

As the stars stood with their heads bowed, the family approached the casket to pay their last respects.

Most poignant of all the tributes and messages was a wreath of yellow roses from Mary with a declaration which said: “For my dearest with my deepest love. Your old faithful.”

Peace

She brought another for her son saying: “To Uncle Freddie with love from your Ricky.”

One of the most touching, from Queen drummer Roger Taylor, said simply: “Goodbye old friend, peace at last.”

Boy George’s tribute said: “Dear Freddie, I love you.”

Ex-Beatle Ringo Starr and his wife Barbara sent a message which read: “To Freddie with love.”

And veteran rocker Gary Glitter said: “Sadly missed, never forgotten.”

Only two fans found out where the service was and travelled from Leeds to pay their respects.

Jan Hall and Liz Carter, both in their thirties, sobbed uncontrollably as they said: “He was Freddie — and there is only one Freddie.

“He can never be replaced. We never met him but his music brought us so much happiness for so many years.”

[Photo caption: Carpet of flowers… bouquets pile up for Freddie from grieving fans]

[Photo caption: So sad… Brian and Anita looking pale and drawn]

[Photo caption: Tribute… messages from his star pals]

[Photo caption: Miss you, son… mum and day say goodbye]

NO CHAMPERS, JUST A SIMPLE GOODBYE

By PIERS MORGAN

IT was Freddie Mercury’s long-time minder who summed it up best.

Burly Jim Callaghan stood quietly by the chapel door and told me: “Freddie would have said ‘sod it — grab a glass of champagne and let’s have a party.”

But there was no champagne. For a man who sang to millions and threw parties for thousands during a wonderfully over-the-top life, it was a quiet farewell.

Less than a dozen curious passersby stood by the crematorium entrance as the vintage black Rolls carrying Freddie’s coffin drove in.

Private

The small, select band of mourners filed quietly into the chapel.

Jim Callaghan, who had been on the door at Freddie’s most lavish parties, gently led the star’s parents inside.

Last to go in, as he would have liked, was Freddie.

His painfully thin body, ravaged by AIDS, was carried by four bearers inside a simple light tan coffin. A single red rose rested on top.

The contrast with his flamboyant stage appearances could not have been greater — but that how he wanted it.

It was Freddie Mercury the pop superstar who stole the show at Live Aid in front of one billion TV viewers worldwide.

It was Frederick Bulsara the intensely private man who was laid to rest yesterday.

MAKE FREDDIE NO 1

Stars want Queen’s Bohemian classic in top spot for Xmas

THE pop world last night joined my campaign to make Bohemian Rhapsody the Christmas No 1 as a tribute to Freddie Mercury.

Stars including Bono, Rick Parfitt and Jonathan Ross promised to buy the eight-minute rock classic after Queen said they will re-release it on December 9.

On the B-side will be Freddie's nostalgic These Are The Days Of Our Lives, the song featured on Queen's final video. Profits from sales will go to AIDS charity the Terence Higgins Trust.

Bookies slashed the odds on the 1975 record making the top slot to 7-1 on as bets poured in. DJ Simon Bates said: "I'll play it until it gets to the top."

His Radio 1 pal Mark Goodier added: "I hope the re-release will help people understand how serious AIDS is."

Steve Wright said: “I hope it gets to No 1 and raises loads of cash."

Status Quo's Rick Parfitt admitted he wept when he saw the video for These Are The Days.

He said: "Making sure the record is No 1 is the best way we can pay tribute to Freddie."

Smash

Chat show host Jonathan Ross said: "I bought it first time round and I'll buy it again."

Pledging support, U2's Bono said: "Freddie was fearless and over the top. I loved that about him."

Today I'm printing the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody — and you can hear Freddie singing it on our special phone line. Just dial 0898 334 149.

Calls cost 36p a minute cheap rate or 48p other times. Every penny of The Sun's and Queen's proceeds from your calls will go to AIDS charities — as Freddie would have wanted.

George Michael and Elton John's Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me — which will also raise cash for AIDS — slipped to second place in the Christmas No1 betting at 5-1 against.

{Bohemian Rhapsody lyrics}

#queen #queen band #freddie mercury #queen scans #queencuttings.com #the sun november 1991 #elton john #mary austin #bomi bulsara #jer bulsara #kashmira cooke #kashmira bulsara #roger taylor #brian may #anita dobson

[cosettepontmercys]

Hi!!!! I'm so sorry I didn't reply again until now. I wanted to reply the other day but basically my ask got deleted halfway thru replying and I didn't have time again until now. I'm so glad you had a great time at the movie. It seems like you had a lot of fun and i'm glad you were able to see it again. I expected there not to be a lot of people at the last show since it was so late and it was an added show on Thursday. It did make me wanna see it again just to experience it with other people but I don't know if I will. I hope it comes to streaming so I can watch it over and over. I loved noticing new things seeing it up close. What did your friend think of the whole show? Sometimes I forget how incredible it is how Taylor created and came up with it mostly by herself..a true mastermind! I'm grateful that I was able to go to the show at least once compared to the people that didn't. It did make me nostalgic for my show but I also loved the surprise songs cuz it was like how the fans that have been there from the beginning since Our Song to now with You're On Your own Kid just made it special. Aww she really put it on and said it was her favorite!!! I knew about the cut songs beforehand but my sister didn't and it took her some time to realize any were cut. I understand some of them cuz it didn't have choreography and I guess the movie maybe felt a little long but also everything went by fast too. But that was the one that hurt the most cuz its one of my favorites. It's also the only single from the album so I couldn't believe she cut it. I love them all but my favorites are probably Speak Now and Folklore too, along with rep.

I never listened to Renee's EP cuz I was waiting until her album but I do plan to hear them together probably next week. The few songs I've heard so far I've liked though. I have to give Holly's album a few more listens as well before I know my favorites but which ones did you like the best? I also enjoyed Boygenius as well. Ya I am curious about the movie version but I'm not excited about it or anything. I don't think it would change much from the stage version, but I'm happy it's at least people kinda from Broadway. I never saw anything from Sabrina if she ever was on Broadway, cuz I can't remember..but I agree..she could've been a great Cady. I remember the stunt cast for Cameron Dallas and apparently he was so bad lol. I'm sorry you didn't get to see it on Broadway but I might see it on tour in a few months to compare it to the movie. I also heard a Waitress proshot is coming soon so I'm probably more interested in seeing that, cuz I couldn't on tour.

So one of the reasons I didn't reply to you was cuz we went to see Les Mis last night!!! We were trying to go on Wednesday but it didn't work out so I didn't wanna tell you I was seeing it if I wasn't sure I could go. But it was so amazing and probably top 5 shows I've seen. I would want to go again to have better seats and cuz there was a lot going on, on stage, that I missed. It was really funny though cuz I hadn't thought of the musical in a while but of course I still knew all of the words haha. It felt really fast paced and I wish I could've paid more attention or soaked it in more..that was kinda my first time seeing a sung through show, so it was a good thing I knew it so well lol. My favorite parts were I Dreamed a Dream, The Confrontation, Stars, and One Day More, but I really loved the flow of Act One. The barricade scenes were good too, but the set was pretty dark which made it kinda hard to see. Of course I thought of you every time they said Cosette! And I noticed it was a lot haha. Anyway I also remembered I saw Moulin Rouge on tour almost the exact same day last year which is a crazy coincidence! I only know that cuz it was around when Midnights came out..which is today and I wanna know how you feel about it when it first came out compared to now. I think it's grown on me a lot and I do love it way more now. I can't believe 1989 is only a week away! I'm so excited to hear new Taylor songs to react to..it's so fun and will be fun to see if we have the same favorites.

Wow cool..that's awesome that you met up at your show! You're so sweet to say that and I realized we have been talking back and forth for a while now. I definitely think of you as my friend! Sometimes I worry that I have nothing interesting to say but then I also worry I talk so much lol. But that's why I say you shouldn't worry about replying..but I didn't want you to feel like I forgot about you either. I really do enjoy our conversations and how we just talk about our interests since I don't really have anyone else to talk about this stuff with. It feel weird that you don't know what I look like or that I'm just online, and sometimes I feel weird about it. Books are something I'm glad we can bond over, since my sister doesn't have as much time for reading, and I'm excited to start the book soon. If we are reading the Night Circus too, it's okay cuz I can read two books at the same time but just let me know. I read the summary of those on Goodreads and it reminded me of Only Murders in the Building, even if I haven't even watched the show yet but it's on my list. If you've seen it, let me know how it is. I am not a big thriller or mystery reader but it did seem interesting so I'm glad you enjoyed them! I'm sorry if I forgot anything, but I might not be able to reply until Monday if you reply to this though..just to let you know. I hope you have a nice weekend!

hi friend!! hope you're having a good weekend 🤍 i saw something on twitter about it maybe going to prime, but i take most things i see on twitter with a grain of salt 😭 my friend really liked it — and is super excited to see her next year 🥺 i understand why a lot of them were cut (choreo, etc) but i was really bummed because i love long live and the archer and cardigan and - well, all of them. i was talking to some friends on thursday about how if we could change anything in the eras setlist in a way that wouldn't alter production too much (i.e. costume changes, choreography, speeches, giving her time to rest a bit, etc) what would we change and so i want to ask you the same question! what would you change if you could? i think i said i'd switch out i knew you were trouble with holy ground or red! i would personally also maybe switch all too well 10 for the 5 minute version, and then add our song or i'm only me when i'm with you (or both) instead, just so i could get my little debut songs in. but i do think it's pretty perfect and even the songs that i don't gravitate towards listening to regularly are SO much fun live. the rep set is SO good; we've talked about how it's not my favorite album of hers but honestly one of my favorite eras performances i think.

i think elvis impersonators, cocoon, and ghost me are in my top 3, but i'm not entirely sure yet! i can't wait to hear more of your thoughts on holly's album!! sabrina was only cady for like, two days so not a whole lot exists out there! but i really liked her take on cady. i feel like more often than not i am disappointed with stunt casting (i understand why they do it though) — speaking of stunt casts, i'm curious to see how jordan fisher does as orpheus in hadestown! i'm seeing the tour in a few weeks and i'm super excited to finally see someone who isn't reeve carney haha! and yes — waitress proshot! it was announced yesterday or the day before, i think! my friend texted me about it but i'm not sure if i'll have time to go see it in cinemas. hopefully it gets put on streaming sometime soon too!! i just remembered broadwayhd exists — there's so much on there that i haven't seen (that being said, if you've never seen daddy long legs the musical, i do recommend it because megan mcginnis' voice is beautiful and i just love her — although the actual musical content/plot is a bit questionable — and of course, she loves me and allegiance are also ones i'd recommend)! i didn't know they did a proshot of snapshots — john cardoza was in it and i really like him (i saw him in the notebook + really like what i've heard of him in moulin rouge + like what i heard of him in the snapshots cast recording) so i might give that a watch sometime! and i forgot they filmed the production of first date that sam barks was in! i was also just thinking of submissions only, which was a web series back in like 2012 and is pretty scrubbed from the internet now, unfortunately but i loved it. did you ever watch smash? now i'm feeling incredibly nostalgic!

oh my gosh did you have fun at les mis!!! i really liked the marius on tour (gregory lee rodriguez) — his marius is so earnest and so charming; i saw him in a show here in seattle a few years ago and i remember thinking he was a very likable actor so i was really excited to see him in les mis when i saw the tour in june! the barricade scenes are some of my favorites, but yes — lighting can be tricky! i've been meaning to rewatch the movie at some point as well, but it's so long and such a commitment. i was also ... doing a VERY good job of working at my les mis reread/annotations but then ... did not do that. so we'll see if i pick it back up or if i decide to push it off to next year haha. and no way! that's such a cool coincidence!

i really like midnights; i think it's a solid album — but i do find myself reaching for the 3am tracks over some of the songs on midnights proper a lot! it's interesting because my friends and i did a little ~ prediction ~ of our favorites based on names and i could not have been more wrong. i said lavender haze, anti hero, you’re on your own kid, question…? and sweet nothing were ones that stood out to me, and i do like them, don't get me wrong, but the only one i listen to A LOT is you're on your own kid. i think my top listened to midnights tracks/favorite midnights tracks are (in no particular order): yoyok, mastermind, the great war and dear reader. what about you?

you don't need to worry about not having anything interesting to say! i love chatting with you — you can literally come talk to me about anything you want! and you don't need to apologize for taking your time to reply either! and i'm happy to do whatever works for you reading schedule wise / buddy reading wise! i haven't watched OMITB but i've heard really good things and there's apparently a lot of broadway people cameos in the third season? which is fun!

hope you're having a good weekend 🤍 🤍 !!

#post: answered #🩷 anon

[swiftontumblin310]

MY ERAS WITH TAYLOR SWIFT

I’ve been a fan of Taylor Swift since I heard Teardrops on my Guitar when I was in either seventh or eighth grade (back in 2007/2008 times😅).

I remember streaming Fearless-back when iTunes was a new thing. Still mad bc that’s the only album of Taylor’s I didn’t have the physical copy (bc my sister and I bought it off iTunes). I saw her Fearless concert on May 14, 2010 (I have the pictures to prove that and the Taylor Swift Fearless tour shirt also). I was a a high schooler and living my best life with all those friends you have at the time. Fearless was the perfect album for me as a sophomore/junior in high school. I always loved White Horse, The Best Day and Fearless.

