It's So Damn Funny

This is what happens when a computer geek starts a Taylor Swift blog.

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Big Machine is at it again. Just a couple of days ago, they put up for sale a live album of songs Taylor performed in 2008. Before the release of Fearless, she sat down for Clear Channel and performed a combination of songs from her first and second albums and a cover of the song “Untouchable” by the band Luna Halo. Lest you feel the need to capitulate to BM, here ya go.

1. Love Story 

2. Fearless 

3. Beautiful Eyes

4. Untouchable

5. Teardrops On My Guitar

6. Picture To Burn

7. Should’ve Said No

8. Change

Download (Zippyshare)

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JoJo sings ‘You Belong With Me’ for Seventeen’s lyric challenge

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In addition to being a huge T-Swizzle fan, I’m an OG JoJo fan. So yeah, this was an instant reblog lol.

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Taylor Swift - Tim McGraw (Live for the Debut Special)

Screw Big Machine Records Week isn’t over yet! Here’s another acoustic performance of Tim McGraw from 2006. This is from a radio special called The Debut created to promote her debut album (naturally). She customizes this version as well, changing the line in the bridge to “every time you turn CMT on.” I posted the full radio special awhile ago, which also includes an acoustic performance of Picture To Burn and 20 minutes of interview segments.

Download/Stream (Zippyshare)

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Taylor Swift - Tim McGraw (Santa Monica Digital/Sony Connect Set/)

Screw Big Machine Week continues! For some background, see yesterday’s post. Today’s 2006 acoustic version of Tim McGraw is from the Santa Monica Digital/Sony Connect set. I’ve seen both names used. This is one of five songs she performed to promote her debut album. She personalized the bridge to say “when you turn Kickin’ Country on.”

Download/Stream (Zippyshare)

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Taylor Swift - Tim McGraw (Live for MP3.com)

At the end of last year, Taylor left the only music label she’d ever known, Big Machine Group. BMG still controlled the music she had produced under them, however. They have taken that responsibility and acted like complete jerks with it, selling to a man she despises. And they didn’t wait for the sale to start squeezing money out of Taylor’s back catalog, putting up for preorder a vinyl single of Tim McGraw including a 2006 acoustic performance. Well, as part of my own, small protest against them I’m going to be posting a bunch of 2006 acoustic performances of the song so you don’t feel like you have to buy it. Starting with a performance for MP3.com/CNET. 

Download/Stream (Zippyshare)

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It’s Star Wars Day, i.e. May the Fourth! I am required by Star Wars Fan Law to mention this fact. But I figured I’d tie this back into Taylor with a clip from a behind the scenes video about the making of her You Belong With Me video where she is presented with several “geeky” toys including a lightsaber. In what I am sure is not sarcasm but is instead definitely, totally real, she refuses it on the grounds that she already has a lightsaber.

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OMG where have you been?

Being as lazy as I am is a full-time job. It’s not like the Star Wars Episode IX trailer was going to watch itself 20 times. As a pathetically small attempt at an apology, please accept this screenshot of a typo in one of the messages sent out to people letting them know they could buy pit tickets for the Red Tour.

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Taylor Swift - R-E-V-E-N-G-E

Hey kids, spelling is fun! And Taylor’s been spelling out things in music for years. For instance, this song, which was (I believe) recorded prior to the release of her first album. Come for Taylor making prank calls, stay for her hoping to cost the guy his S-A-N-I-T-Y.

R-E-V-E-N-G-E (Download and Stream)

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Taylor Swift - Fearless Tour Live

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I posted this on my old blog, but that blog got nuked from orbit, so I’m posting it again (2nd time’s the charm!). This is my attempt at creating a live tour album for the Fearless Tour. The audio is taken from the Journey to Fearless Blu-Ray, edited to remove all interviews and sound effects put over the music. The songs were put in the order they were performed on tour. Only songs that were included in full or nearly in full on the Blu-Ray are included. If the performance on the Blu-ray included an intro, it is included on this album. 

Tracklist:

1. You Belong With Me

2. Our Song

3. Tell Me Why

4. Teardrops On My Guitar

5. Fearless

6. Forever & Always

7. Hey Stephen

8. Fifteen

9. Tim McGraw

10. Love Story

11. Picture to Burn

12. Today Was A Fairytale

13. Should’ve Said No

Download

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The Fearless Tour kicked off 10 years ago today so it feels like a good time to bump this :)

Updated Link

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White Horse (Grey’s Anatomy Version)

The music video for Taylor’s song White Horse debuted 10 years ago yesterday. Let’s celebrate by going back to where the song began. While the album it was on, Fearless, came out in November, White Horse was introduced to the world two months earlier on the season 5 premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, one of Taylor’s favorite shows (her cat Meredith is named after the title character Meredith Grey). In fact, it appearing on the episode is the only reason it wasn’t held for her third album:

I actually wasn’t going to put this song on the album. I was going to wait for the third album because I really felt like we had the “sadness” represented on this record. Then my agency out in LA set up a meeting with executive producers Betsy Beers and Shonda Rhimes at Grey’s Anatomy because that’s my favorite show. It would just be a dream come true to have a song on it. So, I played them “White Horse.” It was just me and my guitar and they freaked out. They loved it. They said, “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” For a while, we didn’t know if we were going to put it on the record because if it wasn’t going to be on the show, then we weren’t going to put it on the album. Then they called and said they were very interested in the song. We recorded it right away, sent it off to them, and they put it in!

