[SB 240] Swift and the casual listener | saying goodbye to a buddy

Hi, I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats, where I ruminate on music, muscle, and motion at midlife.

The Casual Listener's Guide to The Tortured Poets Department

Caution: 50 year-old man attempting to write about Taylor Swift.

Proceed with care.

I’m not a Swiftie, but am Swiftie-adjacent: I live with one. Thanks to my daughter, Taylor’s music has wound its way through our car and home Sonos speakers for a decade.

And that’s been fine. Swift is a brilliant lyricist, and I’ve found her music an acceptable background soundtrack to our family life, swirling around the travel to my daughter’s sporting events, or some other chaos that reigned on the homefront.

Being surrounded by Swift, I want to understand her music better. She is the Elvis or Michael Jackson of the modern era. Or maybe they are the Taylor Swifts of their eras.

After all, Swift had to transcend the fragmented media and scattered attention of our modern age, gathering up shards of fame piece by piece, in a way neither Michael or Elvis did.

And she is more prolific than either of them.

Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department” includes 31 tracks if you count the 15 tracks dropped online overnight following the album’s general release. For comparison, Michael Jackson released only 20 songs in the entire decade of the 80s. (“Off The Wall” was released in August of ‘79. Even if you include its 10 tracks, Swift still put out more product in one double album.)

The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s first album I have tried to appreciate and understand, rather than just noticing it as I’m looking for the Wesley Chapel exit off I-75.

At first, I didn’t appreciate it much.

This will sound more harsh than I mean, but The Tortured Poets Department came across like an album on a heavy SSRI prescription. The sharp edges are all clipped off. Taylor is upset, but rarely furious. She’s sad, but not despondent. The actual music politely supports her singing, never overtaking it, the Oates to her Hall. The pitch and tempo rarely jolt—they are deliberate, cautious, waxing and waining carefully, with few disruptive changes.

With subsequent listens, I found more variety and power to the music. It’s there, but understated.

I heard somewhere that this album is less a musical record and more a poetry reading accompanied by backing tracks. Although I would not call this a “reading” — her voice sounds great—that positioning made me appreciate the album more.

I’ve come to enjoy it during the workday, or, once again, in the car. It’s pleasant and steady, in its own melancholy way, without commanding center stage.

My favorite tracks lean in to the lightly-depressed vibe the hardest: the duet with Post Malone (really more of a four-fifths-one-fifth-et, as there isn’t much Post here), called “Fortnight” and the title track.

“But Daddy I Love Him” washes out for me, dissolving into the indiscernible background soundtrack of a long string of car rides to soccer and flag football games. I feel I have heard that song many times, yet barely noticed it.

That’s a common critique of this album: it sounds like much of her work that came before it.

“I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” likely a track about touring after her breakup with Matt Healy, has some spunk to it. But there are no songs with lyrical or musical triumph. There are no spikes in the end zone, even on “Alchemy", the track about Travis Kelce. Even in singing about her new love and his on-field triumphs, the feeling is muted, even jaded at times as she sneers at detractors.

The Tortured Poets Department is in my listening rotation. Does that make me a Swiftie? Not yet. But it’s hard not to appreciate her talent, drive, and work ethic—her relentless push forward in the face of critics and withering attention.

When an artist reaches this level of fame and success, the common reaction is backlash. We’ve seen it in the weird diatribes about her being shown for eight seconds during Kansas City Chiefs games, for example.

I prefer to appreciate and understand how people break out like this—what is the creative drive behind their success? We don’t have to love all of Taylor Swift’s music (or MJ’s or the Beatles’), but isn't it better to learn from it and find something to enjoy, rather than bitching about the attention and success?

I can see myself revisiting Swift’s music in the decades ahead, both for its own merits, but also to take me back. Unintentionally, Swift has become the soundtrack songstress to evoke feelings of simple family memories as my kids grow up — days that will soon come to a close.

That alone should make me a Swiftie for life.

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Rest easy, buddy

This past weekend, we said goodbye to our buddy Finn.

Finn spent 7 years in abject terror.

He was afraid of thunder. Wind. The washing machine. Boxes from Amazon resting on the floor. The list was endless.

All that fear meant he could be a pain in the rear, but he was our pain in the rear.

Finn and our other dog Lucy, who is older than he was, weren’t super close. Many of their interactions started with Finn antagonizing Lucy, and ended with her staring at him, head down, eyes up, looking straight through his soul before wandering off, message sent.

After a brutal visit to the vet on Saturday morning, we brought Finn home and buried him in the backyard. On Sunday, we found Lucy laying next to his burial spot, keeping watch.

Lucy knew Finn could be a pain in the rear. But like the rest of us, Finn was her pain in the rear.

Rest easy, buddy. We’ll stay on the lookout for Amazon boxes.

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