#it adds a contrast to the previous verses lyric like she was so happy

[teawithswift]

Today I learnt that in down bad she is not saying “for a moment I was having a stroke” but instead saying “for a moment I was heaven struck”.

Personally I prefer my version better

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Vox // By Aja Romano // November 20th 2019

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived - and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. He is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl - and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music. Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat. “Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. It will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own - through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory.” Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song - which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s: ‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.’ This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats - the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria - she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat. This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it and from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts,” the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat - one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (This may also sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism. The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic - witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche.

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love. That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending. Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer. Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life. Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!) Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

[xfcklprtehkrx]

Follow the Music

Received this question from @beyondkailani​ : I'd be interested in your views on the episode titles, especially those released for season 2. I find some of the implications interesting - Sex and Candy being followed immediately by Como la flor for example. Very different in tone!

Okay the episode song titles thing is really fun.  For S01 I was familiar with every song, and yay cause even some of my old favorite bands in there.  Nirvana, Everclear, Aerosmith, and Counting Crows?  Can’t go wrong.  Once the episode with Rosa’s CD happened I realized the episode titles were doing the same thing, but I think for most episodes it’s way more literal than others. Since we’ve made it through S01 already I’m gonna mostly focus on S02.

I made a youtube playlist with lyrics for the sake of review: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu6cxfqCMO9l7f1jJlLLgCzQELAo7W-BZ

2X1 Stay (I Missed You) (Lisa Loeb) Okay this song, the lyrics are 100% about Michael and Alex.  Lyrics strangely seem like the inevitable moment of real separation between them because Michael is with someone else.  It also smacks a little bit of their reluctance to let go of each other for so long.  Now the title could be a direct point to both Rosa and Max seeming to be dead at the end of S01.  I mean Rosa was dead for 10 years.  She can’t just come back to life, so if she’s going to live, she can’t stay in Roswell. Even if Rosa could stay, what about all her drama with Isobel?  Problems. I mean she was Noah at the time, but Rosa doesn’t know that, so they can either tell her or have it be a constant problem.  There’s also a chance Rosa already knows and she was going to tell her dad, so she doesn’t exactly scream ‘support the alien conspiracy’ to me.

I don't pay attention To the distance That you're running or to Anyone anywhere

I don't understand if you really care I'm only hearing negative, no no no, bad

So I, I turned the radio on, I turned the radio up And this woman was singing my song Lovers in love and the other's run away Lover is crying 'cause the other won't stay

And you said that I was naive And I thought that I was strong I thought, "hey, I can leave, I can leave" Oh but now I know that I was wrong 'Cause I missed you Yeah, I missed you

You said, "you caught me cause you want me And one day I'll let you go" You try to give away a keeper Or keep me 'cause you know you're just so Scared to lose

2X2 Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Spiritualized) This one is all ‘I can’t help falling in love with you’.  That speaks to me of Michael and Maria.  Could also be a Liz leans on Kyle thing too, assuming Max is still dead.  She does always run back to him, which is super unfair to Kyle.  Maybe it’s also something good for Isobel.  She deserves a new love after everything with Noah, so I’d rather it go that route than either of the other two. 

2X3 Good Mother (Jann Arden) This episode will probably revolve around Maria’s mother, and since I predicted before that Michael’s hand and Maria’s desperation to find a cure for her mother could go sideways, I suspect some of that will happen here.

2X4 What If God Was One of Us (Joan Osbourne) As a Malex shipper I admit this is the one that interested me the most since Tyler Blackburn confirmed in this episode Alex gets a new love interest.  I can’t see how this would relate to Alex in anyway, so I was disappointed to not get any further insight.  

Now the lyrics make me suspect this is when Michael tells Maria he’s an alien. I mean yeah it’s ‘god’ not ‘alien’ but still some similarity there to me.

If God had a face what would it look like? And would you want to see if, seeing meant That you would have to believe in things like heaven And in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?

2X5 I'll Stand By You (The Pretenders) I see so many things in this one. -Rosa(assuming she’s still alive)/Liz -Max(if he’s back)/Liz -Max(if he’s back)/Isobel -Michael/Max and/or Isobel. -Kyle always being there for Liz even though he’s sort of a doormat -Kyle and Alex’s rekindled childhood friendship and Kyle being there for Alex -Tragedy strikes so Alex and Maria make up and he’s there for her or vice versa (even though I don’t foresee that lasting)

This could touch so many of the relationships on this show.  It’s too generic to me, and we won’t know until we get there.  Especially since so much will hinge on how they decide to handle Rosa still being alive and Max being dead.

2X6 Sex and Candy (Macy’s Playground) Now I know the word sex is in the title, but I never interpreted this in a literal way. I always assumed it was about eye sex.  His eyes meeting across the room with this fantasy girl and he’s surprised she’s looking back.  So maybe something romantic for Isobel or Alex.  I assume by this point Maria and Michael will be together so nothing to do with them.

Hangin' round downtown by myself And I had so much time To sit and think about myself And then there she was

I smell sex and candy here Who's that lounging in my chair Who's that casting devious stares In my direction

Mama this surely is a dream Yeah mama this surely is a dream

2X7 Como La Flor (Selena) I don’t speak Spanish so I had to check out a translation for this one, but this one breaks my heart.  It’s all about losing the one you love and letting them be happy with someone else. I could almost ugly cry at the implications of this song.

I know you have a new love However I wish you the best If in me, you didn't find happiness Maybe someone else will give it to you

If you saw how it hurts to lose your love With your goodbye, you take my heart I don't know if I can love again Because I gave you all the love I could give

2X8 Say It Ain't So (Wheezer) This song following the last song makes me feel like I am right about the main subject for that episode since it seems to follow the exact same line of thought, but it actually doesn’t.  I suspect Jesse Manes will make an appearance here.  This song is actually about a boy’s fear of his father’s alcoholism.  Then again, if the person who picked it didn’t actually know what the song was really about then yes, it follows the theme of the previous song.

2X9 The Diner So I wasn’t 100% sure which song this was referencing.  My mind immediately went to Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega, which I won’t lie, I had stuck in my head for like 6 years because I couldn’t figure out what the song was so I never heard it again.  When I finally did it was sweet relief.  Now there’s a ‘The Diner’ by Kaskade but it’s really just a remix of her song, so I’m going to assume that’s the song.

Now absolutely nothing in this song draws me back to this show.  There is a verse at the very end that seems like it might be significant, but it’s not in the ‘the diner’ version.   Then again, it could just be that the episode takes place surrounding the Crashdown, and the song title is literal.

Oh, this rain It will continue Through the morning As I'm listening To the bells Of the cathedral I am thinking Of your voice And of the midnight picnic Once upon a time Before the rain began

1X10 American Woman (Lenny Kravitz) This seems way out there, but this song makes me think of an outsider government/military type showing up to investigate and stir the pot.

So beyondkailani had directly commented on the contrast between 2X6 and 2X7.  I agree. Different in every way, but I’m not sure it has any meaning beyond trying to find song titles that fit the narrative, but then I think ‘no way’, and I’m sure it must be something more complicated.  I’m still digesting how I feel because the songs do bounce all over the place as far as genre.  

In S01 I felt like 75% of the song titles it was just the title that related to the episode.  I’m sure the lyrics also add to it, but mostly I think they were chosen just for their titles.  There are some episodes where it must be the lyrics that had meaning because I can’t see another connection (1X4, 1X10), but for most, it’s just the title.

Per example: -Don’t Speak is a break up song and I suppose you could attach a secondary meaning of the loss of your faith in someone to this song, but that’s a tough sell for me. -Smells like Teen Spirit on the teen revisit episode and I assure you the song is not actually about being a teenager… -I Saw the Sign on the episode where Liz finds a possible motive for why Isobel killed Rosa when this is actually also a break-up song of sorts. -Champagne Supernova on the Gala episode -Creep for the prison and Noah revealing the full extent of his actions (yet the song is actually about wanting someone who you think is amazing to love you but thinking in comparison to them you are nothing).  Now that I’m reconsidering this one the lyrics may also have value here. Originally I hadn’t considered that the lyrics might represent Noah’s feelings about Rosa.  Rosa not being an active character I didn’t consider her as part of the equation the first time.

