0.7.0 - Tell me why I don't like Mondays (Week 7 Wrapup)
On with the show.
I listened to my 200th unique album in its entirety since January 1st on Monday this week, driving back from Manchester after watching the Superbowl, and as a special treat (and to keep my .swifties.com tag on Bluesky validated) I decided to listen to the most recent Taylor Swift album. First, a couple of notes - I understand the machinations of releasing multiple versions of albums to keep them in streaming charts longer and produce limited run vinyl and the like. When I am listening to albums, if there are multiple versions, I'll almost universally choose the studio version over any extended cut that is available (though with the way the Spotify catalogue is with its array of remasters and rereleases, often the opportunity to listen to the original studio album does not exist).
I'm firmly of the opinion that Taylor Swift did herself a disservice by releasing The Tortured Poets Department originally as a 16 track studio album; undoubtedly, this album achieves its correct and final form in the 31 track double album which is The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, and to my mind that should be the official studio version of the album. The fact that this is her eleventh studio album, and yet probably her best (the arguments are endless, and the bracket tournaments on Bluesky unending in their attempt to answer this question. This is the best, I am right, don't @ me) leaves me slightly in awe of her capacity to write songs with incredible depth of feeling, and lyrics which are cutting, wistful, spiteful and brutally honest, without running out of steam or inspiration. As an almost blow by blow account of her short lived relationship with The 1975's Matty Healy, the front half of this album exists in a series of grandiose and defiant pop anthems (My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys, Florida!!!, But Daddy I Love Him, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived) intercut with emotional and mournful country tinged reflections about a chaotic relationship doomed to collapse from both internal and external pressures.
The second half of the album, though, really excels. Past the autobiographical breakdown of a relationship gone bad, the second half of the album exists mostly as a series of acoustic guitar songs reminiscent of Joni Mitchell. Gone is the recounting of facts, and instead we get Taylor's inner monologue set to song, as her insecurities and regrets and longings coalesce into some of the most heartfelt music I can recall. If this second half of this album was released, note for note lyric for lyric by a different singer/songwriter without the baggage and stereotypes attached to Taylor Swift, it would be hailed as a musical masterpiece. If you are a Taylor sceptic, please do this for me; listen to the four songs on this album which start with track 23 I Hate It Here and end with track 27, The Prophecy . Don't think about the fact that its Taylor Swift, just on how the music feels and how you feel about listening to it. If there's something there that speaks to you, I can assure you there are other parts of her catalogue you should explore - hit me up on Bsky (@nottopgearrh.swifties.social) for recommendations.
God I could really have written about twelve paragraphs on this album alone, so I am going to tear myself away; but only partially, because one of the reasons I picked this album is that Taylor spends some time here referencing other bands and songs specifically within it, so it made a handy thread for me to loop together several other albums.
"When someone plays The Starting Line and you jump up, but she's too young to know this song"
Taylor Swift, 'The Black Dog'
I don't have strong feelings about Say It Like You Mean It by The Starting Line and I don't mean that in a particularly negative or dismissive way; I've mentioned before that the more I do this, especially when I listen to albums which are new to me, the more it becomes apparent that when you encounter a band which you associate with a certain genre of music, that's the one that sticks with you and other iterations of that music never hit quite as hard. I spent most of my time listening to Say It Like You Mean It thinking about the Pop-Punk acts of my twenties; they sound to me like Blink-182 and some early Green Day, and maybe a touch of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy in there. They play it with verve and gusto and I enjoyed my time with it, but nothing spoke to me, apart from cringing at the idea of someone being too young to know this song, instead of me being too old to know it.
"Drowning in The Blue Nile, He sent me Downtown Lights, I hadn't heard it in a while"
- Taylor Swift, Guilty As Sin?