It was really when Taylor released Speak Now when I became a forever fan. I remember (again) living my best life with all my friends all summer in 2010 and BAM—Taylor releases Mine. The amount of Mine lyrics that were spread across my Facebook page with all my peers using “You are the best thing that’s ever been mine” was truly unmatched. When Speak Now came out—I never related to any album more. With songs like Never Grow Up, I felt like Taylor was speaking to me as I ended my time in my high school and prepared myself for college. The album highlighted crushes and little signs from boys who you fall for. My favorite theme, however, was the theme to just speak now. This album will always hold a special place in my heart forever and take me back to those glory days of 2010/2011 when life was simple. Except when all I wanted to do was see Taylor’s Speak Now tour in Nov 2011 and just couldn’t find the means to go.

Red came out (originally) in October of 2012. I remember being in my community college and Taylor was dropping singles left and right—I couldn’t keep up. Red dropped a week before my area got devastated by a superstorm. I always found myself associating Red with that time. Honestly, Red was never my favorite. Of course, I loved 22, I Knew You Were Trouble, Treacherous (always a fav), The Last Time, always liked I Almost Do and of course All Too Well. I liked all the bops but couldn’t get into the album as a whole. I remember always having a concept for a Treacherous music video and wanted Taylor to do it lol However when Red (Taylor’s Version) came out, I found a new love for Red. I enjoyed listening to Taylor’s Version and I am fully in love with all the vault tracks. Why Taylor kept Message in a Bottle so long for us, I will never know.

Ahhh—1989. 1989 came out in 2014 when I transferred yet again to another college. This time I thought I knew what I wanted to do. The semester was tough drowning in science courses. 1989 was this little bolt of lightning that came into my life and made me feel like —hey your dreams can come true! Even though I never had a dream per say, but still thought anything was possible. I loved and listened to 1989 SO MUCH. Also loved the fact that Blank Space music video was filmed so close to me! 1989 was that album and always will be. When Taylor was touring 1989, I just started a full time job and a part time job serving. My friend and I didn’t act on getting tickets and by the time we went to look—-it was expensive and I was too afraid to request off short notice. So I missed the 1989 tour and still one of my major regrets in life.

Reputation. When Taylor wiped out her social media and came out with Look What You Made Me Do (I was actually in Nashville). I remember thinking damn, how is she going to break out of this darkness. Meanwhile, turned out reputation was an album full of light. An amazing album that was truly for the fans. I made it my mission to go to the reputation tour and luckily got to go two shows. I tagged along with my friends on the trip to New Orleans in Sept 2018 and it was one of my best decisions. I was on the barricade and touched Taylor’s hand that night! Rep was one for the memories.

Lover came out at a shaky time in my life and unfortunately see more darkness with Lover than the pastel vibes of the era. When Taylor released Me!, Game of Thrones was the moment and my hockey team was in the playoffs. I had so many reasons to be excited. However, my mom was sick and unbeknownst to me—she was dying. By the end of August, I was visiting my mom in the hospital blasting I Think He Knows or Cornelia Street. I love the songs on Lover, but it does hurt to listen to it. Especially when Taylor attacked me with Soon You’ll Get Better—like did she know what I was going through personally?? I still can’t listen to that song. I still wanted to go to Loverfest and I think my friends and I had so many issues getting tickets. We did end up getting them and it became my 2020 goal to get to Loverfest until the pandemic happened.

In 2020, we all knew where we were. I was (and always will be) grieving over my mom. So when folklore and evermore dropped—I think part of me was saved a bit. Folklore was the perfect album I needed to listen too to break away from all the feelings. I was studying for a registry exam (that I failed a few times) and lucky for me, evermore came out the same week. I spiraled into a depression between failing my exam, having covid and feeling like the ultimate failure. With Christmas looming, evermore straight up brought me back to life and gave me hope. It truly saved me and I owe a lot to evermore.

I feel like Midnights is that badass album we needed. On the edge of 30, I give no more fcks about anything and I love that Midnights is this edgy, dark and emo album. It’s exactly the music I need as I continue to get older with Taylor and her music. The edgier sound and lyrics are so true especially after all the shit you go through to get here. I feel like You’re On Your Own, Kid is such a dad phrase and something my dad says to a degree. It’s like the grown up version of Never Grow Up, like damn you’re on your own. But don’t be afraid. Love that. Anyway, I will manifest I get tickets for the eras tour. And manifest even more that I get to meet Taylor after all the eras we have been through together!!🤍

@taylorswift

[mtmains]

Shawn colvin sunny came home album cover pics

Returning for her encore, Shawn sat at the piano and played Tom Waits “Ol ’55,” which she has not recorded. Shawn finished her set with “Diamond in the Rough,” from Steady On. The song was also famously covered by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant on their 2007 album, Raising Sand. The next song - “Killing the Blues,” a cover of Rowland Salley - was first recorded on John Prine’s 1979 album Pink Cadillac. I was on the RuPaul show, and I was a character on the Simpsons.” Shaw brought up singing with Ernie on Sesame Street: “Bert was there the whole time. Without naming names, she said, “I’ve heard some people complain about having hit songs. Shawn played her most popular song, “Sunny Came Home,” the Grammy Award winner for Song of the Year in 1998. Shawn told the audience that she received the music from her collaborator, and one-time partner, John Leventhal. “That Don’t Worry Me Now” appeared on 2006’s These Four Walls. She mentioned that “Sunny Came Home” was originally titled “40 Red Men,” which her A&R rep explained was not going to work for reasons you might imagine. She then discussed the replica songwriting book for her album, A Few Small Repairs. In this vein, she follows other artists like Rodney Crowell, who released Acoustic Classics this year.Īfter “Cry Like an Angel,” Shawn played the first Tom Waits song of the evening, “Heart of Saturday Night,” which she first released on her 1994 album, Cover Girl. She is headed into the studio next year to make an all-acoustic recording of her old songs. Shawn told the audience that she hadn’t played “Cry Like an Angel,” from Steady On, for a long time before last night. Stream A Few Small Repairs by Shawn Colvin on Spotify: As she noted later in the evening, there never was a “Jimmy” - names have been changed to protect the object of her unrequited love. It’s back to doom and gloom,” and played the “Facts About Jimmy,” from A Few Small Repairs. Shawn quipped, “I’ve been in therapy so long that 45 minutes into this set, I just start winding it down.” Continuing to describe “Polaroids,” she revealed that, in writing the song, she found she was stealing from other songs, which led to her playing a hilarious medley.Īfter her song medley, Shawn joked, “I’m worn out.” She added, “That will be the most fun you have this evening. Almost as if she was speaking directly to me, Shawn said that she wrote those in 1987 or ’88, when she was on tour in Europe as a backup singer with Suzanne Vega, who had a big hit, “Luka.” Shawn regaled the audience with tales of playing Wembley Stadium in England and meeting the King of Sweden. Shawn put my speculation to bed to with her rendition of “Polaroids,” also from Steady On. Shawn openly discusses, in her memoir and elsewhere, her history of addiction and mental health problems. When she immediately followed “Trouble” with “Riding Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” from her first album, 1989’s Steady On, I started to wonder. She didn’t say anything before or after her first number, leading into “Trouble,” from 1996’s A Few Small Repairs, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1998. Shawn played solo acoustic, beginning with a cover of Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which she released on 2015’s Uncovered. In the book, she says, it’s a lucky thing that her daughter does too, as they will constitute most of her daughter’s inheritance. As she discusses in her 2012 memoir, Diamond in the Rough, she loves clothes. Shawn Colvin (Photo provided by Press Here)įor her show on Thursday at The Birchmere, Shawn Colvin appeared immaculately dressed.

#Shawn colvin sunny came home album cover pics

[the-brave-and-the-dumb]

If I may, because I think it is quite important. And by any means, keep in mind I am not justifying anything nor anyone here.

I have already reblogged one post about how Poland welcomes Ukrainian refugees but refused the same with people standing on Belarusian border. I said polish activists are pointing that out as well.

But, you see, there actually IS a difference between polish people pointing out their problems and some westerners who have no knowledge about the region doing the same. It's, as always, a sign of entitlement.

What slips the mind of critics is that Poland was predicting this may be diversion action of Belarus and Russia to distract, divide and later conquer more easily, that we warned about the war back in 2008. These predictions turned out to be true – Germans locked their borders as well as many more countries and the West is angry at Poland they didn't took every refugee because they're not white. (Let's forget that Poland isn't the richest country in Europe and have difficulties with housing, lol)

(Btw why isn't anyone talking about Germany being hesitant to help Ukraine because they valued their business with Russians (for example Nord Stream) more? Why no one is offended Germans have send 2WW helmets as a "help" to Ukrainians soldiers?)

Hell yeah racism IS part of the problem here. The way refugees from Middle East were treated was inhuman. I still think every person from there should be taken in a shelter. But that meant not being able to provide any decent conditions. Thinking Poland is the only racist here is being an useful idiot or manipulating facts on purpose.

At the same time racism is only a PART of a problem since Polish people don't refuse shelter to students from India, China, Middle East and other places who are fleeing Ukraine. Polish people always took a huge part in raise funding and sending food, clothing and other goods to people suffering from tsunamis, war, drought, etc. Activists risked their freedom to help those waiting on Belarusian border.

Tl;dr refugee crisis on Polish-Belarusian border was seen as preparations for the war. Ukrainians suffer from the war that was being prepared, that's why the help was immediate. It doesn't mean it was okay to refuse shelter to Afghan people, inhuman acts will never be justified. But you cannot deny the situation turned out to be way more complicated than, for example, previous refugee crisis.

Is Poland a conservative country? Yes. Do they think of people from Middle East as terrorists? Yes, way too often. And now you can easily trace when the trend of calling Arabs terrorists started, I believe you, the reader, is smart enough to get what I'm talking about. Anyway, Poland who suffered two world wars, wasn't on a map for over 100 years in 19th to 20th century, was under occupation of communists since 1945 to 1989 (de facto even 1992) needed allies. And who was better ally than all mighty imperium of United States? So if US says "you have to fight with us" we go, sure.

During refugees crisis in Belarus many people said it's time Europeans start taking responsibility for being part of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. This is true, period. Why isn't it obvious and easy to do? From polish perspective: most of us didn't want to be part of the war. Since I was a child I have heard one terrifying phrase "this isn't our war. We are dying for a cause that isn't ours". Mothers have lost their sons just because politicians needed to be satisfied. Every time polish soldiers shoot civilians they had massive backlash from polish society. Educating and improving will do more good than blaming each other and pointing fingers.

Before you say something ask, listen, learn only after that you can judge, if you need. Stop applying western perspective on non-western countries. These few years showed us all that this perspective is only used to bash other countries – no help to oppressed ever came from this.

Feel free to agree or disagree, I want to know the opinions, the views on the problem. I hope less and less problems like this will occur but that won't happen unless we learn to oppose politicians and act according to human rights, not business.

#poland #polska #Belarus #ukraine #refugee crisis #war in eastern europe #afghanistan #the west #the east #western europe #eastern europe #united states #war in Afghanistan #current affairs

[bybdolan]

would love to see you rank taylor’s album covers and maybe explain what you like/dislike about each of them one day. :) i’m not creative in the slightest and have almost no preferences about that sort of thing, so it’s interesting to hear what more artistic people have to say about them. but even as someone who’s not creative like that, i have always thought the rep cover was trash. like normally i never notice that kind of thing but it feels like that “graphic design is my passion” meme lol

Disclaimer: I am NOT a trained graphic designer, so this list and all my opinions are based on my personal taste and my “eye” for things, not any actual knowledge on what makes a cover good – though I have taken the recognizability of each cover and how it represents the album into account. Making this list has also instilled a deep loathing of the design of the Taylor’s Version packaging in me – the complete and utter lack of care put into any of it genuinely pisses me off. I wanted to say this before showing you my actual ranking, because cover-wise the albums rank higher than Taylor’s earlier work, however, I really have to say that I think all of her albums up to reputation have a spark in the album packaging design that simply was not there afterwards. I think we can blame the streaming era for this, and it makes me sad.

You can find the ranking under the cut!

1. 1989 – This is the shining star of Taylor album covers to me. I don’t think anybody can deny how easily recognizable and iconic this cover is. The polaroid adds the 80s vibe (and I LOVE how those photos defined the album packaging as a whole), the omitted eyes are mysterious and intriguing, and the handwriting makes this album cover so tactile in the sense that it feels like an actual object. I love when album covers have a sense of physicality to them, for example when the title is written on a surface somewhere in the cover photo (check out HAIMs Women In Music Pt. III), and 1989 really delivers on that. I would go as far as saying that this is one of the most iconic album covers of the 2010s.

2. RED – Going from 1989 to RED feels like a pretty significant drop in quality already, even though the original RED album cover isn’t bad by any means. There is a sense of sensuality and mystique about it and it sells the Blue homage it is attempting. My biggest qualm with this cover is the font; I don’t love Bebas Neue as it feels heavy and clunky to me, more advertisement than album cover. I think a different, more subtle font would have done wonders for this. However, it is worth recognizing that the RED cover is an established image in pop culture as well, and I think the overall design with the diagonal stripes is quite nice; it feels vintage-y and sophisticated and I love how cohesive the booklet is.