I added some of these to the playlist at the top as well. 1X1-Pilot 1X2-So Much for the Afterglow 1X3-Tearin' Up My Heart 1X4-Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? 1X5-Don't Speak 1X6-Smells Like Teen Spirit 1X7-I Saw the Sign 1X8-Barely Breathing 1X9-Songs About Texas 1X10-I Don't Want to Miss a Thing 1X11-Champagne Supernova 1X12-Creep 1X13-Recovering the Satellites

Now all of this could be totally moot since most of the songs in S01 are just about the title and I focused on content to make conjectures.  This was really fun for me though.

[noveltylsland-blog]

Our 2019 First Quarter Roundup

thank u, next - Ariana Grande

(Republic)

Ariana Grande has followed up last year’s charming Sweetener with a more consistent, more confident and more moving record; thank u, next. As usual, Ariana’s voice is really something to behold, hitting every note perfectly as she delves into her own heartbreak, loss and guilt following the death of her ex-boyfriend, Mac Miller. Ariana bravely goes into this with no features, which proves to be a powerful decision, as there are no obnoxious Pharrell additions or out-of-date Lil Wayne verses, making for an appropriately personal record. As if to ease us away from the lack of rap features, we are treated to a Wendy Rene sample on ‘Fake Smile’, which will put a real smile on the face of any hip-hop head. The juxtaposition of deep lyrical themes with the positive, playful instrumentation is rather refreshing, and it’s good to see Ariana excited about life and this new chapter in her life. -M

Gallipoli - Beirut

(4AD)

Zach Condon’s Beirut project has buried Balkan folk deep in the hearts of the Western indie fanatics ever since the release of its first three albums. He’s had us enamoured with the sound ever since, and while Beirut’s work has seemingly gotten ever more formulaic and poppy, that folky, worldly manifesto has never really left Condon. Compared to 2015’s No No No, the most recent Beirut project Gallipoli actually sees him taking it in a more varied and independent direction, and you’ll be hard-pushed to find anything objectionable as Beirut traverse their usual pastures of percussive ukulele and various organs and synthesisers. Gallipoli isn’t short of entirely new sounds for the band either and, indeed, it’s hard to see it as anything but a solid record. Condon might not be making the same impact on the musical landscape as he was thirteen years ago but this is his most consistent release in a decade. Gallipoli proves there are indie bands in far worse form than Beirut; an admirably fresh and progressive release for a band who probably don’t particularly need to be either of those things. -E

Assume Form - James Blake

(Polydor)

Even if it isn’t quite the musical landscape-defining, career-best record that James Blake seems inevitably destined to produce, Assume Form goes quite some distance to confirming him as one of this era of popular music’s defining and most influential figures. And that means a lot, considering no one else is really quite like him. There’s a very particular beauty to the combination of Blake’s music style and his love-themed lyricism, and Assume Form sees both assemble for an impressive, career-best effort. More checked for excess than The Colour in Anything but more stylistically developed than Overgrown, the niche Blake has found treads a fine line between hip-hop and sparse, soulful electronica. Assume Form shows what he can do with both, seeing the likes of Travis Scott and Andre 3000, but also Moses Sumney and Rosalía, make impactful and appropriate appearances alongside Blake’s own plainly romantic lyrics. He’s refreshingly obsessive and open but never too doting or unrelatable, and tracks such as ‘Assume Form’, ‘Can’t Believe the Way We Flow’ and ‘I’ll Come Too’ clearly reveal this untethered romantic happiness. Whether you like his newfound bessottedness or not, one can’t deny Blake has carved himself a distinctive aesthetic, to such an extent it’s no wonder his collaboration is so sought-after by hip-hop artists. Even more exciting is that there’s probably much better to come from Blake, and he remains (as he has for the last ten years) one of the most interesting and exciting artists in popular music. -E

Liv - Daniel Blumberg & Hebronix

(Mute)

Apparently a collaboration between Daniel Blumberg and himself (an endeavour I’m still not sure is artistically innovative or a bit pretentious) Liv builds on Blumberg’s 2018 release Minus with impressive amounts of abrasive noise and more chaotic baroque instrumentation. Hebronix is supposed to be Blumberg’s own psych-pop project, predating his releases under his own name, but on Liv it seems like he’s used it to fill out his own sound. His lonely vocals are more like Phil Elverum on the louder Microphones/Mount Eerie records, while the scrawls of anxious feedback that underly the majority of Liv endlessly build to lengthy, haunting finales; entirely validating the record’s lack of drums. The fact that Liv was recorded in only one take is a feat unto itself, never mind the consistency and coherence that it gives the record. Despite seeing releases on the infamous Mute Records, Blumberg continues to be overlooked by pretty much everyone – and as he’s putting out exceptional, genre-bending experimental music like this he deserves far, far more attention than he currently enjoys. -E

Careful - Boy Harsher

(Nude Club)

Despite “minimal wave” having seemingly ran its course, Boy Harsher provide another argument for it being the perfect time to rework the genre. On Careful, inspiration is clearly drawn from the likes of Depeche Mode and New Order, but whereas these bands created colourful, dynamic dance tracks, Boy Harsher do the complete opposite; as if they’ve been booked to DJ a funeral. Ghostly vocals speak of abandonment and loss over layers of cold, pounding synths and minimal drums – fit for any cyberpunk movie. Dotted throughout the record are a handful of quieter, atmospheric moments which add to this cinematic feel; intensifying the anxious, dark nature of the project. This is a synthpop record which truly reflects the times. –M

Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery - The Comet is Coming

(Impulse!)

The sophomore offering from The Comet Is Coming is the latest outstanding British jazz record, taking the reins from from Sons of Kemet’s 2017 offering Your Queen is a Reptile (incidentally another project with the involvement of Shabaka Hutchings), with more of an electronic, rock fusion. Fusion of the last twenty years has usually been the result of influence the other way, injected jazz into electronic, funk or rock music; but Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery appears to have come the opposite way. Foremostly a jazz record but enhanced and driven by elements of other genres, it’s catchy and passionate spiritual jazz, topped off with harks to Sun Ra and an inventive space-age theme. The Comet is Coming are yet more evidence of the burgeoning, world-leading London jazz scene and this is easily one of the year’s most striking and innovative releases. -E

Czarface Meets Ghostface - Czarface and Ghostface Killah

(Silver Age)

The follow up to the much-anticipated and mostly-forgotten Czarface Meets Metal Face, Czarface Meets Ghostface proves to be an enjoyable return to form for both Czarface and Ghostface Killah. As usual, all beats are produced by The Czar-Keys (7L and Jeremy Page) and are an electrifying mix of updated, gritty boom-bap, and futuristic beats reminiscent of early-morning superhero cartoons. Lyrically, the emcees really entertain, bringing the right amount of corniness needed for a project based around comic book superheroes, but still manage to sound imposing and even threatening when necessary. A specific standout moment is Esoteric’s verse on ‘The King Heard Voices’ in which he moves his way between four different flows with such ease. Comparisons with the collaboration with MF DOOM were always going to be drawn, and, for this album, that is a good thing. I’m not sure it would have been able to stand on its own, but in comparison, it shines. –M  

Remind Me Tomorrow - Sharon Van Etten

(Jagjaguwar)

Sharon Van Etten’s most lyrically and instrumentally developed record yet, Remind Me Tomorrow continues to carry Van Etten’s reputation for impressive songwriting and great capacity for reinvention. Her vocals are emotionally resonant and forthright and, helped by super-producer John Congleton, her instrumental developments clearly exceed that of her previous contemporary folk. Often the instrumentals here are moodier and heavy, even descending into lower-key, electronica-influenced, more Annie Clark-esque sound. Contrasting with that are lead singles ‘Comeback Kid’ and ‘Seventeen’, which have a Springsteen stomp to them, but mostly Remind Me Tomorrow’s tracks are of a more sullen quality. Well written, well produced, well performed, there isn’t much more one can ask of an indie album – and though Van Etten doesn’t pull out anything spectacular out of the bag on Remind Me Tomorrow, it’s one of the year’s strongest releases and a progressive release for her artistically. -E