This, on the other hand, I do have strong feelings about, mainly asking myself how I didn't know about The Blue Nile and this album before. It's from 1989, it's a kind of introspective alternative pop/soul album that you would think my parents would have been way into (in this case, I was too young to find it myself). Regardless, thanks to a Taylor Swift lyric I ended up listening to this last year, and then again this week. Hats is an absolute low tempo delight, a kind of Sunday evening record to drown in.
"You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate, we declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist"
- Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department
Sorry Taylor, I'm not with you on this one, though the Charlie Puth album I chose to listen to was his first studio album from 2015, and maybe his stuff from the 2020's is much improved, but nothing on Nine Track Mind really left a mark on me. It was all a bit wish.com Harry Styles for my taste, but it's possible I owe one of his more recent albums a listen at some point.
"You said you never met a girl who had as many James Taylor records as you, but I do"
- Taylor Swift, Begin Again
We're off references from TTPD:TA now, and back to earlier work, but if you know James Taylor like I do (my parents were devoted fans, his music is a part of my education in what I think of as good songwriting), it's not remarkable how much his musical style has influenced Taylor's. Honestly, this existed as just an excuse for me to listen to an old old favourite of mine; Sweet Baby James, like most James Taylor albums, is a collection of mournful country blues songs skillfully crafted to make you feel exactly how James wants you to feel in each moment. If you've not heard Fire & Rain, yes you have, you just don't know its title or who sang it, but Country Road and the title track should not be overlooked. I'll do a more detailed James Taylor section before this is over, but this is a great jumping on point for one of my favourite musicians.
OK, this last one is a cheat, as there's no Taylor lyric referencing this album, but I absolutely would not have found Gracie Abrams without Taylor Swift making her the opening act for the final leg of the Eras Tour. I have conflicted feelings about The Secret Of Us and Gracie Abrams in general; she's the quintessential nepo baby, being the daughter of film director JJ Abrams; If I am going to give Charlie Puth static for being Harry Styles-lite, there's no doubt that Gracie's music and presentation is so carefully styled after Taylor Swift's own that it makes me feel unfortable - uncomfortable because, despite all those caveats, this album is a total guilty pleasure of mine. There's no writing team of industry experts feeding her songs; by all accounts, most of this album came from her and her roommate writing songs on the spot sat on their couch. She knows how to write a hook that will stay with you, her lyrics are funny and self-deprecating, I can't really say anything bad about this album apart from Serious Music People will probably look down on me for enjoying it, which I think is a them problem and not a me problem. I listened to the Deluxe version of the album because while it's only 3 extra tracks, one of them is That's So True which is such an obvious monster hit single I struggle to understand how it wasn't on the original studio album. Listen to that, or I'm Sorry I Love You or Risk for representative samples - beware, they will stick in your brain after a single listen.
I'll be faster with these ones, I promise.
I listened to Innuendo because I needed an album I knew Catherine liked to play while we played games; another of my long time Something Awful Mafia friends, CCKeane, had this on his list of recommendations to me, proclaiming it to be the best Queen album. Obviously, he hasn't listened to A Kind Of Magic or the Flash Gordon album, but I almost certainly don't have to tell you that Queen are very good and I like this album a lot. Catherine declared as we were listening to it that she doesn't trust anyone who doesn't like Queen's music, which while I think that is harsh and perhaps a little judgemental, it's hard not to see her reasoning.
WORRY. and Real Life were more recommendations from my friend Liam, and unlike the Bruce Hornsby and Merry Clayton recommendations I've listened to in previous weeks, this was much more what I was anticipating getting from him. It took me a few listens to really appreciate MJ Lenderman's Manning Fireworks album from last year, and I think WORRY. might require similar scrutiny to work its way into my brain. I don't have much to say about it because I don't think I am ready to state an opinion yet, apart from its on a list of albums to go back to. Hazel English's Real Life was much more of an immediate hit for me, another alumni of the Faye Webster / Julien Baker / Phoebe Bridgers School For Very Sad Girls and my weakness for music in that style should be by now well established.
