Taylor Swift – The Life of a Showgirl – Is the audio performance up to the marketing hype? – Review (CD,colored vinyl records, streaming,Stereo Atmos)

[diddley]

 

[Rick63]

^^ I love Rhiannon!!

 

[Barrelhouse Solly]

I don't disagree with your general point at all, but I'll drop by to tease out that analogy. Pure electronic music (cf Autechre, Ryoji Ikeda, Tim Hecker and many more) is certainly abstract. Pop music generally centres on a figurative element, the singer. Usually supported by many other elements including synthetic sources and treatments. In that case we are not looking at Rothko, but rather stylised portraiture, perhaps (Gerhard) Richter recently but you could start a century earlier. Pop art being almost too obvious.

Agreed. It's more like impressionism.

 

[goat76]

Such a voice, stripped from any emotion, vibrato, feeling. The pitch software is working overtime here and it's all marketing for the little kids that can spend the money. And Taylor needs lots of it.
My god how I hate the world of modern music.

To be fair, Taylor Swift is not completely talentless.

 

[Sal1950]

To be fair, Taylor Swift is not completely talentless.

There's probably a couple folk on The Voice every week as talented or better.
Her career has been a juggernaut with support collaboration from the very best in the business cause everyone wants to get on and be associated with that train.. Toot Toot
I'm a country music fan and watched as her personal attributes grabbed so many of the pre-teen and teenage girls, everyone wanted to be like Taylor. I then watched her make the switch to the much larger world wide pop market where she did the same X10. It will be interesting if she can maintain that roll as she enters her 40s and beyond.

 

[Caldera]

To be fair, Taylor Swift is not completely talentless.

Taylor Swift‘s trainwreck performance with Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards 2010 documents strikingly her talent free „singing“, my two cents. Singing can perhaps be learned to a certain extent, but she’ll never come close to reaching the vocal legend Stevie Nicks. It’s a remarkable publicity coup that Taylor Swift can regularly bask in the glow of Stevie Nicks at her gigs. It’s actually a bit sad that the icon Stevie Nicks allows herself to be part of something like this — though maybe she simply feels sorry for Taylor Swift.

The video seems to have been removed from youtube but is still circulating on TikTok.

https://www.tiktok.com/video/7468138485484948779

 

[raif71]

no sacd format from tay tay ?

 

[diddley]

A great example of Terrible and Overrated.

 

[masterhw]

can always count on people uninterested in listening to the actual album showing up to these threads.

 

[Rick63]

Taylor Swift‘s trainwreck performance with Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards 2010 documents strikingly her talent free „singing“, my two cents. Singing can perhaps be learned to a certain extent, but she’ll never come close to reaching the vocal legend Stevie Nicks. It’s a remarkable publicity coup that Taylor Swift can regularly bask in the glow of Stevie Nicks at her gigs. It’s actually a bit sad that the icon Stevie Nicks allows herself to be part of something like this — though maybe she simply feels sorry for Taylor Swift.

The video seems to have been removed from youtube but is still circulating on TikTok.

https://www.tiktok.com/video/7468138485484948779

 

[mhardy6647]

^^ I love Rhiannon!!

She is phenomenal.
Her recordings are probably pretty free of gratuitous studio trickery, too. I mean, maybe not, but - lord, I love to hear her sing (and play), even though many of the songs she's recorded rip my heart out.
e.g.,

 

[mhardy6647]

no sacd format from tay tay ?

DVD-A for the retro-hipsters in her posse.
Come to think of it: the term posse is probably two decades out of common usage, speaking of retro-hipster.

PS Apropos of @masterhw's comment above, I am more or less Taylor-agnostic. She's OK at the dosage level I get of her. We watched some extensive Disney video of the creation of one of her albums (that kind of spare, acoustic one, back in the COVID era, IIRC) at our son & daughter-in-law's house some years back. It was long but pretty good. It seemed to be a latter-day window into what one would imagine the Laurel Canyon gang of the 1960s might've been like to hang around with while they were creating music for the ages. Well, lots less drugs in Ms Swift's case, I reckon.

PPS Does Tay-Tay have a stack of vintage (or modern) McIntosh hardware in her chalet? I'm guessing... no...

​

 

[Rick63]

She is phenomenal.
Her recordings are probably pretty free of gratuitous studio trickery, too. I mean, maybe not, but - lord, I love to hear her sing (and play), even though many of the songs she's recorded rip my heart out.
e.g.,

I also think she's a natural beauty!