This Is How You Smile - Helado Negro

(Rvng)

Robert Carlos Lange takes a step back from his usual focus on race and politics to reflect on his life and hone in on his musical soundscapes. Latin folk and atmospheric synths are mixed beautifully to create a cathartic listening experience which Lange guides us through with his gentle vocals, switching back and forth between English and Spanish. Lange’s hauntological influences are evident more than ever on Smile. Beneath the cosy, relaxed instrumentals there are field recordings and unnerving samples which give the nostalgic feel of a Caretaker project, with some of its dejectedness too. The perfect example of this is ‘Fantasma Vaga’, which directly translates to “Ghost Knife” in which Lange describes a supernatural figure over droning synths and sparse steel drums. The triumph of Smile is this ability to overlay and mix these tranquil folk songs, with a hint of discomfort, giving it just the right amount of edge. –M

Crushing - Julia Jacklin

(Polyvinyl)

The 2010’s have become synonymous with female singer-songwriter indie folk; Sharon van Etten, Angel Olsen and Courtney Barnett are just some of the artists who have really championed the genre. It has, however, become rather saturated in the past couple of years, making it that much harder to standout and make a name for oneself. Julia Jacklin has a lot to say, however, and is determined to be heard. Themes of betrayal, loneliness and acceptance are touched upon in a mature and articulate way. Jacklin stands out because she really gets into her subject matter; she intensely scrutinises herself and her surroundings in order to find answers to her questions and solutions to her problems. It is empowering and refreshing to hear an artist not only acknowledging their struggle with humanity and empathy, but so confidently confront and explore it. –M

Love Is - Jungstötter

(PIAS)

Gaining some buzz from his tour with Soap&Skin this spring, Fabian Alstötter’s debut album under the name Jungstötter is a gloomy affair. The name Jungstötter is a mix of his family name and the German word ‘jungstoter’, which translates to ‘young dead’, which perfectly embodies the overall theme of this record. The general slow pace of the album is occasionally disrupted by more intense and chaotic moments, creating some really dynamic and striking tracks. On listening to this record, a barrage of familiar sounds will flood your ears. From the intense baritone ballads of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to the androgynous vocals of ANOHNI, there is a wealth of alternative art rock influences dotted throughout. Though, at times, Alstötter does seem reliant on his influences, it is a marvellous debut from the German, obviously keen to form his own signature sound. –M

[X X] - 이달의 소녀 [LOONA]

(BlockBerryCreative)

Loona’s reissued EP is a modern and fashionable set of pop tunes pretty typical of K-pop but with some characteristics Western listeners might find in the work of Grimes or, to a lesser extent, other electro-pop artists like SOPHIE and Charli XCX. Considering there are twelve members of Loona, [X X] is a watertight release, even if it stylistically varies a bit between tracks. Opener ‘X X’ combines electronic chillwave with dubstep in an interesting way, followed by the very modern album highlight ‘Butterfly’; and while many of the rest of the tracks aren’t particularly memorable, they certainly aren’t dull – ‘Colors’ even seems overtly influenced by American R’n’B. With all its similarities to Western pop, it’s easy to see [X X] as a record that could be a gateway into Korean pop music for Western listeners; with the added bonus of being of slightly more substance than your usual idol group. -E

Elephantine - Maurice Louca

(Northern Spy)

A by-product of the Arab Spring in 2011 was the development of a flourishing music scene in Egypt. Cairo-born composer and performer, Maurice Louca, is one of the most exciting names to have risen from this scene. On his third project, Elephantine, Louca explores native Egyptian jazz, surrounding them in the avant-garde. On the track ‘One More for the Gutter’, outbursts of free jazz are complemented by the intensity of guitar-led post-rock. Whilst the finale, ‘Al Khawaga’ is a powerful, repetitive groove littered with swinging horns and hectic drum fills. Elephantine is an inventive exploration, covering immense musical ground throughout its six compositions. –M

Malibu Ken - Malibu Ken

(Rhymesayers)

Aesop Rock has always kept a low profile and doesn’t seem too fussed about reaching the mainstreams. This collaboration with Tobacco of Black Moth Super Rainbow fame certainly doesn’t’ change that as his infamously lengthy and challenging bars have finally found a match. Tobacco’s own brand of neo-psychedelia and indietronica is so out of skew with traditional hip-hop beats that it gives Aesop an edge which he has certainly been missing in the past couple of years. Aesop revisits old themes and is as introspective and philosophical as ever, and opener, ‘Corn Maze’, and ‘Suicide Big Gulp’ showcase some of the best flows of his career. Tobacco’s production is faultless throughout the entire ten tracks, which is good to hear after last year’s lacklustre BMSR effort. Aesop Rock’s dry, esoteric style finds a new home in Tobacco’s weird world of psychedelia. –M

Girl With Basket of Fruit - Xiu Xiu

(Polyvinyl)

Even for Xiu Xiu, Girl With Basket of Fruit is a wild release. Post-pop, post-industrial, post-punk and post-everything, there’s nothing comfortable or light about it – especially compared to the Arcade Fire-cum-lunatic style of 2017’s Forget. So much of this record is unsettled and eerie, isolating and unpredictable. There’s bits of Swans (Thor Harris showing through), some Einstürzende Neubauten, some Suicide, some drone, some Baroque. There’s no belittling Xiu Xiu’s ability to entirely manipulate mood, and here demonstrates again the emotive uniqueness of Jamie Stewart’s exulting, uber-dramatic vocals as well as a new, unsettling sound that includes a pretty vast array of instruments from upright bass to electronic percussion. I’ll be listening to this for years before getting anywhere close to actually dissecting and understanding what Xiu Xiu are doing here, but that’s what makes it so compelling. There’s nothing else like it, an album of intriguingly formless music that’s worth hearing just to for the experience of being so entirely, helplessly intrigued. ­-E

[jezfletcher]

1000 Albums, 2020: Top Tracks #50-26

Hey folks! After the fun and excitement of counting down my top albums of 2020, I'm launching straight into my top tracks. Today, we're counting down numbers 50-26, which will leave the Top 25 as a Christmas present from me to you tomorrow. I don't know exactly how many tracks I've listened to this year, but I conservatively estimate more than 12,000, which puts these tracks in the top 0.4% of all the music I've heard this year. YouTube versions of the songs are included where possible. I belatedly discovered that I can also embed Bandcamp links as well, which is probably a better option, from a "supporting artists" perspective. If you stumble upon something you like, go buy it on Bandcamp. Apologies if the video clips for any of these are wildly offensive—I have not at all vetted them before embedding them. Enjoy!

50. L.E.J. - Pas Peur (French chamber folk)

I’m starting off this write-up with this excellent bit of folk—a sultry chanson, backed with low strings that develop into a full little chamber ensemble. I’m perhaps demoting this down to a fairly low position because I heard this track as a single, and was thrilling in excitement for the release of their album, which consisted of this song, and a whole bunch of songs that sounded nothing like this song. So it’s a standout, but it’s not necessarily a sign that L.E.J. is an artist I want to follow in general.

49. Avec Sans - Altitude (vapor pop)

When I first heard this track, I loved it a lot, especially the contrast between the restrained, almost plinky verses, and the smash of drums and synths which mark the start of the chorus. The rolls of the hihat and the fuzzy synth bass are overt and intense and I love it. Overall, it ended up not quite being of the same depth and character as many of the tracks above it though.