3. Folklore – I mean. Yea. This is kind of boring but it fits the album in its subduedness and I do like the imagery of Taylor disappearing in the woods/the world she has created. The folklorecover does what it needs to do and it does it well. Anything more would probably have been too much for this album. I have my complaints about the back cover and the booklet though (yes, I understand it had to be made last minute, but still… could have been better!)

4. RED TV – I actually preferred this over the og RED cover when it first came out, and I still love the photograph, but idk how much I love it as an album cover. The RED ring is absolutely FANTASTIC (see my notes on album titles being part of the cover photograph in the 1989 section), and I think this could have been my second favorite Taylor cover, had they just zoomed in on the face and the ring a little bit. I simply don’t like the framing of this photo, and it kind of ruins the whole thing for me. I am intrigued to see what she does for the rest of the recordings, but so far, I have been incredibly underwhelmed at the lack of cohesion and graphic design care put into a project that would be fantastic for collectible editions and is meant as a tribute to Taylor’s legacy. Even though most of her early covers rank below the newer stuff, I do have a soft spot for them because I cannot help but feel like Taylor’s album designs have gotten lazier and lazier over time. If I were to judge the album packaging as a whole, I think this list would look a little different.

5. Speak Now – This was spot 7 on this list but then I typed the last sentence of my RED TV review and was like !!! You know what! Speak Now is very cute and at least she isn’t lazy! This is obviously a rather cheesy album cover, and idk if I like the pretty big section that is just. White. But as I said: This isn’t lazy. The hazy fairy tale vibes are there, the painting effect is a nice touch, and I can’t help but think about how whimsy and cute the back cover and the booklet are. Yes this is not wonderful graphic design, but at least it has heart and ambition, which you cannot really say for Taylor’s album packaging from reputation onwards.

6. Evermore – Again: It does what it needs to do. It’s fine. I cannot complain about it by any means, but I also don’t love it in the slightest.

7. Fearless TV – This should be bottom of the list simply for the abomination that is the back cover, but Taylor looks super pretty in the photo and the whole thing works as an homage to the original Fearless cover. I even have a soft spot for the sepia filter until I discovered that apparently not all rerecordings would have that feature. So now it’s kind of weird. Again, you cannot tell from the cover alone, but the whole packaging just is so boring to me and just feels so churned out. Where is the fucking spark?

8. Fearless – This has spark! I kept swapping og Fearless and Fearless TV around because at least the packaging of og Fearless feels like people had fun making it, but I cannot get over my dislike for the fonts used here (which is why I prefer the European version!) Whyy is the “Fearless” so big and has a shadow around it. I don’t like it, I am sorry. I do LOVE the booklet though, it radiates joy.

9. Taylor Swift – This is a country album released by a teenager from Nashville in 2006. I think I shouldn’t have high expectations. Debut is fine. She is cute! That photo of Taylor kneeling in the pond was part of my bi awakening when I was 14/15, so I have to give it that. The notebook vibes of the booklet are a nice touch. Now that I think about it I do have love for the design of this, but I think it’s mainly nostalgia. I applaud the cohesion of the color scheme and I like the little notebook details :)

10. Reputation – I think this is terribly ugly and the only reason it is not at the bottom of this list is that I can appreciate the idea behind it. She is speaking her truth after the media has tainted her, whatever. I get it. I just think the execution is awfully lackluster (stop with the fucking white backgrounds!) and the most basic take on the “album about the media” idea (I may direct you to Faber’s I Fucking Love My Lifeas an album cover that did it better). Taylor’s face and neck also look a little strange to me. It does have a sense of recognizability, I’ll admit that. But I cannot believe this is the cover one chooses for their “taking back the narrative” album. Have a little fun! But, with all of reputation, we didn’t get what we could have gotten.

11. Lover – I HATE this. The diary theme in the booklet is cute and I don’t hate the back cover at all, but maaan I find the actual album cover to be awful. It’s a shame, really, because the album cover shoot is fantastic, but the coloring of Taylor’s face on the cover is super dull and strange, the weird sky background feels so lazily photoshopped and the font is just. Bleh. Cheesy and ugly. The CD is super super nice though, and, again, the rest of the packaging is honestly fine, but I cannot get over how actually unprofessional the album cover looks. The aforementioned weird color of Taylor’s face is honestly my biggest issue. This is just. Bad. It doesn’t make me as angry as the booklet or back covers of the TVs, but I just think it’s sooo… How does the biggest pop star in the world end up with this album cover?

#ask #anonymous #have fun with this dshdd i think i got pretty in deoth #*depth

[robinrunsfiction]

Style

Pairing: Frank Iero x Female Reader Rating: Teen Requested By: None Word Count: ~3,900 Author’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories inspired by songs by Taylor Swift, this one of course being Style from the album 1989. I had intended on holding on to the series until I had all of them done, but I’m struggling to write... anything lately so I’m posting the two that I do have done. Full honesty, this story is one I originally wrote about two years ago for a different fandom and then modified for this challenge. I hope you enjoy.

The vibrating of her phone on the nightstand next to her woke her from her light sleep. She rolled over, bleary eyed, and checked the screen.

From: Frank Iero Message: hey

"Oh for fucks sake" she muttered to herself. She glanced at the clock, just before midnight, no surprise there. 'What's up?' She texted back. She set her phone down and rolled back over, willing it to stay silent.

Until it vibrated again.

'So you are up…' he replied

'Because you woke me up' she replied.

'Anyway, wanna come over?'

'Where's your girl tonight?'

They had an arrangement. They would only contact each other if they knew the other wasn't seeing anyone and they'd hook up, no strings attached. It had been working out pretty well for a few years now. They were each occasionally with a significant other for a while, him more usually than her, but nothing long term, so they weren't ever out of their routine for too long.

'She's gone' he replied.

'At the very least you come to my place' she replied back.

'Already on my way'

(YN) dragged herself out of bed and into the bathroom to check her reflection in the mirror before curling up on the couch and waiting for the doorbell to ring. About 20 minutes later, she had almost fallen back to sleep, when there was a knock. Trudging to the door, she opened to find that familiar face.

"Hey" she said, letting him in.

"Hey, glad you were up," he said with a smirk as he took off his coat and tossed it on the couch where she had just been sitting.

"I wasn't, remember?"

"But you are now," he said, taking a step toward her, putting his hands on her hips.

"Lucky you," she replied as she slipped from his grasp leading the way to her bedroom. Frank had hardly taken a step when she pulled off her tank top and flinging over her shoulder at him. 

It always amazed (YN) that no matter how long they may have been apart, they were always able to pick right up. She could remember exactly what to do to drive him wild, he remembered all the spots that she loved him to kiss and touch. 

When they both finished and were both lying back, catching their breath, he looked over at her and chuckled.

"What?" She asked with a laugh as well.

"I dunno" he muttered.

"So what happened with your girl?" She asked after a few moments of silence.

"Nice pillow talk, (YN)."

"Oh come on, you know how I am" she said rolling over onto her elbow to look at him.

"Nosey?"

“I was gonna say kind of a bitch, but I suppose that’s true too,” she said with a shrug and he laughed.

"She said I wasn't giving her the attention she deserved, so she found someone who could."

"So she starts dating a touring musician,  someone who everyone knows is busy as hell, and bails when he's busy as hell? What a bitch."

"Eh, it was fun while it lasted."

(YN) rolled her eyes. "If you say so."

"What have you been up to?" He asked.

"Ya know, the usual" she said with a shrug.

"Been seeing anyone?"

"Why?"

"Making conversation."

"Nah. Been on a few dates, but nothing worth the effort." She said rolling on to her back again. He then rolled onto his side and looked at her.

"What?" She asked again, with a sideways glance.

"Admit it, you missed me."

"Ugh, you are the worst."

"You know you did."

"I missed... parts of you" with that same sly grin from before.

"Well, let's get reacquainted again."

~

The next morning (YN) woke up with the sun streaming in around the blinds. She was glad she had the day off because Frank had kept her up late. She looked over at where he slept beside her, back turned to her and she couldn't help but smile fondly at his tattooed back. She pulled herself out of bed and slipped into the shower.

Frank woke up and didn't find (YN) next to him, but soon realized he heard the shower running. Even when he was with his ex, he missed coming over to (YN)'s place, or when she would stop by his house unannounced. They were friends first and foremost, but the physical chemistry between them was undeniable. Their agreement had been working so well for so long that he didn't dare say what he had been feeling for a while now.

He heard the shower shut off and a minute later she came back into her room with her plush towel wrapped around herself.

"Oh you're up" she smiled. She thought maybe he would have slipped out by the time she got out of the shower.

"Yea I just woke up. You gotta work today?"

"No, today's my day off. You?"

"We got a meeting this afternoon."

"Sucks to suck" she said with a grin, pulling on underwear from her drawer.

He laughed lightly as he got up from the bed and got dressed. She glanced over at him while pulling on her shirt. It looked like there was something on his mind, but she didn't know if she should pry. "Wanna get brunch? Your treat?" She asked with a grin.

"Sure," he replied with a laugh.

They headed to a diner down the street and ordered their meals and caught up a bit more since it had been a while since they had been face to face.

"I have to go to this bachelorette party for my coworker tomorrow after working all day." (YN) said, rolling her eyes. She was a hair stylist and knew she had a busy Saturday booked. After being on her feet for hours, she knew she'd rather just crash in bed than go out.

"If you don't wanna go, don't go."

"No, I'm gonna go, I don't just bail, but I am gonna hate it the whole time. I'll just have to get a good night of sleep tonight." She said, narrowing her eyes at her friend across the table.

Frank shrugged and put his hands up defensively. "You coulda told me not to come over."

"Oh, you and I both know that wasn't gonna happen."

"Again, you missed me."

"Stop projecting your feelings on to me" she said hitting his arm from across the table and he laughed.

"Anyway, I gotta get home and shower, let's get outta here."

Frank paid for their meals, and they walked back down to her building.

“Good to see you again, (YN),” he said as he turned toward his car.

“Welcome back to the land of living Mr. Iero,” she replied as she let herself into her building.

~

The next morning (YN) woke up without any text messages interrupting her sleep. She got out of bed, showered and got ready for her day. She had a full schedule that included two of her more difficult clients in the afternoon.

Thankfully the day went quickly, but by the time her last client was done she had a splitting headache. She knew if she wanted to leave Jenny wouldn’t hold it against her, but Susie who organized the bachelorette party for Jenny would never let her forget it. As she cleaned up her station, she heard champagne bottles popping in the back room and decided she could at least go to dinner if it involved champagne.

After pre-gaming in the back of the salon, the group headed out to dinner and (YN) found her patience growing thinner, and the drinks she was consuming weren’t helping. There were multiple conversations happening, but she found herself sitting back, wishing she was anywhere else at that moment.

 “(YN), you’re single, what’s up with that? You’re so pretty and feisty, I can’t believe you can’t find a guy who can put up with that!” One of her coworkers asked. She opened her mouth to reply to the back handed compliment, when Susie jumped in.

“I heard she’s got a friend with benefits!”

“Well yes Susie, you’re right! Because I don’t see the point in being in a relationship. I can get laid without all the unnecessary bullshit that goes along with it! Win-win!” She said taking a smug sip of her drink, relishing in the dumbfounded looks and glares being shot at her from her coworkers who were celebrating the idea of long-term commitment and romantic love.

She finished her dinner and glanced at the time on her phone, it wasn’t very late, but waved down the waiter and paid her check. As she left, she gave Jenny a hug and whispered an apology into her ear for her bitchy comment earlier.

“Don’t worry, I understand” Jenny replied with a smile.

(YN)'s uber was outside when she exited the restaurant. She gave the driver the address and rested her head against the cool window.

If she was to be honest with herself, she wasn’t completely opposed to the idea of a relationship, but she was really satisfied with where her life was, especially now that Frank was coming around again. He really was the best sex she had ever had, probably because they had been in each other’s lives for so long.

When she arrived at her destination, she breathed a sigh of relief that the lights in the living room were on and no other cars were around.

“I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, but I didn’t think it would be this soon” Frank said with a smirk when he opened the door.

“Are you gonna chastise me, or are you gonna invite me in?” She asked, rolling her eyes. He stood back and opened the door for her and she came in. The place looked the same as always, kind of cluttered with guitars and horror movie memorabilia all over the place.

“How was your party?”

“It was ok. I like my coworkers at work, much more than that, I’ll pass. They get real catty when they start drinking," she said flopping down on the couch. "I see you have a real exciting evening going on here.”

“Well it’s a good thing you came along to save me from it” he said sitting down next to her, putting his hand on her thigh.

“What can I say, it’s my super power,” she said, turning her body into his, putting her hand on his chest. He leaned in and they started making out. He ran his hand further up her thigh over her tight jeans, the other hand on her back pulling her closer to him. She ran her nails up the back of his neck, raking over his scalp sending goosebumps up and down his body.