Continued Global Political Nonsense continues to make my anxiety spin like a perpetual motion machine at the moment. This has been known to manifest in long periods of insomnia, one of which I am in the middle of right now, so I thought it would be fun to listen to a couple of albums with songs about not sleeping on them.
In August you'll probably get my long form essay on Counting Crows, but while everyone I knew owned their first album in the early nineties, their second album never made much of a splash with me or anyone else I asked. I'm pretty sure I didn't know it existed until a few years ago, when I heard it being discussed on The Throwback Podcast, which compelled me to seek it out. Novelty goes a long way, and I've heard every song on August & Everything After 3000 times more frequently than I have the songs on Recovering The Satellites, so these tunes have a shiny newness to them which means I put this on more often than its more famous sister album. While I'm Not Sleeping is the song that made me pick this to listen to A Long December might be the best Counting Crows song in their repertoire, and for real weird cultural artifact, please enjoy the video for it featuring peak Friends-era Courtney Cox.
When the opening words on your debut album are 'My name is Maxi Jazz and I ain't no joke, I'll make you choke on the mic when I go for broke' you have to be ready to back that up; I'm confident in saying that the late great Maxi Jazz did just that not only on Reverence, but on every Faithless album. This was amongst the first records I bought for myself on CD, coming just as the great cassette-to-cd transition was happening in my music purchasing, and the CD copy of this which I own has lost its jewel case and most of the CD's top side art is scuffed and missing chucks; the music sounds as good as it ever did though. I saw Faithless live just once, supported by Groove Armada at the Sheffield Octogon in 1998 or so. I'm not a church going person, but being in that crowd, losing their mind, was the closest a gig has been to a religious experience for me.
Last up is Clues, a weird oddity from the recesses of my mind; I think when people think about Robert Palmer they think of the Addicted To Love video first, then Simply Irresistible because it was used in a Pepsi campaign back in the day. But I'm pretty certain my Dad owned this record, because when I listened to the Placebo Covers album, their version of Johnny and Mary immediately made me remember the Robert Palmer original, so I listened to the whole album and was shocked at how many of the tracks on it came back to me. I can't seem to summon up a specific memory of any circumstances where this album got enough airplay to sink into my memory, leaving me feeling like I've got an itch that I just can't scratch.
See, that was much faster. Last little push now.
As I mentioned in the last post, I made a cake on Saturday night, a Nigella Lawson Nutella Cheesecake to be exact, and while I was doing so I listened to CAKE's Fashion Nugget because obviously. CAKE are a hard band to categorise; in my dashboard I nearly created a specific genre tag for them called 'Not Sure?'. I bought this album because I heard The Distance on a Radcliffe & Maconie (English Radio DJs) show about 6 times in the space of a couple of weeks, bought the album sight-unseen apart from that, and then spent the following months wondering if I'd made a huge mistake with my limited budget. I honestly still don't know nearly thirty years later. The Distance is still a great song, but their cover of I Will Survive feels almost heretical, and I go back and forth about the rest of the album depending on what mood I am in.
I listened to The Invisible Band this morning to finish off the list of Travis albums lots of people listened to, having learned that they are still a going concern and have 4 more albums after this, including one from 2024. They're not getting the Linkin Park treatment though, and everything I said about The Man Who applies here also.
Closing us out, Invisible Touch I mentioned in my article on cover albums, and this is another record I had on CD as a young teen. I remember being genuinely slightly scared listening to this album; imagine being scared of Phil Collins? But this is a dark, dark album, filled with pretty evocative imagery and a kind of ethereal synth and heavy drum combo that no doubt fuelled my appreciation for Pretty Hate Machine and the music of Trent Reznor a decade later. Land of Confusion might be the generational anthem not just for the Cold War Reagan era, but our own moment of ludicrousness we are experiencing right now.
Seven weeks down. Because I was curious, I checked, and at my current pace I'll crest over 1000 albums by the 25th of July this year. Monster Hunter Wilds, a computer game I've very excited about, comes out in two weeks time though, maybe that will slow me down.