48. Trixie Mattel - Malibu (pop rock)

Trixie Mattel is such a fascinating artist, and she’s a genuinely great songwriter too—far outstripping most (all?) of her RuPaul’s Drag Race cohort. This is a great bit of pop rock, the kind of thing I absolutely groove along to and sing at the top of my lungs (at least until we get to the falsetto swoop in the chorus). I will absolutely keep following Trixie Mattel’s career as long as she’s producing music.

47. Beans on Toast - Logic Bomb (jazz folk)

The top track from Beans on Toast this year is this jazzy number, performed with his new full band, and filled with pessimistic predictions about the fall of the world through the computers we depend on. I’m far more sanguine about the world he describes, so I’m left to enjoy the groove and the gentle horn riff which launches each new doomsaying verse.

46. Nelson Kempf - Family Dollar (art folk)

A long, slightly meandering adventure in avant-garde folk, with Kempf’s conversational lyrics, found sound recordings like announcements at an airport, and the persistent presence of gently struck marimba or xylophone. It’s a great piece of music, although it’s also one which is hard to think about as a catchy tune—it’s certainly not something that gets in my head all that much, which is probably why it’s languishing a bit in the 40s. But every time I’m reminded of it, and listen to it, I do enjoy going through it again.

45. Marcelyn - Guilloteens (experimental folk rock)

I switched from Google Play Music (shutting down, of course) to Spotify about half way through this year, and as a result, my Spotify end-of-year list was jank, missing anything from the first half of the year, and lacking much of my revision listening. I say all of this because of all the songs I’d heard since switching, this was apparently my most listened-to on Spotify. It’s certainly not a bad song, and it’s a song which won Track of the Week the week it came out—but it’s also languishing in the mid-40s on my end of the year list, so it’s not genuinely a standout. But it is very solid, especially the shifting vocal harmonies from an evocative chorus. It’s certainly a song which makes me keep an eye on Marcelyn in the future.

44. Little Big - Hypnodancer (funeral rave)

It’s one of the great tragedies of 2020 (you know, along with all the sickness and dying) that there was no 2020 Eurovision Song Contest, because Little Big, progenitors of the hardstyle analog “funeral rave” were going to represent Russia. Which possibly would have been one of the only times I would have been cheering for that country come voting time. Anyway, the song they were taking to the competition was not this one, but another called UNO. But this is better, capturing the pop aesthetic into a hard 90s underground techno beat. Maybe we’ll get to see them again in 2021.

43. Walk Off The Earth feat. Harm & Ease - Toxic (eclectic pop cover)

Prolific indie pop coverers Walk Off The Earth have seemingly come up with a neverending stream of singles this year, none of which seem to be obviously pointing to a new album—especially given that their last album (my #2 album of 2019) was released towards the end of last year. But I keep listening to and enjoying their fun cover versions. This one, done with philosophical stablemates Harm & Ease builds into a great, raucous singalong version of one of the millennium’s pop classics.

42. Stormzy feat. Aitch - Pop Boy (grime)

I’m very conscious of the general lack of hip hop on my end of year list. It’s a genre that I think is ill-served by its most prominent examples currently. Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, Drake—all have an extremely thin production quality and a drawly delivery that lacks the rhythm that really helps the style. But grime (and UK rap more generally) seems to get the point of what makes the style worthwhile. With a kicking beat, rhythmic delivery that lands its rhymes beautifully, Pop Boy is probably the best bit of grime this year. Stormzy and Aitch trading flows is genuinely fun to watch. I’m also glad that I have a new grime favourite after its Godfather outed himself as a raging anti-Semite earlier in the year. Stormzy seems pretty chill by comparison.

41. The Fratellis - Six Days in June (pop rock)

The Fratellis are a band who are absolutely rocking the late era of their career. Their 2018 album In Your Own Sweet Time was an absolutely cracking set of music, and if this lead single is anything to go by, their 2021 album is going to be similar. Swinging in 6/8, and with a horn section to add something of an orchestral sound to their accessible pop rock, this is a great track.

40. MOBS - Big World (80s pastiche pop)

These guys did an amazingly fun album this year, taking a broad kind of funky electropop and embracing all of the biggest 80s tropes. This one leans on the synth horns, and some working synths that you just know have the black and white keys reversed. It’s a jumpy, poppy, danceable track—one of the ones this year that’s most likely to get me grooving.

39. The Lemon Twigs - The One (alt rock)

A great piece of music (albeit one from an even better album), this is almost a kind of throwback alt rock—it has elements of the 80s to it, more poppy than the Cure, but maybe containing a similar kind of theatricality to it. It’s very happy to swing between high tenor vocals and squealing guitars for its drama. But on top of everything, it’s just a great bit of pop rock.

38. The Cuckoos - Weekend Lover (glam rock)

There’s something that you’ll likely see over and over again in this list, especially if you listen to the tracks and look for similarities. And it’s a driving, perhaps slightly repetitive riff in a pop rock song. This has a great one, incorporating bass and synths, and working in counterpoint to the straight up percussion line. It’s something of a formula that works really well for me, and you’ll see it a number of times on this list.

37. MisterWives - It’s My Turn (indie pop)

MisterWives are absolute stars of the music project. In 2017, the last time they really released much music, they had my #1 song of the year for Machine, and also took out #3 on my albums list. This year’s album didn’t do quite as well, but it’s hard to deny there are some pop bangers on it, like this one, their top entry this year. It’s a lot of fun, with manic, colourful energy. Sure, it’s not a #1 track of the year this time around, but I defy you not to have some fun with it.

36. Sammy Brue - Pendulum Thieves (alt country)

A fabulous piece of country rock, about stealing a bit of time back—maybe you want an extra minute with a lover in a perfect moment, or maybe you want to take back a fight. It’s nicely done with an anthemic chorus and some harmonic slide guitar in the background. Great piece of music.

35. TheFatRat feat. Laura Brehm - We’ll Meet Again (pop EDM)

Just a great piece of dance music. It has a great riff that evokes other classic dance numbers from the past 10 years like Clean Bandit’s Rather Be, throwing in a bit of grunty wobble bass for good measure. It’s short and sweet and catchy, and I like it for that.

34. Starbenders - Holy Mother (glam rock)

A track that came out of nowhere the week it was released, because I didn’t overly love the album. But this is just a full-throated bit of stomping glam rock that I couldn’t go past it for song of the week. Incidentally, Sam liked the album a whole bunch more than me and we ended up both giving this particular song a nod. It’s just a raucous, fun bit of music with a singalong chorus I often find myself headbanging along with.

33. Minh Beta - Let’s Fight COVID! (Vietnamese coronavirus pop)

Absolutely one of my iconic songs of 2020, this is a straight up pop banger released as a PSA by Minh Beta about the best ways to stop the spread of COVID-19 in his home country of Vietnam. It also has an excellent video clip[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSiK7U46PfA] with anthropomorphised superhero versions of things like “Wear a Mask”, “Don’t spread Facebook conspiracy theories” and “Don’t share your ice cream cone with your mates”. It’s apparently a re-skin of Minh Beta’s previous track “Viet Nam Oi!”, but we’ll forgive it for being a timely readjustment for a good reason (personally, I credit about 90% of the success that Vietnam has had containing Covid to this song). And also, it just absolutely slaps.

32. Kiesza feat. Lick Drop, Cocanina & Shan Vincent De Paul - Dance With Your Best Friend (pop)

You know this might be the highest track of pure unadulterated pop. There’s nothing subversive or quirky about this—this is just a catchy pop track. It’s helped along its path by some great rapping from Cocanina, and a bit of that laddish vocal quality from Shan Vincent De Paul with the London accent of Rat Boy and Yungblud. Just a fun bit of music.

31. Ultrahappyalarm - Messy Gyaru (happy hardcore)

CRITICAL DAYDREAM by ULTRA HAPPY ALARM

It has been so many years since I’ve heard a true bit of happy hardcore like this. It has all the things I loved about the style in the 90s, but it brings with it a complexity to the production which ensures that you can’t just immediately pick apart the tracks. This was the standout on a great set of variegated techno in Ultrahappyalarm’s EP Critical Daydream. More happy hardcore for 2021, please.