He leaned back pulling her onto his lap, and she took the opportunity to pull her top off. He pulled her back down to kiss him, hand roaming over her back, easily undoing her bra and tossing it aside, as she ground her hips into his with an increasing urgency. He sat up and she pulled his shirt off and then raked her nails over his tattooed chest.

Moans and muttered curses filled the room until they both came. She fell forward onto his chest and he wrapped his arms around her. She was surprised at first by the affection of the action, but didn’t care because it did feel nice to be held like that. They stayed like that for a few minutes before she pulled back.

“I guess I should get goin' then” she said reaching down to gather her clothes from the floor.

“Why?” He asked. “I mean, we haven’t hung out in a while, just stay.”

She considered the offer. He had a point, they used to hang out much more. And it wasn’t like she had anything to do that night.

“Ok sure, but I’m still putting on some of my clothes," she retorted.

“You want something to drink?” He asked, getting up after pulling his sweatpants back on and wandering into the kitchen.

“Yea, I’ll take a beer” she said following him into the kitchen in just her bra and panties.

“That’s a good look,” he said, handing her a beer.

“Thanks, I was thinking this bra wasn’t getting enough appreciation for the hard work it does.”

“Well I for one would like to salute it. It truly is doing God’s work.” He replied with a wink.

They went back to the couch and sat on opposite sides while he picked a movie on Netflix. As the movie played, they talked about the party she had been at and some new songs he was working on. As the evening wore on, (YN) could feel herself getting sleepier from her long day. She felt her head getting heavy as she slowly leaned toward Frank.

She woke up the next morning still on the couch, her head was on this chest and his arms were wrapped around her. She didn't move, not sure of how to react to the position she was in.

They had been friends for a long time before that one night when they were at a party and someone suggested Seven Minutes in Heaven. (YN) had been a little worried, but also quite exhilarated when she realized her partner was Frank. They had both been liquored up enough to throw caution to the wind the second the door to the closet shut behind them.

Their lips crashed together, hands in hair and all over each other. The seven minutes passed too quickly, so when the attention of the party was off them and their disheveled state, they snuck off to another room to finish what they had started.

At that point in their lives, (YN) had just gotten out of a shitty relationship and had no interest in getting into anything else serious anytime soon, and Frank was fine with just having fun. She and Frank’s chemistry led them to hooking up a few more times before they officially agreed to do the friends with benefits thing. Over time she warmed back up to the idea of being in a relationship, but she didn’t actively pursue anything because she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be with Frank. She always had felt jealous when he let her know he was seeing someone, but she was terrified of ruining things with him, so she never let on to how she felt.

Now as she woke up with his arms around her like that, it felt quite intimate, bordering on relationship-y behavior. Even if she did decide to risk it all with Frank, now wouldn't be the time as she'd just be a rebound, so in that moment she decided she just needed to back off for a minute and let things even out a little, and get back to normal.

"Hey," he murmured, waking up.

"Hey" she replied, pulling herself up from his arms.

"You want some coffee?" He asked sitting up and shuffling off to the kitchen.

"Yea sure" she said following behind him, sitting on a barstool at the counter as she watched him make the coffee.

"What are you doing today?" She asked. That voice in the back of her head nagged for even asking the question. They weren't a couple, they didn't just hang out every day they were free, why even bring up the topic?

"I'm gonna go down to record a few of those demos I was telling you about last night" he replied, pulling out a couple mugs. "But you wanna hang out later?"

"Nah" She replied, shaking her head. A concerned look crossed his face. He wondered what he had done as he handed her the mug.

"You got something better to do?"

"Frank, I'm gonna be straight with you, I'm not looking to be a rebound, you know that. That’s not what I signed up for.”

"I'm not trying to use you as a rebound! I just thought you’d want to hang out since it’s been a while. I don't want anything to change what’s going on with us," he lied. 

It wasn't completely a lie, he didn't want her to be a rebound, but he did want things to change between them, he wanted them to be more. He did want a relationship with (YN), that's why he never put effort into his other relationships, because they never were with her. But he didn't want to drive her away, so he kept being friends with benefits, so at least he could be with her in some way.

She considered what he was telling her, not completely believing him. "Mmk," she replied, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Can I at least give you a ride back to your place?”

“You're such a gentleman," she smirked. "But I’d appreciate it.”

~

Over the next few weeks, (YN) and Frank settled back into their usual routine for when they were both single. They would text regularly, stop by each other’s place to hook up at least once a week, and sometimes hang out if a group was getting together.

Once things had normalized between them, she started to stop worrying so much about whether Frank was using her as a rebound. She did notice though that he still was being more physically affectionate than he used to be, putting his arm casually around the back of her chair when they were sitting next to each other, holding her for a little longer after hooking up, she'd wake up sleeping against him. She realized that maybe she was keeping up the affection just as much as he was, but that didn't change the fact that she just didn't think they should be pursuing a relationship.

On a quiet Tuesday in the salon, Jenny and (YN) were the only two working and chatting about life between clients.

"(YN) , don't take this the wrong way, but I have to ask. Are you still just hooking up with your friend?" Jenny asked

"Yea, but it's good, it's fine! It's what we want to do, ya know? Like for a while I was worried that he was catching feelings, and sometimes I get jealous, but we're just having fun and we're good."

"Yea, but have you talked about it recently? Like you said it seemed like he was getting attached."

"We did talk about it, and he said he wasn't trying to rebound and I believe him, and things went back to normal."

"And what about your jealousy?"

"Damn Dr. Phil!" (YN) retorted. She was surprised at the intense line of questioning coming from her friend. She was even more surprised at the knowing smirk that was on Jenny's face. "What?!" She snapped.

"There's nothing wrong with being vulnerable! Let him crack that hard shell you have around you, I'm sure you have a soft, gooey center in there somewhere!"

"He's found my soft center plenty of times, he's very good at that actually." (YN) said with a wink, getting up to prepare her work station for her next client.

"(YN), ew! But just think about it. What honestly could be the worst that would happen?" Jenny called after her.

"I could lose him and everything we have," she muttered under her breath.

~

(YN) was crammed in a booth with Frank, Mikey, Gerard, Ray and a few others at the afterparty celebrating another sold out show. It had been a long night of partying, but (YN) was having a lot of fun since it had been a long time since she got to hang out with the whole band. She did notice that Frank had kept his arm around her shoulder for most of the night, but she decided to let it slide.

Eventually the group started to get pulled away into different conversations until (YN), Frank and Ray were the only ones left in the booth.

"Ray, that girl over at the bar has been tryna to eye fuck you for a while now. Are you gonna do something about it?" (YN) asked, as she drew their attention to the girl at the bar.

"I see that," he said, taking the last swig of his drink and sliding out of the booth. (YN) and Frank both laughed as he made his way over to her.

"What do you think his chances are?" She asked, taking a drink.

"Eh, probably pretty good, she does seem into him."

(YN) could feel Frank's eyes on her. "What?" She asked, turning to look at him. He reached up to her cheek and pulled her in to kiss him. She didn't protest as he deepened the kiss, but after a moment the voice in her head started screaming 'What are you doing? This isn't how you two act in public!'

"Frank, what are you doing?" She asked, pulling back.

"I don't know anymore, (YN). I... fuck..." he stammered.

She knew where this was going because she had felt it building for a while now. She grabbed her bag and slid out from the booth.

"(YN) , come on, don't leave like this." He said following her out of the bar into the cool night.

"Frank, what are you doing?" She said putting an emphasis on each individual word, as if saying it more clearly would somehow spark clarity in his mind. She looked up at him, his hazel puppy dog eyes filled with fear and frustration. After a long moment, he still hadn't replied so she turned leave when he reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling her back to him.

"(YN), I love you, ok? I fucking care about you and I don't give two shits about what we've agreed we're supposed to be, or what we aren't supposed to say. You are the reason none of those other relationships worked out. You're the one I always come back to, over and over again."

"Fucking hell man!" She shouted as she put her hands over her face. Her head was spinning. This was everything she had known deep down all along, it was all she wanted to hear for so long. But now that it was happening, she was panicking.

Frank took her wrists and pulled her hands away from her face, but she pulled her wrists away from him with a jerk, taking a step back and drawing in a deep breath.

"Ok, fine! I'm out of excuses. I've always had feelings for you too. Every time you tell me you have some girl you're seeing it made me so mad, and at first I didn't want anything more with you or anyone, but now I do and now I know you do too, so let's fucking do this Frank. I'm in. I love you too, goddamn it."

"You're mad that you love me?" He asked, laughing.

"Shut up" she said, pushing on his arm. He laughed again and took her face in his hands and placed a kiss on her lips with every ounce of passion he had been holding back for all the years and she wrapped her arms around his neck. When they separated, he took her hand and they went back into the bar to find Ray back at the table alone.

Even though he was dejected from his strikeout, Ray couldn't have been happier to see his plan to play Seven Minutes in Heaven all those years ago had finally paid off.

#frank iero x reader #frank iero fan fic #frank iero fan fiction #frank iero imagine #my chemical romance fan fic #my chemical romance fan fiction

[chemicalcindercat]

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn. It looked like Lydia was asleep. Why? Had she forgotten about him? Did she forget she had promised to come over and help with his newest prank ideas? The Ghost With the Most was upset, and not at all pleased with his friend, until he noticed her tossing and turning. Lydia was having a nightmare.

Chapters: 1 (1,319 words)

Fandom: Beetlejuice (mostly based on the 1989 cartoon, but can be read for the movie or musical as well)

Rating: T (Minor, non-explicit violence and gore)

Relationships: Beetlejuice & Lydia, Tiny bit of Beetlejuice/Lydia at the end

Additional Tags: Nightmares, Hurt/Comfort, Love confessions, Lydia angst, Older Lydia AU

Lydia was exhausted.

She had been kept up late the night before doing homework, and had struggled not to fall asleep in class. Then she got detention, because she did fall asleep in class. Finally, she got home and wanted nothing more than to ignore the tons of homework she had to do, and just go straight to bed. So she did. She got home, went straight to her room, threw off her backpack, and dove into her bed. Never before in her life did her bed feel quite so comfy. She burrowed her head in her pillow and let her tired muscles finally relax, slowly drifting to sleep. She didn't once think of her best friend, and how he might've had a boring day, and was looking forward to her coming over to visit him all day.

That's exactly what had happened.

Beetlejuice was sooooooo bored. Everything that he could possibly think of doing wouldn't be fun without Lydia. Where was she? She always came over to hang out with him when she got out of school, and it was practically night time! Something weird was definitely going on. Beetlejuice decided to investigate. He flew over to her mirror, and peeked inside. The room was dark, with the curtains drawn. It looked like Lydia was asleep. Why? Had she forgotten about him? Did she forget she had promised to come over and help with his newest prank ideas? The Ghost With the Most was upset, and not at all pleased with his friend, until he noticed her tossing and turning.

Lydia was having a nightmare.

Lydia was strolling through the woods. It was a bright, cold day, with the sun shining blindingly off of the snow. Lydia was looking for something, she knew it, but she couldn't remember what. This bothered her greatly, because how could she know when she found it if she didn't know what she was looking for? Suddenly she could make out Beetlejuice in the distance.

"BJ!" She called, waving an arm in the air as she ran over to him. "Hey, whatcha up to, Beej?"

Beetlejuice was sitting in a tree, facing away from her. When he heard her shout, he looked over his shoulder at her. Once he saw who it was, his face dropped.

"Oh, it's you."

Lydia was confused. Why did he say that so...disgustedly? It was as if the thought of her standing here next to him was the worst possible thought ever. Beetlejuice suddenly stood up and jumped out of the tree, before walking away.

"W-where are you going, BJ?" Lydia asked, trying not to let her voice shake as she ran to catch up with him.

"Anywhere, to get away from you." He responded.

"What did I do?" Lydia asked, trying not to cry. She grabbed his arm, but he roughly pulled away from her. Beetlejuice walked away, leaving a very hurt and confused Lydia behind. "Whatever, you...you asshole!" Lydia yelled. He glanced back at her, and she could see the hurt and shock on his face, but a moment later he was gone. "I don't need you, Beetlejuice!!" Lydia shouted, even though she knew he wasn't there anymore. She was really trying to convince herself, more than anything. It wasn't an easy thing to do. Really, deep down, she knew for a fact that she needed Beetlejuice. They had known each other for years, and he was the only one who had ever understood her. Her life wouldn't be the same without him, if she'd have been alive at all. Lydia was in a terrible state of mind when she first met Beetlejuice, and without him…

Well, it's possible things would've only gone downhill for Lydia.

But none of that mattered. What mattered was that Lydia was upset with how her friend had treated her, and she didn't know what to do about it. Sure, her and Beetlejuice had gotten in fights before, but it was almost always his fault (at least in her opinion), and he always apologized soon after. Now that Lydia was the one missing her best friend, she didn't know what to do. She could always-

Lydia's thoughts were cut off by a rumbling underneath her. She whirled around and jumped back, just as a Sandworm erupted from the ground she had just been standing on. Lydia fell to the ground and rolled, immediately feeling pain from the rough impact. She sprang to her feet, wincing, and stumbled back as the Sandworm approached.

