Taylor Swift: I’m A Convert Now?
Oof, this is a tricky one, pals. If you know me, you will be SHOCKED at the subject of this week’s vocal profile. I won’t lie - Taylor Swift is not my favourite singer. I used to give informal presentations to anyone who would listen about all the reasons that she was a ‘bad singer’ and was definitely one of those people they tweet about, who think that not liking Taylor Swift is a personality trait.
But then, one day, I heard a phrase that saved me ...
‘Great for you, not for me’
I felt cleansed. Millions and millions of people love Taylor Swift. They can’t be idiots with no sense! She must be good. In regards to her last few albums, I’ve tried to ignore them until I realise I cannot participate in online life without understanding any of these bloody references for a moment longer. I finally gave into 'Folklore' on one of my daily-not-daily walks recently, all the while thinking “this is not for me, this music does not speak to me” and I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to delve into the world of Taylor Swift and discover why her music is for soooooooo many other people and how she speaks to them!
***
Right, so there’s a very obvious, simple explanation here. Taylor Swift is a SONGWRITER, not a singer (as she’s pointed out herself, her ‘thing’ is stories), so there’s more focus on the songs. She doesn’t have to be a wildly accomplished vocalist to get her stories out. Beyond the actual content of her songs, the way she presents them helps to build an illusion of her being just a ‘normal’ girl. Myspace had a huge part to play in her early success and the fact that her voice on her first album is - for lack of a kinder word - quite weak just adds to the authenticity of her as a self-made, DIY artist. It’s also important to acknowledge the landscape of Country music at the time. If you look at the top Country singles in 2007 or 2008, for example - when Taylor Swift’s success began to soar - you’re looking at male performers who just happen to have a nice, deep tone and access to heaps of autotune/pitch-correction (as well as a penchant for the confederate flag … but let’s not)*, or incredibly vocally-skilled women. Taylor Swift’s early contemporaries were singers like Carrie Underwood and LeAnn Rimes - people known for their powerhouse voices and able to toss in so many growls and belts and riffs at the drop of a stetson. Honestly, Taylor deserves snaps for having both the songwriting skills and the business chops to break through when she did. For young girls who liked Country music, I imagine it was quite refreshing to find someone who, not only was singing about school and heartbreak and bullies - rather than drinking whiskey and keying shitty ex-lover’s cars - but also sounded like it. She doesn’t sound aspirational - she sounds relatable and, I imagine, gave teenagers a little bit of space to enjoy music without thinking about everything they’re not.
As a non-Swiftie, wanting to analyse Taylor and needing to collate data, I decided to focus on her recordings, rather than ploughing through hours of live performances on Youtube - otherwise we’re just discussing how often she is or isn’t singing completely in tune (which can be caused by numerous factors other than ‘bad singer’ and is just a bit of a boring convo). I actually found it super interesting how her voice has developed over time. A Country artist by trade, she uses speech quality A LOT. I only noticed her use head voice once throughout her first album. On that same album, her accent is strong. It’s extremely pure and unpolished. On her second, you can hear much more nuance. I love in ‘Picture To Burn’ how subtle the speech in the line ‘let me strike a match of all my wasted time’ is. The way she brings in a thicker sound and falls off the phrase really makes the line stand out and brings a lot of humility and humour to it. It’s perfect for what she’s singing, without it sounding crafted. Later on in her career, she brings out speech quality in a much more obvious and obnoxious way. The verses in ’22’ are barely sung and, though not to my taste, that really brash style of speech quality is very effective. It’s how you would act if you were pissing about with your friends, which suits the fun and carefree vibe of the song. If you’ll let me theorise, I also think that this ‘overuse’ of speech quality around this time (the ‘Red’ album) reflects on her attitude towards the general public - this was at the height of ‘Taylor Swift is annoying’ discourse. I wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to take back some power and sing this way just to further piss off people who already hated her.