30. Saint Saviour - Taurus (chamber folk)

Instrumentally, this is such a beautiful combination of piano and strings, with cello dominant, and a set of beautifully blending folk voices over the top. Later, it brings in some soft percussion to bring it home. Hauntingly though, the repeated piano ostinato is layered with a counterpoint of vocals in the final section. It gives me chills.

29. Kate Rusby - Love of the Common People (indie folk cover)

I clearly love this song, originally a standard, but most famously recorded by Paul Young, because there were two separate covers this year which reached my end-of-the-week list of best tracks. This, however, is the better of the two. It has a soft kind of electronic folk quality to it, and Rusby’s sweet, unaffected vocals perfectly fit into the mix. I’ll admit that much of the credit for this being so high has to go to the original songwriters—the team that also wrote “Son of a Preacher Man”. TIL.

28. Seazoo - Honey Bee (indie pop rock)

A lovely bit of pop rock, clearly a genre I like, especially when it has a catchy, slightly unusual riff to it. In this case, it’s a repeated rhythmic guitar stab that plays against the snare backbeat, creating this persistent sense of rocking back and forward. The rest of the song is solid enough to keep it moving, and a late guitar solo kicks it into another geat.

27. City Mouth - Sanity For Summer (indie pop rock)

A fantastic bit of upbeat pop rock. It starts with a melodic theme, then absolutely blasts out a manic piano riff which becomes the energetic motor of the track. Mostly, it’s just catchy, energetic music that makes you want to get up and dance. We need tracks like that this year.

26. Cory Wong & Chris Thile - Bluebird (jazz-bluegrass crossover)

Cory Wong has had a really strong year this year, releasing a full album, a live album, and two paired EPs. This comes from Dawn, the lighter, brighter of the EPs, and pairs his excellent guitar work with the sublime mandolin of every one’s favourite mandolinist. This is just exceptionally virtuosic work from both of these guys, and the combination just ratchets up the quality.

[cherry-interlude]

(Incomplete) Review of Lust For Life

This is the first half of my unfinished review of Lust For Life by Lana Del Rey written on my Wordpress (canwetalkaboutthatthing) which I’m trying to convince myself to finish. Also, all of the written things are my opinion AND I haven’t proofread or anything!

You would only have to know me for ten minutes to discover how much I love Lana Del Rey and her music. Despite the criticisms she has received for things she has said and the glorification of drugs, violence and death, I personally feel there is more to her than that; positives that outweigh the negatives. I feel she is a talented artist - musically, lyrically and visually - and she has a spirit as beautiful as her voice. However, I don't allow this worship of her to halt my own opinions of her music - ones that may differ from the mainstream critics that have already dissected her record - which leads me to this badly-introduced post on her newest album (forgive me, I'm rusty).

When she released Lust For Life this year I felt blessed with her new offering of music - and opinionated. Listening to her album on near-repeat throughout the end of summer and entirety of autumn has given me the chance to pull apart each track and decide precisely how I feel for them. Some I became hooked on immediately - I sang along, I cried and I recognised the familiar 'Lana Del Rey' vibe she consistently has in her previous albums. Others I felt unsettled with, as I couldn't connect to them nor did they have the traditional 'Lana' vibe. Not to say that they're bad songs, nor to say that they are objectively the lesser songs on the album, but in my own personal opinion some were not as favourable as others.

Beginning with the opening track, Love - her first release for the album - I was pleasantly and wonderfully surprised. Whilst it had some new additions to it (directing the song towards her beloved fans, referring to us as 'kids', the pleasant vibe which is rarely seen in a Lana Del Rey song) it still had the familiarity of her vaguely retro music and the lyrics including her favourite "vintage music". It's a beautiful song, easy to get into and gives you a warm vibe. Paired with the futuristic video of shooting stars, floating cars and a beaming Lana, it is a purely joyful and reflective song, paying homage to the fans that, like her, are just young and in love. It's the essence of the majority of her music - to be in love, to fall out of love. Love is a central theme for most of her songs and lyrics. This track takes a positive approach towards it, introducing the album with a lust for life.

This continues into the second single and second track of the album - Lust For Life - her first duet out of the five. It is still Lana with a hint of something new - the familiarity of the doo-wop music and the Americana references to Hollywood go beautifully with her ecstatic joy for life rather than the consideration that we're all really born for death. Once again Lana croons with The Weeknd (previously in Prisoner, Stargirl Interlude and at the end of Party Monster in The Weeknd's albums Beauty Behind The Madness and Starboy) and it's impossible to deny that their voices are made for each other. Both sweet and swooning, silken to listen to, they're a musical match made in heaven, and it makes the line "my boyfriend's back and he's cooler than ever" that much more adorable. Lyrically, the song is about the joys of being with that special someone, seeing the wondrous hope in the world and enjoying being alive, just stripping down and taking off your clothes to only enjoy one another's company - or perhaps "taking off" the serious wall around our true emotions and selves after the worrying events of 2017, an idea that's more believable due to the politically-aware theme of the album. Comparing Lana's almost spoken, low verses with a hint of smiling in her tone to her swooping, sing-a-long choruses, it's another track to make you feel good inside and want to twirl around on the H of the Hollywood sign with the person in your life.

Both of these tracks - happy, and featuring Happy Del Rey - are soon followed by the return of traditional Lana: a cinematic, sweeping opening, a quote from the vintage film (Carnival Of Souls) and devastated confessions of how it hurts to love someone but you can't help yourself: 13 Beaches. Once again, Lana has given us a song to cry over, to lie back and envision the gorgeous imagery she invokes throughout the song - sunlit beaches, dripping peaches and ballroom dancing (as randomly as it sounds). Though it is a song dedicated to the impossibility of being alone when you're famous, and the complicated relationship with fame (loving it and hating it), it can still be taken as a sweet song for a lost lover, and it's these interpretations that make her music on the whole so much more enjoyable for each person individually. It's pure Lana Del Rey, just as brilliant and upsetting as The Blackest Day, Pretty When You Cry or Blue Jeans - though feels slightly disconnected to a real love interest due to the roots of who it's really for: fame.

The fourth track, and one of the shortest, is decidedly my favourite. It's a song that fills me with so much joy as it does sadness that I can't resist it at all. It's a song I frequently listen to and sing along to as there are so many elements that make it so fabulous. Firstly, once again the Lana-isms return: stunning imagery of cherries, wine, rosemary and thyme, and the difficulty in loving a dangerous man who is no good for you. Secondly, the music itself - I think it's a fun and sexy song, especially when you see Lana perform it live - and it makes it that much more enjoyable to sing and dance to with friends. Thirdly, its connection to the previous song: In 13 Beaches, she delicately references to eating "dripping peaches", a stunning image. However, in Cherry, she informs us that her peaches are "ruined". It's a beautiful link, and she has often reused and linked lyrics in many songs before. In this album, peaches, black beaches and summer bummers are recycled in the first few tracks, linking these opening songs together - and connecting them further is the vibe. Moving onto the fourth thing I adore about Cherry is the swearing. Between verses and choruses, and at the end of the song, she exclaims a muffled "Fuck!", and peppers the latter half of the song with "Bitch". It's spiteful and sexy, a comeback that both deals with the emotions and ruin as well as calling out the one who made her snap. The insults honestly make it more fun, especially when you can shout them out loud when no one is around and imagine you're a sneering Lana looking down upon the man who destroyed the things she loved.

White Mustang, the second short track, takes a slightly different turn. Rather than being directly insulting towards the ne'er-do-well, she instead laments over him. He was a big man with a big car, clearly a dangerous man like the one who made her feel as if she was "smiling when the firing squad was against [her]" - the "revving"/"lightening" brings to mind danger and potential damage. It's a gentler song, with a soft piano throughout and slower choruses. This song is definitely a close favourite for me, keeping in line (once again) with recognisable Lana Del Rey imagery (cars/horses) and the dedication to a man she loved who she couldn't keep up the pace with. The switch from white Mustang the car to white mustang the horse is swift and cute, and my favourite part of the entire song is the whistling at the end. It brings along the slightly Western vibe, of a typical American cowboy which contrasts perfectly with the modernised addition of racing car sound effects. I just basically enjoy all these little things - subtle sounds and shifts that only layer it and add to the imagery.