"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!" Lydia called, forgetting about her confused and jumbled up feelings she was having about her friend just moments before. Beetlejuice immediately appeared, took one look at the situation, and flew right into the Sandworm, knocking it down.

"B-BJ, you actually came!" Lydia cried. She thought for sure he wouldn't help, because of how he had treated her earlier. Beetlejuice just smirked at her. Suddenly she remembered the events of earlier that day. "Beetlejuice!" She exclaimed, crossing her arms. "Why were you such a jerk to me earlier?!"

Beetlejuice's smile dropped. His expression changed from a happy one to a hurt grin. "Um, about that, I-"

"No, you know what? I don't wanna hear it right now. You treated me like I was the scum of the Earth, and like I was a piece of shit. Well, news flash, I'm not any of that!" With every sentence Lydia shouted, Beetlejuice flinched even more. But that didn't stop her. "You were a complete and total douche, Beetlejuice, and- look out!" She shouted as the Sandworm appeared behind Beetlejuice out of nowhere.

It was too late.

Lydia screamed as the Sandworm chomped Beetlejuice in half, the bottom part of him falling over. "NO!!!" Lydia screeched, falling to her knees in horror. Tears immediately started streaming down her face as she sobbed, unable to look away from what remained of her best friend's body. She was shaking uncontrollably, and hyperventilating. It was over, he was gone, and it was all her fault, and she was a monster, and holy shit she killed him! And now he was gone forever and-

Lydia bolted upright, breathing heavily, with tear stains on her face. She was okay, it was all just a dream, none of it actually happened. After a few seconds of silence, in which she was too busy with her thoughts to notice her worried friend watching through the mirror, Lydia started sobbing.

"...Lyds…?" Beetlejuice asked softly, his voice full of concern. Lydia looked up in surprise; She hadn't realized he was there.

"Beetlejuice, Beetlej-juice, B-beetlejuice." She called.

In an instant Beetlejuice was by her side with his arms around her. He held her close as she cried, shielding her from whatever it was that was frightening her.

"Shhh, Babes, it's okay, I got you." Lydia hugged him, burying her face into his striped jacket.

"B-beetlejuice!" She sniffled. "I-I'm so s-sorry!"

"It's alright, Lyds, it's alright."

"I-I was so mean, a-and you left, and it w-was all my fault, a-and-"

"Babes, it's okay. You know I'd never leave you, right? It was just a dream." Beetlejuice said soothingly, rubbing circles on her back.

"N-no, you didn't leave, you died!!" Lydia said, shaking. "It was all my f-fault! And I called you an a-asshole and I couldn't apologize! I'm so sorry!"

"Lydia." Beetlejuice said firmly. He gently put his finger under her chin, and made her look at him. "Lyds, it was just a dream. You're okay, I've got you. Now close your eyes and try to get some sleep, okay?" All Lydia could do was nod. She turned around, and Beetlejuice wrapped his arms around her. After awhile, Lydia's breaths slowed down, and Beetlejuice could tell she was asleep.

"Oh, Lyds," He said, quietly. "How do I tell you I'm in love with you?"

'He's in… love with me?' Was Lydia's last thought before she drifted off to sleep.

#Beetlejuice #lydia deetz #Beetlejuice and Lydia #Older Lydia AU #Nightmares #Hurt/Comfort #Light angst #Lydia angst #Love confessions #Beetlebabes #If you squint #No beta #i wrote this two years ago #so please dont judge me

[tswiftdaily]

In the 2010s, she went from country superstar to pop titan and broke records with chart-topping albums and blockbuster tours. Now Swift is using her industry clout to fight for artists’ rights and foster the musical community she wished she had coming up.

One evening in late-October, before she performed at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift’s dressing room became -- as it often does -- an impromptu summit of music’s biggest names. Swift was there to take part in the American Cancer Society’s annual We Can Survive concert alongside Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Camila Cabello and others, and a few of the artists on the lineup came by to visit.

Eilish, along with her mother and her brother/collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, popped in to say hello -- the first time she and Swift had met. Later, Swift joined the exclusive club of people who have seen Marshmello without his signature helmet when the EDM star and his manager stopped by.

“Two dudes walked in -- I didn’t know which one was him,” recalls Swift a few weeks later, sitting on a lounge chair in the backyard of a private Beverly Hills residence following a photo shoot. Her momentary confusion turned into a pang of envy. “It’s really smart! Because he’s got a life, and he can get a house that doesn’t have to have a paparazzi-proof entrance.” She stops to adjust her gray sweatshirt dress and lets out a clipped laugh.

Swift, who will celebrate her 30th birthday on Dec. 13, has been impossibly famous for nearly half of her lifetime. She was 16 when she released her self-titled debut album in 2006, and 20 when her second album, Fearless, won the Grammy Award for album of the year in 2010, making her the youngest artist to ever receive the honor. As the decade comes to a close, Swift is one of the most accomplished musical acts of all time: 37.3 million albums sold, according to Nielsen Music; 95 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 (including five No. 1s); 23 Billboard Music Awards; 12 Country Music Association Awards; 10 Grammys; and five world tours.

She also finishes the decade in a totally different realm of the music world from where she started. Swift’s crossover from country to pop -- hinted at on 2012’s Red and fully embraced on 2014’s 1989 -- reflected a mainstream era in which genres were blended with little abandon, where artists with roots in country, folk and trap music could join forces without anyone raising eyebrows. (See: Swift’s top 20 hit “End Game,” from 2017’s reputation, which featured Ed Sheeran and Future.)

Swift’s new album, Lover, released in August, is both a warm break from the darkness of reputation -- which was created during a wave of negative press generated by Swift’s public clash with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West -- as well as an amalgam of all her stylistic explorations through the years, from dreamy synth-pop to hushed country. “The skies were opening up in my life,” says Swift of the album, which garnered three Grammy nominations, including song of the year for the title track.

She recorded Lover after the Reputation Stadium Tour broke the record for the highest-grossing U.S. tour late last year. In 2020, Swift will embark on Lover Fest, a run of stadium dates that will feature a hand-picked lineup of artists (as yet unannounced) and allow Swift more time off from the road. “This is a year where I have to be there for my family -- there’s a lot of question marks throughout the next year, so I wanted to make sure that I could go home,” says Swift, likely referencing her mother’s cancer diagnosis, which inspired the Lover heart-wrencher “Soon You’ll Get Better.”

Now, however, Swift finds herself in a different highly publicized dispute. This time it’s with Scott Borchetta, the head of her former label, Big Machine Records, and Scooter Braun, the manager-mogul whose Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group and its master recordings, which include Swift’s six pre-Lover albums, in June. Upon news of the sale, Swift wrote in a Tumblr post that it was her “worst case scenario,” accusing Braun of “bullying” her throughout her career due to his connections with West. She maintains today that she was never given the opportunity to buy her masters outright. (On Tumblr, she wrote that she was offered the chance to “earn” back the masters to one of her albums for each new album she turned in if she re-signed with Big Machine; Borchetta disputed this characterization, saying she had the opportunity to acquire her masters in exchange for re-signing with the label for a “length of time” -- 10 more years, according to screenshots of legal documents posted on the Big Machine website.)

Swift has said that she intends to rerecord her first six albums next year -- starting next November, when she says she’s contractually able to -- in order to regain control of her recordings. But the back-and-forth appears to be nowhere near over: Last month, Swift alleged that Borchetta and Braun were blocking her from performing her past hits at the American Music Awards or using them in an upcoming Netflix documentary -- claims Big Machine characterized as “false information” in a response that did not get into specifics. (Swift ultimately performed the medley she had planned.) In the weeks following this interview, Braun said he was open to “all possibilities” in finding a “resolution,” and Billboard sources say that includes negotiating a sale. Swift remains interested in buying her masters, though the price could be a sticking point, given her rerecording plans, the control she has over the licensing of her music for film and TV, and the market growth since Braun’s acquisition.

However it plays out, the battle over her masters is the latest in a series of moves that has turned Swift into something of an advocate for artists’ rights -- and made her a cause that everyone from Halsey to Elizabeth Warren has rallied behind. From 2014 to 2017, Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify to protest the streaming company’s compensation rates, saying in a 2014 interview, “There should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify.” In 2015, ahead of the launch of Apple Music, Swift wrote an open letter criticizing Apple for its plan to not pay royalties during the three-month free trial it was set to offer listeners; the company announced a new policy within 24 hours. Most recently, when she signed a new global deal with Universal Music Group in 2018, Swift (who is now on Republic Records) said one of the conditions of her contract was that UMG share proceeds from any sale of its Spotify equity with its roster of artists -- and make them nonrecoupable against those artists’ earnings.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade expresses hope that she can help make the lives of creators a little easier in the years to come -- and a belief that her behind-the-scenes strides will be as integral to her legacy as her biggest singles. “New artists and producers and writers need work, and they need to be likable and get booked in sessions, and they can’t make noise -- but if I can, then I’m going to,” promises Swift. This is where being impossibly famous can be a very good thing. “I know that it seems like I’m very loud about this,” she says, “but it’s because someone has to be.”

While watching some of your performances this year -- like Saturday Night Live and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert -- I was struck by how focused you seemed, like there were no distractions getting in the way of what you were trying to say.

That’s a really wonderful way of looking at this phase of my life and my music. I’ve spent a lot of time recalibrating my life to make it feel manageable. Because there were some years there where I felt like I didn’t quite know what exactly to give people and what to hold back, what to share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade. I broke through pre-social media, and then there was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music. I’m not really here to influence their fashion or their social lives. That has bled through into the live part of what I do.

Meanwhile, you’ve found a way to interact with your fans in this very pure way -- on your Tumblr page.

Tumblr is the last place on the internet where I feel like I can still make a joke because it feels small, like a neighborhood rather than an entire continent. We can kid around -- they literally drag me. It’s fun. That’s a real comfort zone for me. And just like anything else, I need breaks from it sometimes. But when I do participate in that space, it’s always in a very inside-joke, friend vibe. Sometimes, when I open Twitter, I get so overwhelmed that I just immediately close it. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don’t like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that’s it. But I don’t like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There’s only so much bandwidth my brain can really have.

You’ve spoken in recent interviews about the general expectations you’ve faced, using phrases like “They’ve wanted to see this” and “They hated me for this.” Who is “they”? Is it social media or disparaging think pieces or --

It’s sort of an amalgamation of all of it. People who aren’t active fans of your music, who like one song but love to hear who has been canceled on Twitter. I’ve had several upheavals of somehow not being what I should be. And this happens to women in music way more than men. That’s why I get so many phone calls from new artists out of the blue -- like, “Hey, I’m getting my first wave of bad press, I’m freaking out, can I talk to you?” And the answer is always yes! I’m talking about more than 20 people who have randomly reached out to me. I take it as a compliment because it means that they see what has happened over the course of my career, over and over again.

Did you have someone like that to reach out to?

Not really, because my career has existed in lots of different neighborhoods of music. I had so many mentors in country music. Faith Hill was wonderful. She would reach out to me and invite me over and take me on tour, and I knew that I could talk to her. Crossing over to pop is a completely different world. Country music is a real community, and in pop I didn’t see that community as much. Now there is a bit of one between the girls in pop -- we all have each other’s numbers and text each other -- but when I first started out in pop it was very much you versus you versus you. We didn’t have a network, which is weird because we can help each other through these moments when you just feel completely isolated.

Do you feel like those barriers are actively being broken down now?

God, I hope so. I also hope people can call it out, [like] if you see a Grammy prediction article, and it’s just two women’s faces next to each other and feels a bit gratuitous. No one’s going to start out being perfectly educated on the intricacies of gender politics. The key is that people are trying to learn, and that’s great. No one’s going to get it perfect, but, God, please try.

At this point, who is your sounding board, creatively and professionally?

From a creative standpoint, I’ve been writing alone a lot more. I’m good with being alone, with thinking alone. When I come up with a marketing idea for the Lover tour, the album launch, the merch, I’ll go right to my management company that I’ve put together. I think a team is the best way to be managed. Just from my experience, I don’t think that this overarching, one-person-handles-my-career thing was ever going to work for me. Because that person ends up kind of being me who comes up with most of the ideas, and then I have an amazing team that facilitates those ideas.

The behind-the-scenes work is different for every phase of my career that I’m in. Putting together the festival shows that we’re doing for Lover is completely different than putting together the Reputation Stadium Tour. Putting together the reputation launch was so different than putting together the 1989 launch. So we really do attack things case by case, where the creative first informs everything else.

You’ve spoken before about how meaningful the reputation tour’s success was. What did it represent?

That tour was something that I wanted to immortalize in the Netflix special that we did because the album was a story, but it almost was like a story that wasn’t fully realized until you saw it live. It was so cool to hear people leaving the show being like, “I understand it now. I fully get it now.” There are a lot of red herrings and bait-and-switches in the choices that I’ll make with albums, because I want people to go and explore the body of work. You can never express how you feel over the course of an album in a single, so why try?

That seems especially true of your last three albums or so.

