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The internet has completely lost the thread. Here's what actually happened.
The director of Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer' video, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Mills, talks about getting Saoirse Ronan's 'feral' perf
(from the middle of the article)
Indeed, the long-broken-up foursome, which has come back together in recent years at least for the sake of business purposes, issued a statement in conjunction with the release of the video, saying: “This video makes the song better. We LOVE what this video is NOT – it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”
(about the shoot)
It was “an athletic performance,” Mills tells Variety of Ronan’s work on the two-day shoot earlier this year — clarifying: “an emotionally athletic performance. Saoirse could be totally feral and go so high, and then be so subtle and go there in a very real way with all those emotions. I still don’t quite get how she didn’t just shrivel up at the end.” And, Mills adds, “She reminds me of Buster Keaton… just an amazing silent film actress.”
The video covers 13 days in the very repetitive life of a woman waking up and going to an unspecified job, where she experiences a range of emotions from indifference to sorrow to rage to, finally, a kind of peace — all of these moods going more or less unregistered by the other humans she interacts with.
“It was a two-day shoot, and it was very minimal financing,” Mills says. “It’s 13 days and each day gets a very strong emotional prompt that she followed through all those different iterations… Half the time was spent like, ‘OK, go change your clothes, come back, be incredibly angry and throw the chair. OK, go change your clothes, come back, cry.’ It really did feel athletic. She had guidelines, but it was a great ride because you just never knew what the fuck she was gonna do next.
You’re only seeing a second or two seconds of each little scene, but there’s three minutes in there that we shot (of each bit). It was bonkers — so fun and so inventive, and she’s so generative of ideas and ways to be in an emotional state that felt really authentic and grounded. All the improvising that’s going on, things she’s saying that you don’t hear, the tip of the iceberg of what she did is what you see. It was so much fun to shoot.”
Bob Dylan was announced earlier this year as having written separate appreciations of more than 60 different songs for his forthcoming book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Now, the na…
Bob Dylan ha barrido en su nuevo libro totalmente para casa en una lista cargada de canciones country, folk, blues, croonerísticas, soul, R&B y rock and roll americanas en su inmensa mayoría, completándola con 3 de artistas británicos, The Who, Elvis Costello, The Clash y una italiana “Volare” de Domenico Modugno. No Beatles o Stones, pero sí Elvis, el artista de quien más canciones comenta, 4 en total.
Taylor Swift appears to be waging war over the serial resale of her old master recordings on two fronts. She recently confirmed that she is already underway in the process of re-recording the six a…
Points to Chris Willman for the lyric references in his review, especially this one:
“As motivations for prolific activity go, relieving and sublimating quarantine pressure is probably even better than revenge. Anyway, this is not a gift horse to be looked in the mouth.”
And for making me laugh with this one (although it’s sad too):
“On the sadder side, Swift is apparently determined to run through her entire family tree for heartrending material.”
And working in a very subtle BM dig:
“... it would be reasonable to speculate that it is not about a romantic relationship at all, but a professional one she has no intention of ever recalling in a sweet light. Or maybe she does harbor that a disdain for an actual former love with that machinelike a level of intensity.”
A documentary on Beach Boys cofounder Brian Wilson is nearing completion, producers tell Variety, after nearly three years of under-the-radar production that has involved collecting about 90 hours …
How Midterm Elections Inspired Taylor Swift’s New Song, ‘Only the Young’
By: Chris Willman for Variety Date: January 21st 2020
Miss Americana was keeping another song about America in her back pocket, as it turns out. Taylor Swift didn’t just record 18 songs for last fall’s “Lover” album - a 19th, “Only the Young,” was held back and kept under wraps for the right occasion. It finds its moment in “Miss Americana,” the Lana Wilson-directed documentary that premieres at the Sundance Film Festival Jan. 23 and goes wide to the public in theaters and on Netflix Jan. 31.
In an an interview for this week’s Variety cover story, Swift described the tune’s origins. Its writing followed a personally disappointing moment for the singer after the 2018 midterm elections, when she got involved by endorsing candidates in the senatorial and gubernatorial races in her home state of Tennessee, only to see them go down despite her best efforts - and those of a lot of fans she urged to sign up to vote and campaign.