From a more traditional techniques point of view, the way Taylor Swift sings doesn’t really make sense. To me, everything sounds like so much more effort than it could be - a lot of her vowels are either ‘too’ narrow/closed or ‘too’ wide/open and, I think, because there’s so much focus on the words of the song, it’s a mixture of her accent and pronunciation getting in the way. 'Enchanted' is such a gorgeous song, but the held note to finish the chorus ends up being a little distracting (again … for me). The ‘oo’ is so strong; everybody’s body is different, so she might be fine, but I’d need a good jaw massage after doing that. I remember being given ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ to sing for a techniques class in uni and all of us being shocked at how difficult it actually was to sing. And before you say anything, it wasn’t the flips in and out of head voice at the chorus, like you’d expect - it was the verse. The first. verse. knackered us. I think this song makes it so obvious how Taylor’s scales are tipped when it comes to song vs. sing. It’s just not written in a way that lends itself to a nice and easy vocal. As she continued to write with Max Martin and leant far more into Pop, her voice transformed. She seemed to adopt more of a transatlantic accent, with her attitude towards consonants being less ‘compulsory’ and playing around with distinct variations between bright and dark tones. Throughout the '1989' album, you can definitely hear a little Katy Perry and Lady Gaga influence (vocally). It’s really difficult to know what Taylor does consciously or unconsciously because she doesn’t talk about her voice often. It’s very clear that writing and performing are much higher on her priority list - which is fair enough, because she’s great (I just found some clips of her giving advice on The Voice US and I’d genuinely love her as a performance coach). The only evidence I could find in the way of her having vocal coaching was a few videos of her talking with Brett Manning to promote his ‘Singing Success’ series, and even then, she didn’t elaborate too much. Technically, her voice definitely has improved over time and I get the feeling it’s a combination of experience and trial and error.
Catch a few weird vowel moments in this chorus … although I think that’s partly due to her copying Phil Collins and I can’t blame anyone for that.
Whilst listening through her albums, it’s obvious that one thing Taylor Swift does very consciously is characterisation. The most evident example of this is on the 'Speak Now' album, going from ‘Speak Now’ to ‘Dear John’. ‘Speak Now', up to that point, was pretty much the most she’d done with her voice. There are things we’ve never heard before - like vibrato (very little, but I swear it’s there). She’s also forming her words so differently - like she’s desperately attempting cursive singing, I almost think she’s doing a bit of a Zooey Deschanel impression. ‘Dear John’ (which comes next on the album) is much more grounded. Her accent is back and her tone feels more settled and ‘neutral’. And this totally makes sense. As far as we know, Taylor Swift has never disrupted a wedding to ‘win back’ the groom, but she absolutely has had messy dealings with John Mayer. It makes sense that she might play around with her voice to create a character for a story that she doesn’t have direct experience with. It adds a nice element of world-building to her work and makes the really personal songs stand out and have more impact … and this is why I think some fans weren’t very pleased with the ’Reputation’ album.
'Reputation' is easily the least-Taylor album she’s released so far (not me, thinking I know what makes a ‘Taylor’ album, after giving them all a bit of a listen over the past few weeks). She tries so many new things; loads of production on her vocals, a bit of rapping, even a little hint of distortion. However, from what I’ve heard over the years, this ‘experimentation’ was not wholly appreciated - so, as any dedicated researcher would do, I took to Reddit to pinpoint the issue. Fans express that Taylor ‘doesn’t sound believable’. There are comments about autotune and production getting in the way, as well as not liking the feeling that she’s putting on a persona. It seems as though the reason that ‘Reputation’ didn’t sit well with a considerable amount of Swifties is because it just doesn’t sound as intimate as they’re used to. Which makes a lot of sense when you listen to the type of vocal she’s providing - it’s a lot more stylised. Her accent is now much more prominent than it was on '1989', whilst being a lot different from her first few albums - maybe she’s ‘changed’? The cursive is back and even seemingly small embellishments like the use of dipthongs and slight cry offsets feel ‘put on’, when they’re coming from Taylor, especially when they’re teamed with a more involved vocal production. There’s also a significant increase in backing vocals on this album. It no longer feels like your best friend singing a song to you that she wrote because she was having some feelings today; it’s now a piece of work that several people had their hands on and constructed with careful consideration.