“Shake It Off” is nothing like the rest of 1989. It’s almost like I feel so much pressure with a first single that I don’t want the first single to be something that makes you feel like you’ve figured out what I’ve made on the rest of the project. I still truly believe in albums, whatever form you consume them in -- if you want to stream them or buy them or listen to them on vinyl. And I don’t think that makes me a staunch purist. I think that that is a strong feeling throughout the music industry. We’re running really fast toward a singles industry, but you got to believe in something. I still believe that albums are important.

The music industry has become increasingly global during the past decade. Is reaching new markets something you think about?

Yeah, and I’m always trying to learn. I’m learning from everyone. I’m learning when I go see Bruce Springsteen or Madonna do a theater show. And I’m learning from new artists who are coming out right now, just seeing what they’re doing and thinking, “That’s really cool.” You need to keep your influences broad and wide-ranging, and my favorite people who make music have always done that. I got to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Cats movie, and Andrew will walk through the door and be like, “I’ve just seen this amazing thing on TikTok!” And I’m like, “You are it! You are it!” Because you cannot look at what quote-unquote “the kids are doing” and roll your eyes. You have to learn.

Have you explored TikTok at all?

I only see them when they’re posted to Tumblr, but I love them! I think that they’re hilarious and amazing. Andrew says that they’ve made musicals cool again, because there’s a huge musical facet to TikTok. [He’s] like, “Any way we can do that is good.”

How do you see your involvement in the business side of your career progressing in the next decade? You seem like someone who could eventually start a label or be more hands-on with signing artists.

I do think about it every once in a while, but if I was going to do it, I would need to do it with all of my energy. I know how important that is, when you’ve got someone else’s career in your hands, and I know how it feels when someone isn’t generous.

You’ve served as an ambassador of sorts for artists, especially recently -- staring down streaming services over payouts, increasing public awareness about the terms of record deals.

We have a long way to go. I think that we’re working off of an antiquated contractual system. We’re galloping toward a new industry but not thinking about recalibrating financial structures and compensation rates, taking care of producers and writers.

We need to think about how we handle master recordings, because this isn’t it. When I stood up and talked about this, I saw a lot of fans saying, “Wait, the creators of this work do not own their work, ever?” I spent 10 years of my life trying rigorously to purchase my masters outright and was then denied that opportunity, and I just don’t want that to happen to another artist if I can help it. I want to at least raise my hand and say, “This is something that an artist should be able to earn back over the course of their deal -- not as a renegotiation ploy -- and something that artists should maybe have the first right of refusal to buy.” God, I would have paid so much for them! Anything to own my work that was an actual sale option, but it wasn’t given to me.

Thankfully, there’s power in writing your music. Every week, we get a dozen synch requests to use “Shake It Off” in some advertisement or “Blank Space” in some movie trailer, and we say no to every single one of them. And the reason I’m rerecording my music next year is because I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.

Do you know how long that rerecording process will take?

I don’t know! But it’s going to be fun, because it’ll feel like regaining a freedom and taking back what’s mine. When I created [these songs], I didn’t know what they would grow up to be. Going back in and knowing that it meant something to people is actually a really beautiful way to celebrate what the fans have done for my music.

Ten years ago, on the brink of the 2010s, you were about to turn 20. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time?

Oh, God -- I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I would have done everything exactly the same way. Because even the really tough things I’ve gone through taught me things that I never would have learned any other way. I really appreciate my experience, the ups and downs. And maybe that seems ridiculously Zen, but … I’ve got my friends, who like me for the right reasons. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my boyfriend. I’ve got my fans. I’ve got my cats.

#taylor swift #interview #billboard #women in music #woman of the decade

[path-of-my-childhood]

Billboard Woman of the Decade Taylor Swift: 'I Do Want My Music to Live On'

By: Jason Lipshutz for Billboard Magazine Date: December 14th issue

In the 2010s, she went from country superstar to pop titan and broke records with chart-topping albums and blockbuster tours. Now Swift is using her industry clout to fight for artists’ rights and foster the musical community she wished she had coming up.

One evening in late October, before she performed at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift’s dressing room became - as it often does - an impromptu summit of music’s biggest names. Swift was there to take part in the American Cancer Society’s annual We Can Survive concert alongside Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Camila Cabello and others, and a few of the artists on the lineup came by to visit.

Eilish, along with her mother and her brother/collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, popped in to say hello - the first time she and Swift had met. Later, Swift joined the exclusive club of people who have seen Marshmello without his signature helmet when the EDM star and his manager stopped by.

“Two dudes walked in - I didn’t know which one was him,” recalls Swift a few weeks later, sitting on a lounge chair in the backyard of a private Beverly Hills residence following a photo shoot. Her momentary confusion turned into a pang of envy. “It’s really smart! Because he’s got a life, and he can get a house that doesn’t have to have a paparazzi-proof entrance.” She stops to adjust her gray sweatshirt dress and lets out a clipped laugh.

Swift, who will celebrate her 30th birthday on Dec. 13, has been impossibly famous for nearly half of her lifetime. She was 16 when she released her self-titled debut album in 2006, and 20 when her second album, Fearless, won the Grammy Award for album of the year in 2010, making her the youngest artist to ever receive the honor. As the decade comes to a close, Swift is one of the most accomplished musical acts of all time: 37.3 million albums sold, according to Nielsen Music; 95 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 (including five No. 1s); 23 Billboard Music Awards; 12 Country Music Association Awards; 10 Grammys; and five world tours.

She also finishes the decade in a totally different realm of the music world from where she started. Swift’s crossover from country to pop - hinted at on 2012’s Red and fully embraced on 2014’s 1989 - reflected a mainstream era in which genres were blended with little abandon, where artists with roots in country, folk and trap music could join forces without anyone raising eyebrows. (See: Swift’s top 20 hit “End Game,” from 2017’s reputation, which featured Ed Sheeran and Future.)

Swift’s new album, Lover, released in August, is both a warm break from the darkness of reputation - which was created during a wave of negative press generated by Swift’s public clash with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West - as well as an amalgam of all her stylistic explorations through the years, from dreamy synth-pop to hushed country. “The skies were opening up in my life,” says Swift of the album, which garnered three Grammy nominations, including song of the year for the title track.

She recorded Lover after the Reputation Stadium Tour broke the record for the highest-grossing U.S. tour late last year. In 2020, Swift will embark on Lover Fest, a run of stadium dates that will feature a hand-picked lineup of artists (as yet unannounced) and allow Swift more time off from the road. “This is a year where I have to be there for my family - there’s a lot of question marks throughout the next year, so I wanted to make sure that I could go home,” says Swift, likely referencing her mother’s cancer diagnosis, which inspired the Lover heart-wrencher “Soon You’ll Get Better.”

Now, however, Swift finds herself in a different highly publicized dispute. This time it’s with Scott Borchetta, the head of her former label, Big Machine Records, and Scooter Braun, the manager-mogul whose Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group and its master recordings, which include Swift’s six pre-Lover albums, in June. Upon news of the sale, Swift wrote in a Tumblr post that it was her “worst case scenario,” accusing Braun of “bullying” her throughout her career due to his connections with West. She maintains today that she was never given the opportunity to buy her masters outright. (On Tumblr, she wrote that she was offered the chance to “earn” back the masters to one of her albums for each new album she turned in if she re-signed with Big Machine; Borchetta disputed this characterization, saying she had the opportunity to acquire her masters in exchange for re-signing with the label for a “length of time” - 10 more years, according to screenshots of legal documents posted on the Big Machine website.)

Swift has said that she intends to rerecord her first six albums next year, starting next November, when she says she’s contractually able to - in order to regain control of her recordings. But the back-and-forth appears to be nowhere near over: Last month, Swift alleged that Borchetta and Braun were blocking her from performing her past hits at the American Music Awards or using them in an upcoming Netflix documentary - claims Big Machine characterized as “false information” in a response that did not get into specifics. (Swift ultimately performed the medley she had planned.) In the weeks following this interview, Braun said he was open to “all possibilities” in finding a “resolution,” and Billboard sources say that includes negotiating a sale. Swift remains interested in buying her masters, though the price could be a sticking point, given her rerecording plans, the control she has over the licensing of her music for film and TV, and the market growth since Braun’s acquisition.

However it plays out, the battle over her masters is the latest in a series of moves that has turned Swift into something of an advocate for artists’ rights, and made her a cause that everyone from Halsey to Elizabeth Warren has rallied behind. From 2014 to 2017, Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify to protest the streaming company’s compensation rates, saying in a 2014 interview, “There should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify.” In 2015, ahead of the launch of Apple Music, Swift wrote an open letter criticizing Apple for its plan to not pay royalties during the three-month free trial it was set to offer listeners; the company announced a new policy within 24 hours. Most recently, when she signed a new global deal with Universal Music Group in 2018, Swift (who is now on Republic Records) said one of the conditions of her contract was that UMG share proceeds from any sale of its Spotify equity with its roster of artists - and make them non-recoupable against those artists’ earnings.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade expresses hope that she can help make the lives of creators a little easier in the years to come - and a belief that her behind-the-scenes strides will be as integral to her legacy as her biggest singles. “New artists and producers and writers need work, and they need to be likable and get booked in sessions, and they can’t make noise - but if I can, then I’m going to,” promises Swift. This is where being impossibly famous can be a very good thing. “I know that it seems like I’m very loud about this,” she says, “but it’s because someone has to be.”

While watching some of your performances this year - like SNL and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert - I was struck by how focused you seemed, like there were no distractions getting in the way of what you were trying to say. That’s a really wonderful way of looking at this phase of my life and my music. I’ve spent a lot of time re-calibrating my life to make it feel manageable. Because there were some years there where I felt like I didn’t quite know what exactly to give people and what to hold back, what to share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade. I broke through pre-social media, and then there was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music. I’m not really here to influence their fashion or their social lives. That has bled through into the live part of what I do.

Meanwhile, you’ve found a way to interact with your fans in this very pure way - on your Tumblr page. Tumblr is the last place on the internet where I feel like I can still make a joke because it feels small, like a neighborhood rather than an entire continent. We can kid around - they literally drag me. It’s fun. That’s a real comfort zone for me. And just like anything else, I need breaks from it sometimes. But when I do participate in that space, it’s always in a very inside-joke, friend vibe. Sometimes, when I open Twitter, I get so overwhelmed that I just immediately close it. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don’t like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that’s it. But I don’t like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There’s only so much bandwidth my brain can really have.

You’ve spoken in recent interviews about the general expectations you’ve faced, using phrases like “They’ve wanted to see this” and “They hated me for this.” Who is “they”? Is it social media or disparaging think pieces or... It’s sort of an amalgamation of all of it. People who aren’t active fans of your music, who like one song but love to hear who has been canceled on Twitter. I’ve had several upheavals of somehow not being what I should be. And this happens to women in music way more than men. That’s why I get so many phone calls from new artists out of the blue - like, “Hey, I’m getting my first wave of bad press, I’m freaking out, can I talk to you?” And the answer is always yes! I’m talking about more than 20 people who have randomly reached out to me. I take it as a compliment because it means that they see what has happened over the course of my career, over and over again.

Did you have someone like that to reach out to? Not really, because my career has existed in lots of different neighborhoods of music. I had so many mentors in country music. Faith Hill was wonderful. She would reach out to me and invite me over and take me on tour, and I knew that I could talk to her. Crossing over to pop is a completely different world. Country music is a real community, and in pop I didn’t see that community as much. Now there is a bit of one between the girls in pop - we all have each other’s numbers and text each other - but when I first started out in pop it was very much you versus you versus you. We didn’t have a network, which is weird because we can help each other through these moments when you just feel completely isolated.

Do you feel like those barriers are actively being broken down now? God, I hope so. I also hope people can call it out, [like] if you see a Grammy prediction article, and it’s just two women’s faces next to each other and feels a bit gratuitous. No one’s going to start out being perfectly educated on the intricacies of gender politics. The key is that people are trying to learn, and that’s great. No one’s going to get it perfect, but, God, please try.

At this point, who is your sounding board, creatively and professionally From a creative standpoint, I’ve been writing alone a lot more. I’m good with being alone, with thinking alone. When I come up with a marketing idea for the Lover tour, the album launch, the merch, I’ll go right to my management company that I’ve put together. I think a team is the best way to be managed. Just from my experience, I don’t think that this overarching, one-person-handles-my-career thing was ever going to work for me. Because that person ends up kind of being me who comes up with most of the ideas, and then I have an amazing team that facilitates those ideas. The behind-the-scenes work is different for every phase of my career that I’m in. Putting together the festival shows that we’re doing for Lover is completely different than putting together the Reputation Stadium Tour. Putting together the reputation launch was so different than putting together the 1989 launch. So we really do attack things case by case, where the creative first informs everything else.

You’ve spoken before about how meaningful the reputation tour’s success was. What did it represent? That tour was something that I wanted to immortalize in the Netflix special that we did because the album was a story, but it almost was like a story that wasn’t fully realized until you saw it live. It was so cool to hear people leaving the show being like, “I understand it now. I fully get it now.” There are a lot of red herrings and bait-and-switches in the choices that I’ll make with albums, because I want people to go and explore the body of work. You can never express how you feel over the course of an album in a single, so why try?