 

[mhardy6647]

I also think she's a natural beauty!

in every sense of the word. A force of nature, she is.

 

[Sal1950]

The video seems to have been removed from youtube but is still circulating on TikTok.

A great example of Terrible and Overrated.

Yep,
A shame she didn't have auto-tune to help her out there.

 

[Sal1950]

She is phenomenal.
Her recordings are probably pretty free of gratuitous studio trickery, too. I mean, maybe not, but - lord, I love to hear her sing (and play), even though many of the songs she's recorded rip my heart out.
e.g.,

Another child of Nashville, but this one has extreme talent, a modern day Linda Ronstadt

 

[diddley]

She is phenomenal.
Her recordings are probably pretty free of gratuitous studio trickery, too. I mean, maybe not, but - lord, I love to hear her sing (and play), even though many of the songs she's recorded rip my heart out.
e.g.,

If you hear something like this, it is heavenly beauty.

 

[goat76]

Taylor Swift‘s trainwreck performance with Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards 2010 documents strikingly her talent free „singing“, my two cents. Singing can perhaps be learned to a certain extent, but she’ll never come close to reaching the vocal legend Stevie Nicks. It’s a remarkable publicity coup that Taylor Swift can regularly bask in the glow of Stevie Nicks at her gigs. It’s actually a bit sad that the icon Stevie Nicks allows herself to be part of something like this — though maybe she simply feels sorry for Taylor Swift.

The video seems to have been removed from youtube but is still circulating on TikTok.

https://www.tiktok.com/video/7468138485484948779

As Taylor doesn't seem to have any problems keeping her voice in pitch at the Tiny Desk Concert I posted, I would suggest that there were maybe some foldback monitoring problems for her in that live performance with Stevie Nicks.

 

[Sal1950]

Her recordings are probably pretty free of gratuitous studio trickery, too. I mean, maybe not, but - lord, I love to hear her sing (and play), even though many of the songs she's recorded rip my heart out.

Yep, most of her stuff offers good to excellent DR. Even her latest w/Justin Robinson "What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow" has a 96k rez file with a Official DR 12.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow / Artist: Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR Peak RMS Duration Title [codec]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR13 -0.00 dB -16.21 dB 2:28 01 - Rain Crow [flac]
DR12 -0.00 dB -14.84 dB 2:39 02 - Brown's Dream [flac]
DR13 -0.00 dB -15.32 dB 2:29 03 - Hook and Line [flac]
DR12 -0.00 dB -14.72 dB 2:00 04 - Pumpkin Pie [flac]
DR11 -0.00 dB -13.56 dB 1:58 05 - Duck's Eyeball [flac]
DR14 -0.00 dB -15.82 dB 2:20 06 - Ryestraw [flac]
DR12 -0.00 dB -14.00 dB 2:48 07 - Little Brown Jug [flac]
DR13 -0.00 dB -14.93 dB 2:28 08 - Going to Raleigh [flac]
DR12 -0.00 dB -15.04 dB 2:00 09 - Country Waltz [flac]
DR14 -0.00 dB -15.40 dB 1:31 10 - Molly Put the Kettle On [flac]
DR11 -0.00 dB -12.85 dB 2:31 11 - Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss [flac]
DR13 -0.00 dB -15.23 dB 3:18 12 - John Henry [flac]
DR14 -0.00 dB -17.33 dB 1:58 13 - Love Somebody [flac]
DR11 -0.00 dB -12.61 dB 2:18 14 - Ebenezer [flac]
DR13 -0.00 dB -15.53 dB 2:35 15 - Old Joe Clark [flac]
DR12 -0.00 dB -14.44 dB 1:39 16 - Old Molly Hare [flac]
DR11 -0.00 dB -13.32 dB 2:16 17 - Marching Jaybird [flac]
DR13 -0.00 dB -20.27 dB 4:07 18 - Walkin' in the Parlor [flac]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Number of files: 18
Official DR value: DR12

Sampling rate: 96000 Hz
Average bitrate: 2872kbs
Bits per sample: 32 bit

Dr14 T.meter 1.0.16

 

[Chrispy]

Haven't listened to this nor much of Taytay's music, but this is probably a poor forum for discussing her talents. Country music is less appealing, tho.