That haste actually shows up in the version of the song heard in the episode. It’s stripped down compared to the album version. And all those years ago, in September 2008, I was able to track down a copy of the episode with a 5.1 audio track with, thank the Lord, no dialogue in the left and right channels. Which allowed me to get a relatively clean copy of the song, with no dialogue and few sound effects.

Download and Stream (Zippyshare)

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So today producer Robert Ellis Orrall posted some really cool pictures to his Instagram account. On this day fifteen years ago, he, Angelo Petraglia, Jamie Tate, and Taylor Swift recorded two songs that would end up on Taylor’s debut album (and one that wouldn’t). To celebrate, Orrall posted Taylor’s handwritten lyrics for several of them. He also mentioned that the version of “I’m Only Me When I’m With You” recorded and mixed that day is the same that is on the album, which means the “demo” going around is almost assuredly fake. Also, note that “A Place In This World” includes the line “got my pink shirt on” which was changed to “got the radio on” in the final version. If you want to hear that demo version, I posted it a little while ago. And for anyone wondering, What Do You Say has leaked. Robert’s original description, in case the original post gets lost to the ether:

“A Place In This World” is one of three songs cut with Taylor Swift on this day in 2004 at Abtrax Studio in Nashville. Co-produced by @maestrofuzz_angeloand engineered by Jamie Tate now at @rukkusroom, this demo of “I’m Only Me (When I’m With You)” landed on the deluxe edition of Taylor’s debut, without being so much as remixed, a testament to Jamie’s mixing genius, as it was one of four he mixed the same day. “A Place In Thus World” (Orrall/Swift/Angelo) “I’m Only Me (When I’m With You) (Orrall/Swift/Angelo) “What Do You Say” (Orrall/Swift/Angelo) Produced by Angelo and Robert Ellis Orrall

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Taylor Swift - Christmases When You Were Mine (Demo)

To promote the release of Taylor’s Christmas album in the fall of 2007, Entertainment Weekly was given a demo of one of the original songs Taylor had written for it. This being 2007, and this being EW, it was posted to their website as a low-quality Flash file, a grievous crime for which I have yet to forgive them.

Download & Stream (Zippyshare)

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Taylor’s album RED came out 6 years ago and to celebrate I’m going to reminisce about the tour. The day she came to Cleveland was my final day of college, a big day for anyone, but a really big one for a dummy like me who apparently loved college so much that he stayed there for years and years. I celebrated with the best tickets I will ever have to any concert. I was in the pit (that’s the first picture) and got to see Taylor sing the rarely performed The Best Day and turn one of my favorite songs (You Belong With Me) into a Motown girl group jam as if she knew I loved Motown girl groups (Martha and the Vandellas are underrated!). I high fived one of her backup singers and got a guitar pick from one of her guitarists. It was amazing. I’ve said before that I’m never allowed to complain about Taylor tickets and that really started in this era. Not only did I get to see the Red Tour in Cleveland, I then managed to snag a ticket to see it in Pittsburgh. And again in the pit (that’s the second picture). So yeah, the Red era was awesome.

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Hi! I was wondering if you have a listenable audio of 'Babe' at Cleveland I think?

Yes, I do:

https://www71.zippyshare.com/v/z6I89DMZ/file.html

I was lucky enough to be at this show. Taylor introduced the song by asking if we were okay with her singing a song that she had “never performed live before” and I nearly fainted lol.

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Taylor Swift - Invisible (Acoustic) (Live on the Reputation Stadium Tour)

Mere seconds after I had finally recovered from Taylor performing A Place in This World in Pittsburgh, she goes and plays Invisible in Tampa and now I’m losing it all over again. I shamelessly stole borrowed as many videos as I could find and stitched together a full version of the song, complete with essentially the entire opening speech.

Download & Stream (Zippyshare)

P.S. Shout out to the fan who asked Taylor to play this. Anyone who wants to hear a song from the debut is a gentleman and a scholar in my book!

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Taylor Swift - A Place in This World (Demo)

I wrote this when I was, like, thirteen years old and had just moved to Nashville and I knew that I wanted to end up making music and on a record label but I didn’t know how I was gonna get there.

So Taylor performed A Place in This World as the surprise song last night in Pittsburgh and I still haven’t fully recovered. And I wasn’t even there! That was the first time she’d performed the song in ages. She also performed it as part of her Live from SoHo iTunes EP in 2008 which is where the quote up above comes from. Anyway, while I work on getting my breath back, here’s a demo for the song with a slightly different mix and an altered line about a pink shirt.

Download & Stream (Zippyshare)

P.S. I think my dream of her performing Mary’s Song at some point in the future just got a little more realistic!

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Fun fact: the light-up wristbands from the 1989 Tour work on the Reputation Tour! This is from the Cleveland show a couple days ago. The one on my wrist is from the Reputation Tour, while the one I’m holding is one I brought from the 1989 Tour.