That seems especially true of your last three albums or so. “Shake It Off” is nothing like the rest of 1989. It’s almost like I feel so much pressure with a first single that I don’t want the first single to be something that makes you feel like you’ve figured out what I’ve made on the rest of the project. I still truly believe in albums, whatever form you consume them in - if you want to stream them or buy them or listen to them on vinyl. And I don’t think that makes me a staunch purist. I think that that is a strong feeling throughout the music industry. We’re running really fast toward a singles industry, but you got to believe in something. I still believe that albums are important.

The music industry has become increasingly global during the past decade. Is reaching new markets something you think about? Yeah, and I’m always trying to learn. I’m learning from everyone. I’m learning when I go see Bruce Springsteen or Madonna do a theater show. And I’m learning from new artists who are coming out right now, just seeing what they’re doing and thinking, “That’s really cool.” You need to keep your influences broad and wide-ranging, and my favorite people who make music have always done that. I got to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Cats movie, and Andrew will walk through the door and be like, “I’ve just seen this amazing thing on TikTok!” And I’m like, “You are it! You are it!” Because you cannot look at what quote-unquote “the kids are doing” and roll your eyes. You have to learn.

Have you explored TikTok at all? I only see them when they’re posted to Tumblr, but I love them! I think that they’re hilarious and amazing. Andrew says that they’ve made musicals cool again, because there’s a huge musical facet to TikTok. [He’s] like, “Any way we can do that is good.”

How do you see your involvement in the business side of your career progressing in the next decade? You seem like someone who could eventually start a label or be more hands-on with signing artists. I do think about it every once in a while, but if I was going to do it, I would need to do it with all of my energy. I know how important that is, when you’ve got someone else’s career in your hands, and I know how it feels when someone isn’t generous.

You’ve served as an ambassador of sorts for artists, especially recently - staring down streaming services over payouts, increasing public awareness about the terms of record deals. We have a long way to go. I think that we’re working off of an antiquated contractual system. We’re galloping toward a new industry but not thinking about re-calibrating financial structures and compensation rates, taking care of producers and writers. We need to think about how we handle master recordings, because this isn’t it. When I stood up and talked about this, I saw a lot of fans saying, “Wait, the creators of this work do not own their work, ever?” I spent 10 years of my life trying rigorously to purchase my masters outright and was then denied that opportunity, and I just don’t want that to happen to another artist if I can help it. I want to at least raise my hand and say, “This is something that an artist should be able to earn back over the course of their deal - not as a renegotiation ploy - and something that artists should maybe have the first right of refusal to buy.” God, I would have paid so much for them! Anything to own my work that was an actual sale option, but it wasn’t given to me. Thankfully, there’s power in writing your music. Every week, we get a dozen synch requests to use “Shake It Off” in some advertisement or “Blank Space” in some movie trailer, and we say no to every single one of them. And the reason I’m rerecording my music next year is because I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.

Do you know how long that rerecording process will take? I don’t know! But it’s going to be fun, because it’ll feel like regaining a freedom and taking back what’s mine. When I created [these songs], I didn’t know what they would grow up to be. Going back in and knowing that it meant something to people is actually a really beautiful way to celebrate what the fans have done for my music.

Ten years ago, on the brink of the 2010s, you were about to turn 20. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time? Oh, God - I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I would have done everything exactly the same way. Because even the really tough things I’ve gone through taught me things that I never would have learned any other way. I really appreciate my experience, the ups and downs. And maybe that seems ridiculously Zen, but... I’ve got my friends, who like me for the right reasons. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my boyfriend. I’ve got my fans. I’ve got my cats.

Taylor Swift Discusses 'The Man' & 'It's Nice To Have a Friend' In Cover Story Outtakes

Billboard // by Jason Lipshutz // December 12th 2019

During her cover story interview for Billboard’s Women In Music issue, Taylor Swift discussed several aspects of her mega-selling seventh studio album Lover, including its creation after a personal “recalibrating” period, her stripped-down performances of its songs and her plans to showcase the full-length live with her Lover Fest shows next year. In two moments from the extended conversation that did not make the print story, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade also touched upon two of the album’s highlights, which double as a pair of the more interesting songs in her discography: “The Man” and “It’s Nice To Have A Friend.” 

“The Man” imagines how Swift’s experience as a person, artist and figure within the music industry would have been different had she been a man, highlighting how much harder women have to work in order to succeed (“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can / Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” she sings in the chorus). The song has become a fan favorite since the release of Lover, and Swift recently opened a career-spanning medley with the song at the 2019 American Music Awards.

When asked about “The Man,” Swift pointed out specific double standards that exist in everyday life and explained why she wanted to turn that frustration into a pop single. Read Swift’s full thoughts on “The Man” below:

“It was a song that I wrote from my personal experience, but also from a general experience that I’ve heard from women in all parts of our industry. And I think that, the more we can talk about it in a song like that, the better off we’ll be in a place to call it out when it’s happening. So many of these things are ingrained in even women, these perceptions, and it’s really about re-training your own brain to be less critical of women when we are not criticizing men for the same things. So many things that men do, you know, can be phoned-in that cannot be phoned-in for us. We have to really — God, we have to curate and cater everything, but we have to make it look like an accident. Because if we make a mistake, that’s our fault, but if we strategize so that we won’t make a mistake, we’re calculating.

“There is a bit of a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t thing happening in music, and that’s why when I can, like, sit and talk and be like ‘Yeah, this sucks for me too,’ that feels good. When I go online and hear the stories of my fans talking about their experience in the working world, or even at school — the more we talk about it, the better off we’ll be. And I wanted to make it catchy for a reason — so that it would get stuck in people’s heads, [so] they would end up with a song about gender inequality stuck in their heads. And for me, that’s a good day.”

Meanwhile, the penultimate song on Lover, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend,” sounds unlike anything in Swift’s catalog thanks to its elliptical structure, lullaby-like tone and incorporation of steel drums and brass. When asked about the song, Swift talked about experimenting with her songwriting, as well as capturing a different angle of the emotional themes at the heart of Lover. Read Swift’s full thoughts on “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” below:

“It was fun to write a song that was just verses, because my whole body and soul wants to make a chorus — every time I sit down to write a song, I’m like, ‘Okay, chorus time, let’s get the chorus done.’ But with that song, it was more of like a poem, and a story and a vibe and a feeling of... I love metaphors that kind of have more than one meaning, and I think I loved the idea that, on an album called Lover, we all want love, we all want to find somebody to see our sights with and hear things with and experience things with.

“But at the end of the day we’ve been searching for that since we were kids! When you had a friend when you were nine years old, and that friend was all you talked about, and you wanted to have sleepovers and you wanted to walk down the street together and sit there drawing pictures together or be silent together, or be talking all night. We’re just looking for that, but endless sparks, as adults.”

Read the full Taylor Swift cover story here, and click here for more info on Billboard’s 2019 Women In Music event, during which Swift will be presented with the first-ever Woman of the Decade award.

[link to this tweet]

Was there ever a part of you that was like, “Oh shit, I like this darker vibe, let’s go even further down that path?” I really Loved Reputation because it felt like a rock opera, or a musical, doing it live. Doing that stadium show was so fun because it was so theatrical and so exciting to perform that, because it’s really cathartic! But I have to follow whatever direction my life is going in emotionally... The skies were opening up in my life. That’s what happened. But in a way that felt like a pink sky, a pink and purple sky, after a storm, and now it looks even more beautiful because it looked so stormy before. And that’s just like, I couldn't stop writing. I’ve never had an album with 18 songs on it before, and a lot of what I do is based on intuition. So, you know, I try not to overthink it. Who knows, there may be another dark album. I plan on doing lots of experimentation over the course of my career. Who knows? But it was a blast, I really loved it.

I mean, look, a Taylor Swift screamo album? I’ll be first in line. I’m so happy to hear that, because I think you might be the only one. Ha! I have a terrible scream. It’s obnoxious.

Why Taylor Swift's Lover Fest Will Be Her Next Big Step

Billboard // by Jason Lipshutz // December 11th 2019 - [Excerpt]

On why she chose to put together Lover fest: “I haven’t really done festivals in years - not since I was a teenager. That’s something that [the fans] don’t expect from me, so that’s why I wanted to do it. I want to challenge myself with new things and at the same time keep giving my fans something to connect to.”

#taylor swift #interview #billboard #quote #by taylor #lover album #lover era #record deal #woman of the decade #article #music industry #Country Music #Billie Eilish #finneas #marshmello #lover tour #andrew lloyd webber #jason lipshutz #the man #it's nice to have a friend #reputation era #reputation album

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

#taylor swift #vogue #article

[wildwarcat]

Okay, I caved in to my own personal peer pressure and decided to post the first chapter of Warhawk. If you’ve got questions, or just wanna chat because you’re slowly slipping into madness due to social distancing, shoot me a message!

Words: 4k 

Warnings: Fluff, partial nudity, maybe some cussin’

Prologue 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Reunion

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown. But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

New Orleans, Louisiana, May 1995

Had I known what events would transpire over the course of the following twenty-four hours, I would have had less to drink at my usual watering hole. Not that it made a difference. After the crash in 1989, I found that I was physically incapable of ever getting drunk again. What a horrible way to grieve... sober, that is. Had it not been for my level of clearance at S.H.I.E.L.D., I never would have known the details surrounding the crash, the details regarding why Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. was terminated. Lawson was dead, her body recovered at the site. But Carol...

Carol was nowhere to be found. There was no evidence of a body at the crash. We were forced to believe that when Lawson's light speed engine exploded... we were forced to believe that her body disintegrated on contact as a result of the blast. Maria was given the remaining half of her dog tags, which she in turn gave to me. It sat around my neck everyday, next to mine. But it didn't do much to take away the pain, the hole in my heart that had been growing wider with each passing day over the course of six years.

"Foxtrot to Warhawk."

I pressed the comm in my ear as I flagged down the bartender and pointed at my empty beer glass, "Go ahead, Foxtrot."

"I'm gonna need you to swing by a set of coordinates not too far from your location. I've sent them to your pager."

"What for? On account of me being S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top asset, I believe I have the right to know what I'm walking in to, don't you?" I asked him with a smirk, despite the fact that he couldn't even see it.

"Well, if I told you what it was about, that would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?"

I laughed, taking a sip from my glass as I did, "All right. I'll be there in an hour. Want me to bring my briefcase?"

"And your Sunday best."

I straightened up, my light tone turning serious as I threw forty bucks down to pay off my tab, "I'm on my way."

Chugging the remainder of my lager, I grabbed my leather jacket and keys before exiting the bar, making my way toward my now rusty truck. I had been given the option of upgrading it shortly after the crash, but there were too many memories in it for me to simply let it go. I would drive that old Chevy into the ground if given the opportunity. The engine roared to life and I slammed the driver's door shut, whipping my pager off my belt. Sure enough, Fury had sent me a set of coordinates along with the message, 'Look for the jet parked out front.'

I pulled out a map from my glove compartment and tracked down where I needed to be pretty quickly before throwing the truck in reverse and speeding out of the parking lot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Finding the place that Fury wanted me to go wasn't that hard. It was what came after I got there that made things interesting. When I put my truck in park outside of a small house not far from the Louisiana bayou, I immediately went to my truck bed and pulled out a large steel trunk. Having enhanced strength certainly had its perks because with one arm, I was able to carry one hundred and fifty pounds of reinforced steel without trouble to the front door.

Not knowing what was on the other side, I decided to give a S.H.I.E.L.D. approved code through the door.

Knock... knock, knock, knock... knock... knock, knock.

The door swung open wide, revealing Nick Fury. His left eye had been patched up, looked like it had been cut just above his brow, and he looked exhausted, but aside from that, he seemed okay.

"What happened to you?" I asked him, "I thought you were in California."

"It's a long story." He sighed, "You brought your stuff, right?"

"Everything's here." I replied, lifting the trunk a bit higher. Fury stepped aside and let me in, but stopped me before I could go any further into the house.

"There's something you need to know, Mac." He said quietly, his tone serious. I arched a brow at him and took a hesitant step back.

"Then tell me."

"That pilot you told me about, the one who died in a crash six years ago. Her name was Carol Danvers, wasn't it?"

My expression faltered, went from steely to heartbroken and back in an instant, "Yeah. And I thought I told you to never bring it up. So why are we talking about it?"

"Well, that's the thing. Turns out-"

Someone stepped into the hallway, well, multiple someones did. What I saw sent my head spinning. There was Maria Rambeau, standing with her daughter, Monica, now twelve years old. And there with them...

"That's impossible." I breathed, my voice cracking uncharacteristically, "You're dead."

But she wasn't. Standing there right before my eyes was Carol Danvers, still stunningly beautiful, still as fiery as an F-15 afterburner. But there was something different about the way she was looking back at me. It was as though she didn't recognize me at all, as if I was a stranger to her. Then something seemed to click, and recognition flooded her beautiful brown eyes.

"Paige?" She asked gently, her voice like music to my ears. I set my trunk down and opened the front door, motioning for her to follow me outside. She did, and as soon as we were far enough away that I was certain no one would see or hear us, I turned around to face her again.

"How are you alive?" I asked her angrily, tears stinging the backs of my eyes, "I saw the photos of the crash, there's no way you could have survived!"

She took a step toward me, reached out to set a hand on my shoulder, but I slunk back, wanting to keep my distance from... whoever this imposter had to be.