"Summer"/"bummer" was a rhyming couplet in White Mustang and it only foreshadowed her next track (surprise, surprise, Summer Bummer). Her second duet and first of two with Asap Rocky (and Playboi Carti) begins with an entirely different piano vibe - a dark, quick paced throb of built-up energy which Lana flawlessly introduces. It feels big and explodes into a brilliant track starring Rocky in the second verse and in the backing vocals, but Lana has her own way of rapping: delicately listing "white lines and black beaches and blood red sangrias" to give it the summery vibe. This hip-hop track feels guided away from the usual Lana Del Rey but it's fresh and cool as a summer salad cucumber, her lazy vocals woven with her wavering warble towards the end of the track. It's not my favourite and I often prefer to skip Rocky's part (sorry) but it's still a great track.

Locky return with Groupie Love, my most likely close second on the album. I have to take a moment to mention how much I adore this song: the first time I listened to it, and most of the times following, I cried. I find the sweet lyrics, the gentle, bubbling music and the adorable, adoring tone so overwhelming. In some ways it's a parallel to White Mustang: both songs repeat their title over in the chorus, though whilst White Mustang sounds unhappy and longing, Groupie Love sounds radiant. It's a song that chokes me every time and returns to the theme of the follower of a brilliant man but this time rather than losing him or yearning for him, he returns his love to her. Rocky is sparkling on this track, his rap more low-key than his previous song, and their voices together remind me of the National Anthem video - the kisses they blew and the way they held each other as Jackie and John F Kennedy. The sweetest moment? The way they both sing "You and I, til the day we die." Lana and Rocky have sung together before (obviously on Summer Bummer but also on Ridin', an unreleased track) and they compliment one another wonderfully. Where The Weeknd and Lana share a similar voice that can drip like honey, Lana's lighter vocals oppose Rocky's harder, deeper tone, but it's just as beautiful, especially in a track so cute.

This to me is the where the best part of the album ends - seven strong tracks, definitively Lana Del Rey, each of them some of my favourite songs. When In My Feelings begins, I feel like the record takes a slight nosedive. In My Feelings is a song that I always feel is out of place. It doesn't feel quite like something Lana would sing to me, and whilst I understand she may experiment with styles and it's a song many fans favour, I can't connect with it. Does it have her smokey, filtered vocals? Of course, and they're as pretty as ever. Does it have the incredible imagery? Definitely: cigarette smoke, guns and coffee to name a few. However, it feels sort of empty, not quite with the rest of the album. It's a strong song aimed at a certain someone, warning them that she may be a beautiful rose but she's anything but delicate, unafraid to get her thorns out, and I can't say I don't enjoy the "tough bitch" she is expressing. But for me it just falls flat and doesn't quite feel right, especially when the bridge becomes a messy demonstration of her high notes that make it difficult to hear the lyrics. It's not a bad song but it's not the best.

Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind. I've been debating about this track for a while in all fairness. It has its positives but also its unmissable negatives, and usually I just skip the track rather than debate with myself whether or not I enjoy it as much as most of her other work or not. The message is excellent, where she sings of festivals and wondering about the future generations, and I like how Lana is taking the opportunity to use her music as a message to her impressionable fans - and get them thinking too. However, it doesn't feel quite polished and finished, the trap beats too heavy and the chorus a bit messy when it layers with several vocals. It feels like a hurried track, not yet ready for release out of production. I will say though, it did have heightened meaning to me following the Manchester terror attack this year, and after the tragic event occurred I found myself listening to Coachella at a whole new angle. I just can't consistently get into it as a song itself, nor can I relate to it.

God Bless America - And All The Beautiful Women In It is yet another song that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm not saying it's bad - it's quite beautiful - but it doesn't have the same vibe that made me fall in love with Lana's music a few years ago. Of course, she changes over time, and experiments, but to me I can't quite feel like I'm listening to a Lana Del Rey album. This is the point where you take the first few tracks and realise it doesn't sound anything in the same line as them; the music itself is different, a gentle guitar strum that brings to mind ABBA each time I hear it.

To be continued

I do love all of her music but this is an *attempted* non-bias, objective (ish, it hasn’t worked, I still gush about her) review of her music from my opinion.

UPDATE: -> Complete review <-

[cancatervation]

favourite music 2017

The affording of enormous weight to barely concealed fragility and vulnerability; when I pore over the contents of my iTunes from the last twelve or so months it’s plainly apparent that this is the hill I’ve elected to die on. Almost all the albums I found myself infatuated with at some point or another in 2017 meditated upon desire, the transience of romance, and the anguish that often accompanies its pursuit.

I’m acutely aware of how oddly this contrasts with my own life, which for the past almost-two-years has been romantically fulfilling in the way that my previous 25 absolutely weren’t. On this, I would say two things. First, that stability is elusive even (maybe especially?) for the most outwardly rose-coloured of us, and that maintaining relationship hygge takes compromise and is not easy, and for those reasons feelings of vulnerability are never far from the front of my mind; and, second, that it’s testament to the skill of certain songwriters and performers that their work was able to make this gay-ass conventionalist really feel something every now and again last year.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that I only just worked out that the theatrical presentation of desire is something I’m drawn to, but certainly there were some things in the past year that I really did begin to understand. Theatricality is often used in a critical sense as pejorative; something that is too extra, that goes too far, that is all tell and no show. Despite its predisposition towards excess, musical theatre has, for instance, always played out as sterile and spurious to me. (Sorry. And look at it this way, you don’t ever need to worry about getting me tickets to Hamilton). It’s so dramatic that it becomes too dramatic; your self-awareness isn’t allowed the chance to be suspended, even for a moment. An album like Lorde’s Melodrama makes its intentions apparent before you’ve even heard a note of it, but its theatrics (and there are many - think of the wailed chorus of “Writer In The Dark”, the gory car crash of “Homemade Dynamite”, the bridge in “Supercut” that accelerates like you’re on a bike rushing down a hill) are as easily consumed by sitting silently in tears as they are dancing, or walking, or lifting heavy weights, or running up a hill (to make or not to make a deal with God), or lying in blissful supta baddha konasana. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that hyperemotional vulnerability is for all seasons and for all hours of the day and I am now happy to welcome it into every aspect of my life.

I wrote over fifty blurbs for various songs on the Singles Jukebox last year. Some I loved, some I hated, what’s new. I wrote a blurb for “Praying”, Kesha’s first solo single in nearly five years, which turned out to be both the highest scoring song on the site for 2017 and the champion of my personal “list”. I sort of said all this already on the Jukebox, but my love for “Praying” lies nearly entirely in the way Kesha leans so heavily into her aphorisms, finding new ways to bring profundity to ostensibly simple lines like “I’m proud of who I am”. (Contrast this with most of Taylor Swift’s 2017 work, which forewent specific detail in favour of portentously loaded maxim, but forgot about nuance and came up mostly dry). When Kesha punctuates her sermon with a thunderous kick drum, it’s basically game over. As the stories of survivors of sexual assault, abuse and harassment began to dominate news media in the second half of the year, the song only gathered further resonance.  

Lorde’s album held court as my favourite for most of the year. A promo image released by Kelela at the beginning of August threatened a coup. The odds shortened a few days later upon the release of its lead single and the arrival of the full album at the beginning of October marked the tangible takeover. Take Me Apart is all juxtaposition, which when applied to albums is often code for jumbled quagmire, but here there’s too much attention to detail, steadfastness of narrative, and, er, feeling, to get mixed up in anything like that. It see-saws between playful flirting, introspection, self-acceptance, control, loss of control, falling slowly through the sky, and falling fast through the abyss. I love it so much. It’s also very queer and very Black. Support Black queer art! Especially when it’s this well crafted.