On ‘Lover’, it feels like there’s been a little more mindfulness in trying to balance the creative freedom that comes with playing around with different sounds and maintaining a personal connection between Taylor and the listener. In the verse of 'Cruel Summer', there’s a heavily produced backing vocal that has been altered so much that it sounds nothing like her (whether it is or not, I have no idea). She puts on quite a bit of distortion towards the end but, again, it’s more of a backing vocal and used to add texture. I think (or, I like to think) they’ve made a conscious effort to keep any sounds, that veer too far away from what we ‘expect’ from Taylor’s voice, away from the foreground. After going through all these musical transitions throughout her career, it feels like she’s hit the sweet spot, regarding her voice, on this album. She’s back to using speech quality, but her older voice now sits a little lower which, for no reason I can think of other than internalised misogyny, just sounds nicer and less irritating**. As well as this, she has more space above her natural speaking pitch to play around with, if she wants to. Taylor’s always had a habit of breaking up riffs with glottal stops, but she shows on this album that she’s perfectly capable of making riffs lovely and fluid and even. However, at this point, it’s not necessarily a case of her simply improving, as there are plenty of moments where she does break them up; she’s choosing what sounds she wants to make for a reason and I think this only becomes more evident and effective, going on through 'Folklore' and 'Evermore'.
In any case, it’s always tempting to hold up the newest thing as the pinnacle, but it’s also really hard not to, listening to Taylor Swift’s albums in succession. The technical improvement she’s made is blindingly obvious, but listening in detail to the choices she is now able to make and the way she’s marrying her ‘healthier’ pop sound with her unpolished sixteen year old self that people fell in love with is really impressive. Throughout her latest two albums, there are still weird vowel moments, glottal breaks in between words and accents popping out - all things that are signature ’Taylor Swift’. She’s shown on several occasions prior that she no longer has to rely on these sounds and that they’re not necessarily as ‘natural’ as they used to be, so I do feel like she’s put them in on purpose. In her most recent work, whenever head voice is used, Taylor uses a lot of breath - a super clean head voice can sound a little other-worldly, as it’s not an emotional sound we often use, so adding breath makes it sound closer to a whisper - there seems to have been an effort to make these albums sound as intimate and as personal as they can. She’s back to her roots, but in a much more controlled and sophisticated way.
I think what Taylor Swift has demonstrated throughout her career is, ultimately, what any singer wants to achieve. You start off with your ‘natural’ voice, discovering what makes you special and makes people want to listen to you and then you go on to experiment and develop other skills so you can come back and be able to choose to express exactly what you want to and how. Although she is more of a songwriter than a singer, I think her work a really good example of how voices paint pictures, build worlds and tell stories, as well as influence how people interpret them. For singers, I think it’s really interesting to notice how this can be done in the smallest of ways and, whether or not you like an artist, there’s definitely something to learn from everyone. I still don’t think I’ll ever listen to a Taylor album the day it’s released, but I’m really glad I now see the value in her voice and respect how effective it is, as well as learning how she’s curated it to work in the best possible way for her and her fans***.
*I know I’m generalising A LOT and #notallcountrymen. I’m not a Country expert and I’m only as fair as my Google searches allow - these were the kinds of artists/songs/videos that came up.
**If you’re interested in sociology, I’d recommend looking into vocal fry, upspeak and ‘language pet peeves’. Sexism is everywhere - who knew?! (we all knew)
***Which is why I’m so annoyed that Taylor’s re-record of 'Love Story' sounds exactly. the. same. Why do all that work and develop your voice over more than a decade to just sound exactly. the. same?? That version does not exist in the canon of this blog. Don’t talk to me about it.