thequietesthing

[thequietesthing]

since everyone is giving their two cents about the new taylor swift album, i’ll also do the same (it’s more like ten cents cause it’s very long sorry)

first of all, this album (i’m talking about ttpd: the anthology with all 31 songs) can be truly appreciated once you hear it at least twice with the lyrics right in front of you. the reason for this, imo, is pretty simple; the first thought i had while listening to this the first time (and be mindful of the fact that my mind was huddled with sleep bc it was very early) is that it sounds like a diary, more than any other of her previous albums. which is why, i think, that the people that don’t particularly like it may never have kept a personal diary in their life. and i’m not talking about gratitude journals, i’m talking about “teenage petulance” written words, with anger, resentment, hope, love and sadness. which would very well explain the lack of “storyline” that i’ve seen people complain about, in the sense that she doesn’t create stories within her songs but only verbose imaginaries. when you write in your diary you use metaphors, analogies and periphrasis but since it’s something raw and yours you don’t need to craft a story about it because the diary it’s something you write for yourself, so you don’t need to make the effort of making something “pretty” as it’s not supposed to be read by anyone else. it often feels like an unending river flow of messy words because that it’s how writing your own feelings looks like. also the fact that she often reports pieces of dialogue she imagines hearing or that someone actually said it’s a very typical trait of diary entries.

second of all, the games of assigning which song to who can be fun for like the first two hours but then it gets very freaking boring. if you don’t understand that everything that she writes she writes about how she feels and about how other people make her feel you have not been paying attention. she is the main character; if the issue for you is whether that song is written for that person instead of another, you are giving more importance to secondary/recurring roles than to her. these are her words, her story. and i’m not saying it’s not fun ok, catching references to ex-boyfriends or other people, but you can’t, and you shouldn’t, make an entire album that she wrote about her personal intimate experiences about someone else.

to circle back to the lyrics, i think that this album may be one of her best works. they are smart on both a linguistic and metaphorical level. as someone who deeply enjoys english as a language i always have the time of my life listening to her albums and her choice of association of words, themes and rhymes.

a last point regarding the tunes. i am by far the last person that knows anything about music, you give me a pretty tune and i usually like it regardless of where is from (cue my very eclectic music tastes) so when everyone said that all the music sounded alike i was like uhmm. when i heard it a second time (guys the key it’s really in this!!!) i was like no they are different from one another. but also, and this may be a little far fetched so feel free to disagree but it’s what i perceived, is that in this album she may have put much more effort in the lyrics than in the music. not always obvs she is a musician after all, but i think that the turning point here, the thing that she wants us to pay attention to, are the lyrics (also why it’s called tortured poets department and not tortured musicians department :))

to sum everything up, i really really enjoyed this album when i listened to it the first time but i’m appreciating her skills and understanding her lyrics more the second time around. it’s an album that has to be let marinate, like a sauce, otherwise is gonna taste a bit acidic. anywho this is just my opinion, i just needed to tell it to someone and the irl people in my life are not willing to listen, so people of tumblr you are the unfortunate recipients of my two cents on ttpd :)

#personal opinion #taylor swift #the tortured poets department #the tortured poets department opinion #lyrics #songs #music #taylor swift ttpd #ttpd #the eras tour #ts11

[thequietesthing]

Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012 / Cynthia Ozick / Adonis, tr. by Khaled Mattawa, from ‘Celebrating Childhood’, Selected Poems / Gregory Orr, from “Origin of the Marble Forest” / Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by. C.F. MacIntyre, Sonnets to Orpheus / John Boyne, The Absolutist

[thequietesthing]

[thequietesthing]

Something that stood out to me a lot from this album is the intentional de-personalization of extremely personal feelings and stories. She seems to have decided for this project that in order to be free to be completely honest in her art (which tbf she always has been but never as much as this album), she needs to visualize herself, and thus her stories, as a third party, an external entity on which she's conducting a post-mortem examination. Her 2016 self and the hate train she suffered after Snakegate is reimagined as Cassandra, a character from Greek mythology who had visions in her dreams but no one believed her and instead she was punished. Her anxiety of holding her lover's career back is instead described as The Albatross, this girl who everyone has been warned to stay away from bc she causes problems. Her sweet, innocent childhood self is depicted as a robin, a fesity little bird full of life, dreams, and potential who has yet no clue of the cruelty of the world.