"Lawson and I both survived the crash. We were shot down by a Kree ship; they're an alien race hellbent on getting their hands on Lawson's lightspeed tech. They killed Lawson and kidnapped me."

The more she spoke the less I believed. Every word that tumbled out of her mouth just added to the insanity.

"How can you expect me to believe that?" I demanded, my hand drifting to the pistol attached to my belt, "How can you possibly expect me to believe anything you say?"

"Then ask me something." She begged, tears welling up in her own eyes, "Ask me something only I would know."

I took a shaky breath and drew my pistol, "Tell me about the night we first kissed."

She paused, looking as though she was searching for the memory, her eyes drifting toward the ground. I wrapped my index finger around the trigger. Then her eyes shot up to meet mine.

"We were at your place after karaoke night at Pancho's. Maria had gone home early because her babysitter bailed on her, so it was just the two of us. We were standing on the front porch of your house and we were both drunk off our asses, but we still managed to remember every single detail when we woke up the next morning. After I kissed you, I said, 'I've never wanted to kiss anyone as badly as I've wanted to kiss you.' And then you kissed me."

I had never told anyone about that night... not even Maria, not even Nick. It was really her. My entire body tensed, I dropped my gun and let the water works run.

"Carol?"

She nodded, tears streaming down her own cheeks as she began to smile. I strode over to her, my arms snaking around her, her hands making their way around my waist. Time seemed to speed up as we stood there, holding tightly onto each other, both of us fighting the urge to kiss each other. It wasn't until Maria called us both back inside that we finally separated, though that didn't stop Carol from keeping her hand in mine the entire walk back to the house.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"So let me see if I've got this straight." I said, recapping the events that had just been described to me, "After you shot Lawson's light speed engine, you absorbed the radiating energy from the blast and got kidnapped by the Kree. On their home planet you were given a blood transfusion which makes you a human/Kree hybrid. And after being kidnapped by the Skrulls, including this guy over here," I pointed at the Skrull, who had introduced himself as Talos, "You ended up back on Earth with no recollection of your past life. Then you managed to break into Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., escape S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, realize that the Kree are actually the bad guys and regain your memories. And now, you're asking me to go with you into space in order to find Lawson- sorry, Mar-Vell's lab, where she hid the energy core that the Kree are after. Sound about right?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Though when I got my memories back, I definitely didn't remember you being taller than me though." Carol remarked with a lopsided smirk. She and Fury had filled me in on what had happened and why two green, monstrous-looking aliens were in the Rambeau house, but I was having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around everything. So rather than ask a million questions, I turned my attentions to Carol's comment.

"The last time I saw you physically was the day before I went in to receive the Super Soldier Serum. As soon as the procedure was over, I was sent to D.C. for S.H.I.E.L.D. training. We spoke on the phone a few times, but I never saw you again after that day. And next thing I knew, you and... Mar-Vell were both dead." Lawson's true name still didn't sound right coming out of my mouth. The look on my face made both Carol and Talos, chuckle.

"So what have you been doing then for the past six years?" Carol asked me out of genuine curiosity, "They didn't stick you behind a desk like Fury, did they?"

It was my turn to laugh, "God, no! Director Carter assigned a S.T.R.I.K.E. team to me as soon as my training was complete. I've been leading covert ops missions all over the planet for the past seven and a half years."

"Did they dress you up like Captain America?"

I narrowed my eyes at her and got up from my chair at the dining room table. The trunk I had brought in was still sitting by the front door, so I brought it into the dining room and set it down in plain view for everyone. I unlatched the lid and lifted it open, revealing a custom uniform, similar to Rogers' design. It was mainly blue, a navy blue, darker than Rogers' uniform and on the chest was a navy hawk crest set atop red and white stripes. Deep red leather gloves, matching navy pants, a utility belt and simple military combat boots completed the ensemble. I reached underneath the uniform and drew out the icing on the cake.

I don't know how Howard Stark had managed to get his hands on more vibranium and, frankly, I didn't ask. But before going out into the field, Stark had given me a vibranium shield and, aside from the hawk crest replacing a star, it was an exact replica of the original. I held it out to Monica, who had been sitting quietly, awestruck the entire time. She dipped a bit under the slight weight of the shield, but her smile went from ear to ear.

"I may be an enhanced soldier, but I'm no Captain America. They call me Warhawk." I said, turning my attention to Talos, "My job is to look out for the little guy. The ones who're stepped on and persecuted by those who believe they're superior. I'll do what I can to help you get the Kree off your tail."

"Thank you." Talos said, bowing his head slightly. The grandfather clock against the wall began to chime. It was late, midnight in fact, and going off of the original plan, we would be heading into space at dawn. We needed rest. After everyone figured out their sleeping arrangements, we bade each other goodnight. I began to make my way toward the living room couch, but a hand grabbed my wrist and tugged me toward the stairs. I smiled when I saw that it was Carol dragging me toward one of the guest rooms upstairs.

As soon as we were behind closed doors, Carol's lips crashed on to mine. My hands immediately made their way into her hair, hers around my waist. My heart soared at the contact, at the thought that Carol and I were once again reunited after all those years. Her tongue darted out, running over my lower lip, asking for entrance. I complied, and together our tongues began to swirl and dance in an elegant battle for dominance. The Nine Inch Nails t-shirt that Carol was wearing suddenly became too restricting, as did the plain navy thermal I had on. Both were gone in an instant, tattered remains on the hardwood. She certainly didn't seem to mind that I ripped her shirt in half, discarding it lazily on the floor. If anything, the passion that had been recreated between us began to burn even brighter, as a soft glow began to break through my closed eyes. I pulled away gently, my eyes opening ever so slightly.

"You're glowing." I whispered huskily. It was a sight to behold, pale rays of blue, purple and gold light danced off her skin in a stunning array of color that lit up the dark bedroom in an elegant display. From a distance, she must have given off the appearance of a fallen star, but here, up close, she was a woman on fire; radiant, beautiful, powerful.

"I've dreamt about this moment. About us." She admitted quietly, setting her head in the crook of my neck, listening closely to the sound of my steadily beating heart, "But I couldn't remember who you were. I wanted to, so badly. Even if it was just your name... that would have been enough. At least then I would have one part of my life that I could still hold on to."

"Well, if it makes up for anything, it's been hell without you here." I replied, my hands shifting down to her waist, taking note of the muscle that she had put on in the years that she had been gone, how warm her skin felt beneath the pads of my fingertips, "Not a day went by when I didn't wish you were with me. Even before the crash, not being able to see you, not being able to hold you like this... it was torture unlike any other."

"I love you, Paige." She muttered tiredly.

I smiled, leading her to the queen-sized bed and pulling back the covers. I pressed another kiss to her lips, this one gentle, sweet and loving, but still filled with passion.

"I love you too, Carol."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The dawn came earlier than I had hoped. But it came nonetheless, and with it came the mission at hand. Carol was still asleep, and rather than wake her up right away, I thought it best to let her rest. My trunk was still downstairs, my uniform and shield still with it, so I grabbed a spare shirt from the nearby dresser, slipped it on and ducked downstairs without a sound. When I got down there, Talos, Fury and Maria were already awake.

"She still asleep?" Maria asked me, handing me a steaming mug of coffee.

"Of course. That much certainly hasn't changed about her." I replied, taking the mug and grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl that sat on the dining room table. I turned to Fury, "So that new guy let you guys go, huh? What's his name again? Coleman?"

"Coulson." Fury corrected, "Yeah, looks like he's gonna be one hell of an agent. Already going against protocol, breaking the rules."

"Sounds like he learned from the best."

"Very funny."

"Not as funny as that time you wiped out trying to chase a couple of Soviet spies in Budapest in '91." I smirked. Fury didn't reply, he just glared at me and walked away. I polished off the coffee and the apple, grabbed my uniform and went back upstairs to change.

Sure enough, not only was Carol still asleep, but she had taken over my side of the bed, limbs sprawled out covering the entirety of the bed. I changed quickly and quietly before making my way over to her. I sat down on the bed next to her feet and shook her on the shoulder.

"You know, as adorable as you look right now, we have an entire alien race to save, so I'm gonna have to ask that you get your beautiful self out of bed."

"Fi mo ins." She grumbled into her pillow.

"Come again?"

She rolled over and groaned, "Five more minutes."

I leaned over and pressed my lips to hers, making her smile softly, "No can do, baby. We've got lives to save."

She sat up, meeting my lips lovingly on the way, then took a moment to drink in the sight before her.

"Nice outfit." She grinned, setting a hand on the hawk head on my chest, "It suits you."

"Thanks, beautiful. Now get dressed, we've gotta go."

Going to space was definitely something on my bucket list. Going to space to fight a technologically advanced race of aliens... not so much. But hey, how many opportunities was I gonna get to go to space? As I stood outside the stolen P.E.G.A.S.U.S. quadjet with Maria, Talos and Fury, who held Goose, a creature that looked like a cat, though Talos insisted she was a dangerous alien called a Flerken. I watched as Carol interacted with Monica, who had made sure to get herself out of bed before we left. She was fiddling with the color scheme of Carol's suit, before settling on the colors of the original Air Force logo.

"She's somethin', isn't she?" Fury asked me when he saw the way Carol suddenly locked eyes on me.

"Just somethin' doesn't do her justice, Fury. She's... amazing." I smiled, lifting my shield up and attaching it to the electromagnets on my back. I pulled out my Colt Mustang and checked the magazine. Six rounds, plus five additional magazines attached to my belt, perfect. Carol made her way over to the quadjet, wrapping an arm around my waist and leading the rest of us on board. We all took our seats, Maria and Carol in the pilots' chairs, Fury, Talos, Goose and I all behind them.

"Hope your science guy knows what he's doing." Fury muttered to Talos as the quadjet lifted off the ground. Talos grunted, his violet eyes staring straight ahead. After a minute or two, Carol spoke up.

"Passing five hundred and climbing."

"Maintain speed. Any change in speed will turn this old junker into a fireball in the atmosphere." I remarked, letting the familiar feeling of pressure wash over me as we climbed.

"You know you really shouldn't have that thing on your lap." Talos said to Fury, pointing at Goose who was lounging comfortably on Fury's legs.

"Our little alliance with you is tenuous at best." He replied, lifting Goose up and holding him out toward Talos, who shifted away uncomfortably, "And as long as she continues to freak you out, I'm gonna keep giving her all the love and hugs she needs."

I laughed, "Didn't know you were a cat person, Fury."

"Didn't know you were gay until yesterday, Mac. Looks like we're all learning something knew about each other."

"Guess so." I smirked, leaning back in my chair.

"Can I ask you something?" Maria asked, glancing over her shoulder to look at Talos, "Do you just turn into anything you want?"

"Ah, well, I have to see it first." The Skrull replied, surprised at the interest in his shapeshifting abilities.

"Can all of you do it?"

"Physiologically, yeah. But it takes practice, and, dare I say, talent, to do it well."

"Can you turn into a cat?" Fury asked him.

"What's a cat?"

"What about a filing cabinet?" Maria asked him.

Talos gave her a confused look, "Why... would I turn into a filing cabinet?"

"Oh! Venus flytrap! I'll give you fifty bucks right now if you turn into a venus flytrap." I smirked. Talos gave me an unamused look and I heard Carol chuckle under her breath in front of me.

"Switching engines from Scramjet to fusion." Carol announced, "Buckle up, folks."

The sudden shift in propulsion made me suck in a breath. The jet began to shake as we rose higher, everyone was pushed back in their seats. Fury began to grip the arms of his chair until his knuckles turned white.

"Hey, is this normal, like space turbulence?" He asked over the sound of the roaring afterburners.

"Pretty much!" Carol called back to him. Talos looked over at him and then at me and shook his head slowly. Suddenly, the propulsion came to a stop, everything that wasn't strapped down to something, that included Goose, began to float from the lack of gravity. I held back an audible gasp as I looked out on the vast emptiness of space for the very first time. Something that seemed so dark, so endless, and so monotonous, and yet it still managed to take my breath away.

Maria switched on the artificial gravity and everything fell back into place as the jet came to a halt.

"Locking in coordinate grid." Carol said.

"Where is it?" I asked, seeing only the black void of space and a clouded corner of the western hemisphere.

"It's here," Talos muttered under his breath, "It's gotta be here."

"Well, is it in front of all that nothing, or behind it?" Fury asked him, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. I rolled my eyes as Carol pulled up a holographic computer from her wrist gauntlet and punched in a code.

Suddenly, the void wasn't a void anymore as a massive ship appeared out of nowhere. My mouth fell open as I beheld the sight before me. Totally worth getting only four hours of sleep. Carol navigated the jet easily into the central hangar, where, once everyone was out, we went over our plan one final time. I grabbed my shield, attaching it to the electromagnetic plates on my left arm and took a deep breath, following Talos as he took off running into the bowels of the ship.

#brie larson #captain marvel x reader #captain marvel #natasha romanov x reader #marveledit #marvel fanfiction #steve rogers x reader #bucky barns x reader #carol danvers x reader #black widow x reader #captain america x reader #captain marvel x you #original character #avengers fanfiction #fanfiction #avengers fandom