“I wrote it after the midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate, whether it was a senator or congressman or congresswoman,” Swift tells Variety. “It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard. I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed. And I found that to be particularly tragic, because young people are the people who feel the worst effects of gun violence, and student loans and trying to figure out how to start their lives and how to pay their bills, and climate change, and are we going to war - all these horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now.”
It won’t be any secret to anyone watching the documentary just how crestfallen she was when the senatorial candidate Swift had declared stood in opposition to women’s issues and gay rights lost.
“I was really upset about Tennessee going the way that it did, obviously. And so I just wanted to write a song about it. I didn’t know where it would end up. But I did think that it would be better for it to come out at a time that it could maybe hopefully stoke some fires politically and maybe engage younger people to form their own views, break away from the pack, and not feel like they need to vote exactly the same way that people in their town are voting.”
Swift is seen demo-ing the song during the body of the film, before a fully produced version kicks in at the end. “With the way that the documentary ended up being politically leaning, when Lana wanted to put it in the film and use it as an end-credit song, I just went along with it. Just like everything else!” she laughs, asserting again that decisions about the film were really up to her director.
Key lyrics from the song: “You did all that you could do / The game was rigged, the ref got tricked/ The wrong ones think they’re right / We were outnumbered - this time.” Although it isn’t specific about particular causes or political issues, the track references forces that are “too busy helping themselves... We gotta do it ourselves.”
The song was co-written and co-produced with Joel Little. With the “Lover” album, he seems to have become Swift’s go-to guy, deliberately or just by coincidence, for message songs. The other tracks they worked on all, or almost all, fit into that category - “Miss Americana,” “The Man,” “You Need to Calm Down” and (if you consider self-esteem anthems message songs, too) “Me!” Now, “Only the Young” arrives as an unexpected addition to that portfolio.
Says Little, “We did a week in New York; that week we did ‘The Man’ and ‘Me!,’ and ‘Only the Young’ was the last one that we did. That was one where I’d actually come in with a drumbeat, and she was like, ‘Oh, I was actually just playing around with chords that could go with that,’ and then the song just quickly moved from there.”
Adds Little, “Lyrically, that song has got so many gut punches in it - just really important lines, I feel. As that song was coming together and we were realizing what it was saying, it was a very emotional aura. The energy in the room was really intense. Knowing the way things have been going in the States lately with all these horrible shootings and everything, for her to be saying these things made it all the more powerful.”
Production-wise, he says, “That was a fun one. There’s, like, a kids’ choir, and that’s just my two daughters, stepped up over the top of each other singing harmonies with themselves. I had to do it in a way where they weren’t allowed to know that they were singing on a Taylor Swift song, obviously, because there’s a lot of secrecy involved with all this stuff. So I had to sing the parts in a kid’s voice and then get them to sing over the top. They actually don’t even know that it’s going to be in the documentary yet, so I’m excited for them to hear it.” (Let’s hope they aren’t reading it here first.)
Will the song come out as a single? “I don’t see it as a single,” Swift says. “I just see it as a song that goes with this film. I don’t see it as a ‘let’s go make a music video and try to see what this does at radio’ single. I think I’m probably going to keep putting songs out from ‘Lover,’ if I can.” No, no - we, on behalf of fans, want to know if it’ll be available for download or streaming, apart from its place in the documentary? “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can listen to it if you want,” she laughs.