Aside from all THAT, my favourite things in music last year were Moses Sumney’s Tiny Desk Concert, attending the Lorde show in the Botanic Gardens,  the line “every single day I fight another war; every single night I feel more powerful!” in Rina Sawayama’s “Take Me As I Am”, and Rihanna telling Diplo his music sounded like a “a reggae song at an airport”.

My ten favourite songs of 2017 were:

1. Kesha “Praying” - as above and here;

2. Lorde “Green Light” - see here. The score given, however, is wrong. Add another point.

3. Sigrid “Strangers” - see here. I can’t wait until she’s everywhere and everyone knows her; her potential to me scans as “unlimited / infinite / fucking enormous, if it must be quantifiable”.

4. MUNA “I Know a Place”. The album version is acceptable but I’m also partial to this live one, which involves some changes to the lyrics.

5. Tove Lo “Disco Tits”. Like a wonky, filthy Kylie B-side played underwater.

6. Kelela “Turn To Dust”. Refer also to the first set of songs below. She didn’t play this at her concert this week, which is lucky, because otherwise its title may have proved prophetic.

7. Nilüfer Yanya “Baby Luv” - see here. See also dirgey diatribe above re: vulnerability.

8. Rae Morris “Do It” - I’ve become more and more besotted with this as time has passed and am not sure whether I’m most impressed by a) the wordplay b) the ping-ponging percussion in the second verse c) the subtle yet giant switch-up halfway through d) the soaring vocals or e) managing all of the above in less than 3 and a half minutes.

9. Rina Sawayama “Alterlife” - it did not take me long to request for lamination of a stan card for a popstar who loves key changes and here deftly incorporates influences as diverse as the Need For Speed soundtrack, Samantha Mumba and Madonna at her glassiest.

10. Tove Styrke “Mistakes” - see here. I’m ready for her to run away with 2018, in or out of a wedding dress.

Aside from those, here are some other songs I enjoyed in 2017, variously categorised and (with the “top 10″) collected in a Spotify playlist, located here:

Songs that can make you feel like you’re floating slowly heavenward

Björk “Arisen My Senses”

Charli XCX “Track 10”

Julie Byrne “Natural Blue”

Julien Baker “Appointments”

Moses Sumney “Quarrel”

Rae Morris “Do It (Nico Muhly Dance Remix)”

Sampha “(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano”

Sevdaliza “Loves Way”

Slowdive “Slomo”

St. Vincent “Slow Disco”

Susanne Sundfør “Undercover”

Dance music that I barely pay any attention to throughout the calendar year and then become unusually enthusiastic about come end-of-year-list season

Bicep “Vale”

Gerd Janson x Shan "Surrender”

Honey Dijon “Catch The Beat”

Jad & The “Strings That Never Win”

Kink “Perth”

Minor Science “Volumes”

Octo Octa “Adrift (Avalon Emerson’s Furiously Awake Version)”

Shanti Celeste “Make Time”

SW. “Untitled B2”

The xx “On Hold (Jamie xx Remix)”

Yaeji “Raingurl”

Songs for the summer gloaming

Charlotte Day Wilson “Doubt”

Daniel Caesar “Blessed”

Frank Ocean “Chanel”

Jessie Ware “Stay Awake, Wait For Me”

Ladi6 “Guru”

Rachel Foxx “Happen To Me”

Sampa The Great “Bye River”

Sevyn Streeter “Before I Do”

Syd “Body”

Tyler, The Creator “Garden Shed feat. Estelle”

Plaintive songs for grey afternoon walks

Alvvays “Dreams Tonite”

Amandla Stenberg “Let My Baby Stay”

HAIM “You Never Knew”

Kehlani “Advice”

Khalid “Winter”

Lana Del Rey “Love”

Laura Marling “Next Time”

Paramore “Forgiveness”

Perfume Genius “Die 4 You”

St. Vincent “Happy Birthday, Johnny”

SZA “Prom”

Taylor Swift “New Year’s Day”

Best bangers

Amber Mark “Heatwave”

Charli XCX “Lipgloss feat. Cupcakke”

Charli XCX “Porsche feat. MØ”

Charlotte Gainsbourg “Deadly Valentine”

Charly Bliss “Glitter”

Drake “Get It Together feat. Jorja Smith & Black Coffee”

Dua Lipa “New Rules”

Haiku Hands “Not About You”

Ibibio Sound Machine “Give Me A Reason”

ionnalee “Samaritan”

J. Balvin x Willy William “Mi Gente feat. Beyoncé”

J. Hus “Did You See”

Jessie Ware “Your Domino”

Jorja Smith x Preditah “On My Mind”

Kah-Lo “Fasta”

Kelela “Truth Or Dare”

Kendrick Lamar “LOYALTY. feat. Rihanna”

Kllo “Last Yearn”

Leikeli47 “Miss Me”

Lorde “Sober”

Maliibu Miitch “4AM”

Miguel “Banana Clip”

Nite Jewel “2 Good 2 Be True”

Paramore “Hard Times”

Phoenix “J-Boy”

Rina Sawayama “Take Me As I Am”

Ronika “Better Than Ever”

Rose Elinor Dougall “All At Once”

Sigrid “Don’t Kill My Vibe”

Stormzy “Big For Your Boots”

The Horrors “Something To Remember Me By”

Tove Lo “Shedontknowbutsheknows”

Whethan “love gang feat. Charli XCX”

Wolf Alice “Don’t Delete The Kisses”

Finally, here are thirty albums I loved last year. Onwards and upwards!

1. Kelela Take Me Apart

2. Lorde Melodrama

3. SZA Ctrl

4. Fever Ray Plunge

5. Charly Bliss Guppy

6. Wolf Alice Visions Of A Life

7. Rina Sawayama RINA

8. Jessie Ware Glasshouse

9. Tove Lo Blue Lips

10. Charli XCX Pop 2

11. MUNA about u

12. Moses Sumney Aromanticism

13. Sevdaliza ISON

14. St Vincent MASSEDUCTION

15. Susanne Sundfør Music For People In Trouble

16. Ibeyi Ash

17. Sampa The Great Birds & The Bee9

18. Kink Playground

19. Daniel Caesar Freudian

20. Bicep Bicep

21. Sophia Kennedy - Sophia Kennedy

22. Miguel War & Leisure

23. Laura Marling Semper Femina

24. Ibibio Sound Machine Uyai

25. Jen Cloher Jen Cloher

26. Dua Lipa Dua Lipa

27. The xx I See You

28. Honey Dijon The Best Of Both Worlds

29. Kesha Rainbow

30. Leikeli47 Wash & Set

[ewanreviewin]

  Song: “Slide” by LPX

In <100 Words: Cheating a bit since this came out the end of last year, but I didn’t listen until the EP. “Slide” almost feels like a MS MR single if you didn’t know that Lizzy was doing her own thing these days, with its powerful drums and – so far at least – fairly clear vocals (on the verses). THEN Lizzy starts to belt about the lack of warning her heart gave regarding heartbreak. THEN she and her band bust into the incredible, dancey chorus. You’ll be screaming along with Lizzy by the end of the bridge.

Fave Lyric: “The sweetest love in life cuts you like a knife, ripping your insides, leaves you paralyzed.”

I Also Recommend: “Tightrope” has been and still is my favorite LPX track so far with the absolute shredding of that guitar. “Red Queen” is my favorite “new” song from the EP.

The EP Overall: It’s quite a banger of an EP and really makes me excited to see what the LPX project has to give in the form of a full-length album.

What This Sound Like: My heartbreak coming to life and screaming at me, with sick guitars playing in the background.

Song: “My My My” by Troye Sivan

In <100 Words: Writing a good love song is actually a super underrated skill. As is creating a great pop song. Troye Sivan, luckily, has the ability to handle both under his belt. “My My My” is so unabashedly happy. Troye sings to his lover to just let go and enjoy the moment of being in love – and in a world where love has so much pressure put on it, why don’t you?! Bring on the album, baby.

