Four Hours of Music
Taylor Swift and Cindy Lee
There have been so many disappointed reviews of the new Taylor Swift album, it’s starting to feel a bit like a backlash – “Taylor Swift Has Given Fans a Lot. Is It Finally Too Much?” ran the headline of a New York Times piece this week. On the other hand, as the Times noted in that same piece, Spotify declared The Tortured Poets Department its “most-streamed album in a single day.”
These two facts may not be opposed. Many writers have complained that the Swift album is simply too long (two hours), with too many tracks. But too many tracks is precisely what leads to too many streams. As Laura Snapes wrote in the Guardian, “The inessential 31-track sprawl of TTPD just feels as though it feeds a streaming machine where volume is everything.”
My own problem with the release is less the number of songs than the paucity of musicians, given the resources and ambition behind the project. Many of the tracks feature Taylor Swift on vocals, and a single producer on most everything else – either Jack Antonoff or Aaron Dessner. For example, here are the performer credits for the opening track and lead single “Fortnight,” featuring a (barely audible) Post Malone:
Drums, Synthesizer, Percussion, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Programming: Jack Antonoff
Vocals: Taylor Swift
Vocals: Post Malone
Dessner’s tracks tend to be more piano-and-strings based, but some are equally producer-centric. Here are the performer credits for “So Long London”:
Drum Programming, Electric Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer: Aaron Dessner
Vocals: Taylor Swift
This wouldn’t be an issue for a straight-up singer-songwriter record, and may not have been a problem for this pop album were the productions more varied. Antonoff’s style, in particular, is sonically so predictable that there’s a popular video stunt by an engineer who can identify his tracks based on less than a full bar of music.
I’m not sure what the tell is precisely for Caleb Gamman, but for me it’s a lack of space. Antonoff’s tracks lean toward a flat, featureless soundscape with one lone figure, singing words. There is no sonic space for instrumental solos, not even from one of his own many, many instrumental contributions (according to the credits, he also plays cello on this album, although so vaguely I cannot tell if he knows how to fret the thing or it’s just an open string).
Dessner’s productions on the album generally include more musicians, and more space in the mix – but not much, anyway not enough to feature the musicians’ individual contributions. No less a drummer than the excellent Glenn Kotche is on a number of Dessner’s tracks, but mixed so low you cannot feel his hands or the shape of the always varied sounds he makes. On some, a 20-odd string section is credited - but Dessner has kept them so far back in the mix, it sums to what might as well have been a DX7 pad.
Making folky, singer-songwriter albums, I’m no stranger to some of these strategies. Naomi and I recorded our first two albums essentially as a trio in the studio with a producer credited on “Electric guitar, mellotron, emulator, clarinet, tapes, bass and backing vocals.” And our self-produced albums ever since are not exactly known for their eclecticism. But maybe it takes one to know one? I can hear the missing space in these Antonoff and Dessner recordings – a space that exists by default around every instrument in every studio, no matter how DIY or pro, and that it takes deliberate action to eliminate from audio. These aren’t lazy productions in that regard – you need a lot of DAW skill to limit, compress and squeeze musical sounds into a featureless background. But it is lazy the way this trick has been used over and over on the album - the source, I think, of the tedium that many reviewers have identified but possibly misattributed to the songwriting. Those lyrics, after all, are what everyone is discussing in detail.
It is possible to make a one-person pop recording mind blowingly all over the place. Another two-hour album was just released that does exactly that, and it was made almost entirely by a single person playing and producing everything. Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is like the antimatter pair to The Tortured Poets Department, also because it is not available on Spotify or any other streaming platform apart from a single, two-hour-and-two-minute YouTube track.
The only other way to hear the Cindy Lee album (and the only way to hear individual tracks) is to download it from the artist’s fabulously Web 1.0 geocities website. Or, eventually, on the LP that “WILL BE PRESSED A WHILE AFTER THE TOUR..”
Diamond Jubilee is as extremely offline as TTPD is on. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is as full of physical, audible space as TTPD is devoid of it. Each instrument reads clearly on Diamond Jubilee – as does every unexpected gesture in its arrangements. It feels DIY not cause it’s raw but because it so thoroughly pursues its own peculiar sense of time, texture, and song structure. Bass lines disappear midway through a track, harps and fuzz guitar enter out of nowhere, girl group harmonies materialize, the lead vocal changes registers and colors throughout. Brian Wilson is my most immediate production association – I think I even heard a bit of buried studio conversation in “Wild One,” a la Pet Sounds’ “Here Today” – but it’s as if Brian performed all the parts himself, rather than those ace LA studio players he arranged in such unexpected ways.
I’m far from alone in being captured by this two-hour tour de force of odd. Andy Cush’s 9.1 review in Pitchfork brought the album to my and many others’ attention – and everyone I have told about it so far has been equally entranced. I know a lot of people with odd musical tastes, it must be said. But the hyper-odd Pet Sounds is hardly obscure. Maybe everyone’s ears are open to much more than Spotify, Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift imagine…? No one is going to call this 32-track Cindy Lee album tedious, anyway. And I don’t see why “GAYBLEVISION” (Disc 2, Track 2) won’t end up more of a club banger than anything on TTPD.
Listening to: If I don’t make it, I love u by Still House Plants
Cooking: The last black garlic bulb in what looked like a bottomless supply when I took a chance on it at H-Mart
I have the worst 'ears' for production of anyone I work with , but even I get what you're saying about Antonoff's soundscapes. The prime example of that to me was Pharrell Williams' "Happy"; where I couldn't even discern beyond the ghostliest notion the chord structure, much less what instruments were or were not present.
One gets the sense that Antonoff and Dressner are acutely aware that no listener is coming to hear anything but Swift's lyrics, so they shoved everything into drawers but those. "Serving the Song", but taken to its worst extreme, where "tasteful" vanishes into "flavorless".
But you know. The spice must flow; the pipeline must have product. In 10-15 years, one of those 31 songs will be in a TV commercial for mortgage loans or osteoporosis medication.
"Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is like the antimatter pair to The Tortured Poets Department"
You get the sense that we’ll look back on the release of these records years from now and mark it as an indicator of a shift. There were Spotify- and Bandcamp-induced tremors all last year building up to this moment, but that Cindy Lee record is the earthquake that shook a lot of music fans (myself included) out of a stupor into which the corporate music industry had lulled us.
DAW-based production has resulted in fussy, clean, “featureless soundscapes” as you called them. Social media has resulted in album releases driven more by their narrative context and story and brand than the actual songs. All Music From Everywhere Ever™ available at the frictionless click of a button has resulted in a feeling that music is disposable content: more is always better than better.
I’m not saying any of this is inherently bad. (Well, maybe the last one...)
But it does induce expectations and patterns of behavior. And that Cindy Lee record is the absolute antithesis of what we’ve grown to expect from a big album release.
The "messy production" and "sloppy musicianship" add to making Diamond Jubilee's songs, melodies, and riffs feel so uncannily, humanly, alive. A pal of mine had to Google how to import .WAVs into Spotify, feeling—for the first time since his Limewire days—the labor that goes into curating a music library you *actually* own. The little bit of friction—of having to put in track names and track orders—that gets you to pay a little more attention and feel a little more connected to the songs themselves. The slapdash look/feel of the Geocities site, the overall absence of any narrative context. You have to dig a little more to figure out what the fuck is going on. What *is* this alien artifact that landed in my back yard?
I've missed this feeling.
The fact that—like you—everyone I’ve shared it with has been gobsmacked by it is telling: It's very likely the album of the year, and will likely end up on the prestige, end-of-decade "Albums of the 2020's" lists.