*** You can read other parts of Taylor’s interview with Variety here: Taylor Swift: No Longer ‘Polite at All Costs’ and Taylor Swift Opens Up About Overcoming Struggle With Eating Disorder
There’s a famous “Peanuts” cartoon panel, long circulated as a meme among music nerds, in which the Schroeder character, bearing armloads of LP, explains to Lucy, “Buying re…
1. Taylor Swift - Folklore/Evermore (ranking by Chris Willman)
Either of Taylor Swift’s two 2020 releases could be a list-topper in itself. Considered in tandem - entwined, like the braid that graces the cover of “Evermore” - they add up to one of the most accomplished and filler-free double-albums, official or otherwise, in all of pop folklore. When the first album was announced with less than a day’s notice in July, as something that had been instigated and finished in what amounted to four months of lockdown at that point, it would’ve been easy to look at the forested cover images and rustic fonts and imagine that Swift had either made a very slapdash attempt at indie-folk or was just going to have a serious disconnect between her ruminative new self-image and the actual content of the music (a la Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods,” a trip into the trees that ended less well). But with the assistance of new collaborator Aaron Dessner and old one Jack Antonoff, she was up to something more original than anything we imagined in those few pregnant pre-release hours of wondering whether cabin fever had gotten to her. Tree bark didn’t really have a lot to do with it: she was biting into a kind of chamber-pop that pitted the sometimes very formal, largely acoustic, not-so-percussive track beds that she wrote to against the kinds of dramatic emotions and storytelling she’d always done, and magnificently splitting any difference. It was if she’d commissioned arrangements from her primary co-producers that ordered her: You need to calm down. She did, and a globe caught up in a similarly reflective mode stepped up to embrace it. “Evermore,” released five months later, felt like it had even fewer “pop” concessions than its predecessor - yet an electronically styled remix of “Willow” made it clear that this is really the kind of writing Swift has been doing all along, under our noses, as some turned theirs up at her shinier versions of the same. The high level of lyrical cleverness and phrasing in the best ballads put her in a class with the great writers of our time, like Aimee Mann. But you have to think back to the Beatles to think of a time when someone was turning out Event Albums in such fast succession and not setting anyone up for a letdown.
4. Taylor Swift - Folklore (ranking by Andrew Barker)
As someone who’s long been enthralled by her songwriting, and entirely uninterested in the endless webs of tabloid narratives and self-referential meta-commentary that tend to swirl around her, Swift’s last few albums presented a bit of a challenge. “Reputation,” in particular, felt a bit like wandering into the middle of “Infinity War” having seen none of the last few Marvel installments. So it was a welcome change of pace to see her turn her considerable gifts outward on this delicate, beautifully crafted lockdown release, painting vivid pointillist portraits of illicit teenage love affairs, dynastic disintegration, and the wistful late-night musings of a speaker who may be, but doesn’t necessarily have to be, Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” album may have been out for two weeks already, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t command the new-release news cycle 14 days later with a single new song — the addition of a bonus track that was held back from the previous digital edition and is only hitting the streets now as part of the belatedly released CD package.
Taylor Swift, “The Lakes”
Is “The Lakes” worth a deep dive all by itself, as the 17th track at the end of an already long tail? Yes, if you’re looking for additional madly-in-love content, additional hating-your-ex-(label) content, lusher orchestration than heard in any of the album’s previous 16 songs, or if you’re just looking for a vicarious change of British-countryside scenery.
If you are a Swiftie (and with the positive vibes for “Folklore” giving her the closest thing to consensus acclaim in her career so far, this term may cover a plurality of pop fans at the moment), one of the things you may enjoy batting around with your fellow Swiftarians in the weeks and months to come is which is the album’s “real” ending. The standard edition climaxes with “Hoax,” the first time she’s ever ended on a despondent note. If you don’t feel like following her over the cliffs described in that number, though, you may prefer the more characteristically hopeful capper she provides in the deluxe edition’s “The Lakes.” Even though it’s mid-tempo, heavy-laden with strings and makes frequent reference to depression, it’s actually one of the more ebullient “Folklore” songs, as Swift describes getting away to the Lakes District in England as a tonic for Twitter, bad-blooded feuders and other urban blights, muse in tow.
The region came up in another new song that also seems to reference a healing current relationship, “Invisible String” (in which a third anniversary lunch “down by the Lakes” is referenced). Here in the most bucolic spot in Great Britain, she says she wants to “watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet / ‘Cause I haven’t moved in years” - an odd aspiration toward laziness for someone who did just start and complete the year’s most celebrated pop album in three months. But can we help it if we’re drawn into the song most when it recalls past hysteria, not current wisteria? Because has there ever been a more perfect distillation of the ethos driving her more dramatic side than in a second verse that begins: “What should be over burrowed under my skin / In heart-stopping waves of hurt”? There’s such a light-hearted side to the song that she’s clearly being a bit tongue-in-cheek when she self-consciously invokes her “calamitous love and insurmountable grief.”
It’s also fair to say she’s as serious as a heart attack when she says she’s “come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze tell me what are my words worth,” obviously meaning to pin the tail on one of the business titans who put a dollar value on her Big Machine catalog. Even there, though, she’s at play, bringing up a famous denizen of the Lakes, William Wordsworth, in her wordplay..
With a mind that’s always racing as furiously as the one in this song, the wisteria don’t stand a chance.