Consequently, the characters in her life are, too, bestowed upon fictional characters from stories that have been told before and/or are familiar in some way to the listener (aIMee the girl from this allegorical high school which is actually Kim Kardashian, Peter the boy who never grew up and stayed forever in Neverland who actually is Joe, both Taylor's and Joe's separate future lovers imagined as Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, her real life therapist referred to as The Professor etc). By using the representation of well-known characters from widely popular stories and myths with names and all, she creates an even deeper line of emotional connection with the listener. Then, the 4th wall is delightfully broken in Clara Bow, where she refers to Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks as the inherent precedents to Taylor Swift. But what's even more brilliant about this is that in this way, she is making Taylor Swift into a character in and of itself. She is actually attempting to externalize Taylor Swift from Taylor the real-life woman. By narrating her stories through tangible entities presented as completely external to herself, she is inhibited by the safety of this fictional/allegorical lense through which she's allowing her stories to be consumed, and as a result, she has unlimited freedom to be more personal than she has ever been in her art before.

#ttpd #taylor swift

[thequietesthing]

me trying to assess and comprehend the lyrics of ttpd while process the fact that she dropped 31 absolutely gutwrenching songs that are so cohesive knowing damn well each one means something so intricate to her personal life while trying to figure out how these songs fit with my own life also while yelling over the double album drop being real not knowing which song to listen to again or which one is my favorite or how to go to sleep or how to be normal around other people for the foreseeable future like

#taylor swift #the tortured poets department

[thequietesthing]

"the story isn't mine anymore" she's literally. she packed it up and gave it to us and said it's not mine it's ours now let's move on

#taylor swift #the tortured poets department

[thequietesthing]

I hate it here is for all the girlies who grew up reading books as a precocious child and dreamt of worlds that exist only in a sophisticated imagination, for the girls who live in delusions

[thequietesthing]

if you asked me about any of the tunes to any song or any lyrics i’ve listened to in the past two hours i wouldn’t be able to tell you

#the tortured poets department #taylor swift

[thequietesthing]

I just think TTPD is not an album you can understand and fully digest in one listen or even a few listens and that's what makes it so great. It is accessible in terms of its melodies and high-level storytelling but the lyrical details are poetic and complex. I'm really just so excited to spend a lot of time with this album.

[thequietesthing]

call me fucking Cassandra because I was fucking right

the way the more we go on, the more i know that TTPD album is gonna break me is just not healthy

#taylor swift #the tortured poets department #ttpd #ts ttpd #the eras tour #songs #music #ttpd spoilers

[thequietesthing]

If the rumors about JATP returning for a season 2 are true, I will lose it.

#jatp #julie and the phantoms

[thequietesthing]

I am so enthusiastically obsessed with the idea of Julie and the phantoms s2, but I need them to understand that the best (only) way to do that is to pretend that the last 4 years didn't happen. no time jump, no recastings (if they can help it), no explanation on why Carlos was 9, but now he's 14, none. just simply pretend s2 came out right away. give me one. "Wow, you grew fast since dinner." "yea I ate my veggies," and then simply move on. it would be perfectly comedic and simply nothing would be better

#julie and the phantoms

[thequietesthing]

absolutely criminal how falling into bad habits is the easiest thing in the world while developing positive habits feels like fighting a literal war

[thequietesthing]

cancelling Shadow and Bone right before they were going to do the Ice Court Heist and with a WHOLE SEASON of Six of Crows fucking WRITTEN AND READY TO GO and scrapping that too is evil incarnate netflix you deserve to go out of business forever

[thequietesthing]

sometimes i am doing fine and then i get struck by an intense yearning for a show that was cancelled too early

#julie and the phantoms #the society #netflix #lockwood and co #fate the winx saga #shadow and bone

[thequietesthing]

#shadow and bone #julie and the phantoms #lockwood and co #the society #anne with an e #fate the winx saga #just to name a few

[thequietesthing]

Gloomy but beautiful morning thoughts