Fave Lyric: “Now let’s stop running from love.”

The Video: It’s sexy. It’s pretty. It’s gay. Come on – how can you not love it.

What This Sound Like: Running through a field at night as a rainbow – somehow – appears in the sky.

Song: “Supernatural” by BØRNS

In <100 Words: This is a bit of an underrated song from Blue Madonna. I am obsessed with the multiple drum play going on (I even hear bongos) and the strings in the post-chorus. There’s even a theremin solo in the bridge. Hell. YES. Lyrically, “Supernatural” falls on the second half of the album (right after the interlude actually) where Mr. Born seems to be over the heartbreak and is moving into a more introspective view of his previous relationship. It’s all dreamy and just lovely.

Fave Lyric: “Is it love or am I fooling around trying to find the truth?”

I Also Recommend: “Faded Heart” still holds up quite well, the witty and bright, yet bitter and cold “Second Night of Summer,” the rock-tinged “We Don’t Care,” and the empowering “I Don’t Want U Back.” I’d include the interlude, “Tension,” but it’s ONLY AN INTERLUDE!

The Album Overall: I’m really happy that he went down a route that was less energetic and… polished as Dopamine, even though I really enjoy that record too. It’s a great follow-up, though at the same time I feel like he’s yet to achieve his full potential. I have a feeling that will come with the next record.

What This Sound Like: A montage of going to the mall, but on an alien planet, but everyone’s happy.

Song: “After the Storm” by Kali Uchis (feat. Tyler the Creator & Bootsy Collins)

In <100 Words: Kali expands her resume a little by venturing into the deep funk of “After the Storm.” Tyler name drops his newest record & the Disney deer Bambi in his mellow & very fitting verse. Kali sounds great on the track too – singing very sexy & empowering lyrics as she likely speaks to herself in a mirror. The highlight of the track is easily the production. The bass is excellent & the groove slows down a bit towards the end before picking right back up & leaving you wanting more once the track draws to a close.

Fave Lyric: “So you gotta be careful baby, and look both ways before you cross my mind.”

What This Sound Like: Laying in silk sheets dressed in your softest robe.

Song: “King for a Day” by Anderson East

In <100 Words: This song is quite cheeky and I didn’t realize! The opener for Encore is actually a “let’s-get-it-on” song because I’d rather hook up once than be strung along as an unrequited love for a long time. You would not think that’s what Anderson is singing about when you first listen to “King for a Day.” Tinged with some elevating trumpets in the bridge/end of the song & very traditional guitar/drum pairing, the instrumental of this track is quite infectious.

Fave Lyric: “Even if your heart can’t look away, even if our love can’t stay together, I’d rather be king for a day than a fool forever.”

I Also Recommend: The scandalous & energetic “Girlfriend,” “Surrender” which sounds like that “rollin! rollin!” song, the sweet but also jamming with the guitar “Sorry You’re Sick,” and my favorite mid/lower tempo track “This Too Shall Last.”

The Album Overall: It’s quite good Americana/blue-eyed soul music!

What This Sound Like: Wrangling cattle on the ranch as the sun is high in the sky.

Song: “Kissing Tree” by The Spencer Lee Band

In <100 Words: Whoa, WHERE did this song come from? “Kissing Tree” opens up for a while as just an acoustic guitar and a back and forth from higher pitched vocals to, who I guess is the main singer. The song builds up more and more with a few strings, and then a NASTY bass line once we get to the second verse. Lyrically, it’s probably what you’d expect from a song called “Kissing Tree,” but some lines in particular are quite clever. All the instruments being released from their cages in the bridge – oh yeah, favorite bit.

Fave Lyric: “Shake you like a leaf, break me off a piece, I got everything I need under the kissing tree.”

What This Sound Like: Unsurprisingly, like sitting on a tree & making out with someone.

Song: “Disappear” by Tonight Alive (feat. Lynn Gunn)

In <100 Words: In case you didn’t know, Lynn Gunn is the front woman of the awesome band PVRIS. She doesn’t hijack the “Disappear,” but rather she gives the track a little more fire to make it that highlight from Underworld. The song is liberating, fun, and also a bit detached.

Fave Lyric: “Why does it feel like home when I’m lonely?”

I Also Recommend: “Last Light” is one of the softer moments on the record that’s really needed. “Burning On” is another fun, upbeat banger, and the punk rock “Temple.”

The Album Overall: Jenna’s vocals are awesome on this record, but I can’t help but feel the sounds of the album have kinda been done before.

What This Sound Like: Getting out of your comfort zone to do something that you enjoy, by yourself.

Song: “Lottery” by Jade Bird

In <100 Words: What a great melody on this song, especially on the chorus. “Lottery” almost feels hippie/Woodstock ready with the soft guitar moments & jangling tambourine. However, the lyrics add a cool contrast to this, being filled with number-talk. Plus, her voice is lovely – like birds singing almost. Seriously, can I talk about the chorus again? The ending line has been stuck in my head for days now.

Fave Lyric: “You used to say that love is a game, but you got your numbers and you’re betting on me.”

What This Sound Like: Spending your time with a loved one in nature instead of spending your money inside a casino.

Song: “Bite My Tongue” by The Academic

In <100 Words: It can feel good to speak your mind, but sometimes it’s better to just sit down and shut up. “Bite My Tongue” seems to touch on the short-term joy (or potentially, in the end, long-term joy) of not holding back and also deciding to keep quiet for the sake of “not raining on your parade.” Meanwhile, this the band playing probably makes this the most upbeat track on the record – and it sounds great, especially on the chorus.

Fave Lyric: “My dear, what have we become? … So I’ll just bite my tongue.”

I Also Recommend: The track that directly follows this, “Fake ID,” sounds like going out for the night – kicking off the track with the opening of a door. “Permanent Vacation” and “Television” are two more upbeat bangers. I also enjoy “Different.”

The Album Overall: It’s a quick listen at 35 minutes, and while the songs on the record may feel too similar to each other, the pacing & length of the songs don’t tire you out at all. All-in-all, a good debut!

What This Sound Like: Driving with the top down by the beach.

Song: “Perfect” by Andreas Moss

In <100 Words: Andreas has a silky sweet voice that sounds best over non-distracting music. “Perfect” does a good job of this by having, essentially, just an acoustic guitar in the verses/bridge and a fairly subdued worbly bass in the chorus. If anything the shaking bass in the chorus pairs perfectly (lol) as Andreas hits the high notes in a swoon to the listener who “doesn’t have to be perfect” and is “worth it to me.” It really does take someone else to see the beauty in yourself when all you see are flaws.

Fave Lyric: “These are the moments when I see you – the purest form of you bleeding through.”

What This Sound Like: Blushing.

Song: “Stay Off My Mind” by Skott

In <100 Words: Immediately, you’ll hear “I’m thinking of you!” in some sort of ethereal, potentially self-sampling outburst that will catch your ear. The production kicks in as “Stay Off My Mind” enters the first verse with chirpy drums, guitar, and piano. Skott seems to throw in some autotune into the mix, which makes her sound pointedly distant from the listener who she wants out of her mind. The one moment of a back & forth of “still on my mind” in the chorus is really pretty. Lyrically, it’s more heart-wrenching than you’d expect – being about the death of a close friend. Damn.

Fave Lyric: “I’m left with the silence – there’s something about it, I don’t know, I don’t mind just sitting here alone.”

I Also Recommend: Snappy & groovy “In the Mood.”

The EP Overall: Because it’s so short I don’t have too strong of an opinion one way or another, but the two aforementioned tracks get me very excited to see what a full record would look like.

What This Sound Like: Wandering a city, with nothing to distract you from thinking about thoughts you were trying to avoid.

Week of January 12, 2018 Song: "Slide" by LPX In <100 Words: Cheating a bit since this came out the end of last year, but I didn't listen until the EP.

[shanedakotamuir]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM

[corneliusreignallen]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM

[gracieyvonnehunter]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM