Speaker 1: Welcome to Rolling Stones five hundred Greatest Songs, a podcast
Speaker 1: based on Rolling stones hugely popular, influential, and sometimes controversial list.
Speaker 1: I'm Britney Spanos and.
Speaker 2: I'm Rob Sheffield. We're here to shed light on the
Speaker 2: greatest songs ever made and discover what makes them so great.
Speaker 1: So we have a song that a song bite artist
Speaker 1: that Rob and I have many many hours of recorded
Speaker 1: conversations on, even more hours of unrecorded conversations on. And
Speaker 1: that is Taylor Swift and her song blank Space, which
Speaker 1: made the twenty twenty one list at number three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty seven. It is one of two Taylor songs
Speaker 1: are on the list, the others All Too Well, which
Speaker 1: made it at number sixty nine. Robin, I figure that
Speaker 1: we've talked about all too Well more than any two
Speaker 1: people have spoken about All too Well. You can listen
Speaker 1: to Rolling Stone Music now if you want to hear
Speaker 1: more of us talking about All tu Well. We haven't
Speaker 1: talked enough about Blank Space, though. I feel like we've
Speaker 1: talked about it a bunch, but not.
Speaker 3: Enough, never enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this song is just totally inexhaustible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean even like just to wrap up
Speaker 1: All Too Well, quickly. Is the fact that it came out,
Speaker 1: that the list came out before the ten minute version
Speaker 1: even came out is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the list really needs an asterisk on it specifying
Speaker 2: that this is all pretty the ten minute all too well.
Speaker 1: So. Flank Space is on Taylor Swift's twenty fourteen album
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. This is Taylor's full pop moment. This
Speaker 1: is the album where she completely shakes off any of
Speaker 1: the country sound of her past. She started to do
Speaker 1: it a little bit with the Right. Of course, that
Speaker 1: was the first time that she worked with Max Martin
Speaker 1: and Shellback, and she had her first number one hit
Speaker 1: with we Rt Never Getting Back Together, So it was
Speaker 1: very promising already that people really loved pop Taylor, And
Speaker 1: of course with nineteenighty nine she brings in Max Martin
Speaker 1: and Shellback even more. She worked on nine of the
Speaker 1: sixteen songs. If you think about the deluxe editions of
Speaker 1: nineteeny nine, nine of the sixteen songs that she released
Speaker 1: during that era with Max Martin and Shellback, and of
Speaker 1: course blank Space is one of them. It's the second
Speaker 1: single from the album, and I mean, I think everyone
Speaker 1: was shocked when they first heard it. I think every
Speaker 1: Taylor fan. It's hard to shock a Taylor fan nowadays,
Speaker 1: but like we've just always that base level shocked. Yes,
Speaker 1: But like Blank Space, I think was the first time
Speaker 1: where people were really like, oh, this is like a
Speaker 1: brand new tailor.
Speaker 2: You could ask, is this one of the two big
Speaker 2: shocks of in terms of Taylor's long history of shocking
Speaker 2: people folklore obviously like such a huge shock, But nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine it was the complete opposite of what she
Speaker 2: should have been doing. It made no career since no
Speaker 2: commercial sense for her to be taking the red formula,
Speaker 2: which she could have milked forever and just throwing it
Speaker 2: out the window and doing something new.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean even with Redd the album, I mean,
Speaker 1: we both love that album so much, and so much
Speaker 1: of the joy of listening to it is that it
Speaker 1: is kind of all over the place. She's talked about
Speaker 1: it as her her Jackson Pollock album, where it's like
Speaker 1: meant to be a little bit of a mess and
Speaker 1: meant to be something that captures the messiness of breakup,
Speaker 1: captures the messiness of being in your early twenties, captures
Speaker 1: the messiness of her kind of figuring out the next
Speaker 1: step of who Taylor Swift is, just because there are
Speaker 1: so many of these country songs, but they also are
Speaker 1: kind of a little bit like heartland rock ish, where
Speaker 1: you know, kind of kind of moving a little bit
Speaker 1: away from the country that she was making before and
Speaker 1: those big pop songs of course, but nineteen nine it
Speaker 1: is like such a cohesive album, especially in comparison to
Speaker 1: to Red having a little bit of those multiple sides
Speaker 1: and multitudes to them. But nineteen nine is so cohesive.
Speaker 1: It's such a great sound. I mean, it's just like
Speaker 1: it's just a really perfect album. I've only grown to
Speaker 1: love more and more over the years.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's funny because now it's such a classic album,
Speaker 2: one of her most beloved, and yet because it's so
Speaker 2: beloved and canonical, it's easy to forget that at the
Speaker 2: time it seemed like total self sabotage. There's so much
Speaker 2: of the trademark Taylor sound she just totally ignores. There's
Speaker 2: no twanging on the album, the whole steel guitar thing
Speaker 2: she did. There's very little guitar at all in the
Speaker 2: first half of the album, especially Yeah, and what people
Speaker 2: thought of as the Tailor sound is a complete departure.
Speaker 2: The first single, shake It Off. Yeah, that was one
Speaker 2: of the songs that sort of cemented the tradition of
Speaker 2: the Taylor lead single, which is usually a total departure
Speaker 2: from the album. But blank Space, I think that's the
Speaker 2: one that we think of when we think of nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I mean that song is so specific about
Speaker 1: how it responds to a lot of criticism that Taylor
Speaker 1: had been getting, and I think a lot of unjust
Speaker 1: criticism that a lot of women, a lot of famous
Speaker 1: women tend to get, which is her dating seemingly a
Speaker 1: lot or the idea that she was dating for the
Speaker 1: content for the songs, that she was a man eater,
Speaker 1: that she she was playing the victim, whatever criticism people
Speaker 1: would throw and you know, again, thinking about it just
Speaker 1: in realistic terms, she is turning twenty five of the
Speaker 1: year that she really she's twenty three or twenty four
Speaker 1: when she's recording these songs. It's kind of insane to
Speaker 1: think about all of those things being wielded at someone
Speaker 1: who's in their early twenties and is famous and happens
Speaker 1: to just also be dating famous men, and that's just
Speaker 1: how life works. But this song sort of is her
Speaker 1: directly responding to the haters in a way that is
Speaker 1: even more kind of pointed than shaken office. Shake it
Speaker 1: Off's more of kind of a general kind of like
Speaker 1: this doesn't bother me, and playing space is her being
Speaker 1: very satirical about a lot of those comments that people
Speaker 1: have been wielding at her for years at that point.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, And it's mind blowing to go back and
Speaker 2: read the kind of stuff that was written about her
Speaker 2: in the speak Now era, in the Red era, so
Speaker 2: many interviews with her where it's all about her boyfriends
Speaker 2: and nothing else. There's a really shocking Vanity Fair cover
Speaker 2: story around this time where it's almost entirely about her boyfriends,
Speaker 2: and at one point Taylor says, can we talk about
Speaker 2: something besides my boyfriends? Maybe talk about my songs? Like
Speaker 2: lots of young women have boyfriends, lots of young women
Speaker 2: do a lot of dating, only one of them is
Speaker 2: writing all these songs, making all these albums. She was
Speaker 2: the biggest star in music at the time, but to
Speaker 2: so much of the music world in the public at large,
Speaker 2: she was just seen as this boy crazy young girl
Speaker 2: who who wrote all her songs about her boyfriends. And
Speaker 2: for a lot of people, they would explain away her
Speaker 2: success by saying, oh, well, people just they like the
Speaker 2: celebrity aspect of what she does. I know it was
Speaker 2: exasperating for you at the time as a Taylor fan,
Speaker 2: definitely exasperating for me at the time as a Taylor fan,
Speaker 2: And yet this was her responding to it in a really,
Speaker 2: like you said, brilliantly satirical way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and also kind of all the flack
Speaker 1: that she got for right now, so many breakup songs,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not unusual thing in pop music. As
Speaker 1: we've talked about extensively, it's not an unusual thing for
Speaker 1: a songwriter to want to explore a breakup in their
Speaker 1: music and kind of the emotions because a breakup is can.
Speaker 3: Be very inspirational.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things that come, a lot of
Speaker 1: emotions that are unexpected that come from a breakup, and
Speaker 1: Taylor is very good at pinpointing those and finding those
Speaker 1: and really good at sort of finding like kind of
Speaker 1: weird nuanced threads and scenes that she's able to pull
Speaker 1: out of it.
Speaker 3: And I think within a lot of.
Speaker 1: Nineteen y nine, so much of it is so fascinating
Speaker 1: lyrically and blank space in particular, where there's this kind
Speaker 1: of give and take in the relationship where she's not, oh,
Speaker 1: she's not acting perfectly, her partners are not acting perfectly.
Speaker 1: A little bit of playing with that and a lot
Speaker 1: of her songs, which I think is such a it's
Speaker 1: an almost subtle move that if you're not listening I
Speaker 1: guess closely to a lot of Taylor's music, it's kind
Speaker 1: of you're still going to assume it's a lot of
Speaker 1: breakup songs and all this stuff, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of fun ways that she twists what the
Speaker 1: idea of a breakup song can be, especially what the
Speaker 1: idea of Taylor swept breakup song can be.
Speaker 2: Totally. I love that she's always had that great sense
Speaker 2: of humor about herself from the very beginning. It's like
Speaker 2: at the time, people did not hear her clearly enough
Speaker 2: to hear that she was in on like those sorts
Speaker 2: of jokes, and she was the first one making them,
Speaker 2: and it's wild that also, just the people for a
Speaker 2: long time I think missed the pain in this song
Speaker 2: and the anger that now like people have come to
Speaker 2: sort of more appreciate those aspects of her songwriting, but
Speaker 2: a lot of pain a lot of anger in the vocal, especially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I think with Taylor and sort of the
Speaker 1: arc of her songwriting too is you are very much
Speaker 1: in real time witnessing a young woman sort of kind
Speaker 1: of shed a lot of the fantasy and illusion of
Speaker 1: what love is thinking about. Even just like her first
Speaker 1: three albums, self titled, Fearless and To Speak Now, all
Speaker 1: of those songs are so baked into the idea of
Speaker 1: a fairy tale romance, Like she's using fairy tale kind
Speaker 1: of lyrics and illusions in all of her songs through
Speaker 1: those three albums. Of course, we have like the Shakespeare
Speaker 1: reference and love story and a song like Enchanted where
Speaker 1: she turns this crush into this like big kind of
Speaker 1: you know, castle kind of meet and greet that she
Speaker 1: has with this like this guy for like five seconds,
Speaker 1: you know, And that's so much a big part of
Speaker 1: the way that she views love in the first three albums,
Speaker 1: and then by Ride it's completely that's you know, when
Speaker 1: she starts to get to real kind of very realist
Speaker 1: lyrics that she's doing and these like scenes and these
Speaker 1: kind of very like sort of like tortured kind of
Speaker 1: feelings and moments that she has in exchange like both
Speaker 1: with the person after the person's gone, and with nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, it's kind of fun to see her take
Speaker 1: that to another level where she's able to kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, she has a song like Wow This Dreams,
Speaker 1: which kind of has that sort of almost larger than
Speaker 1: life kind of fairy tale essence to it, but still
Speaker 1: like the lyrics themselves have this very kind of directness
Speaker 1: and this very like you know, like I am now
Speaker 1: the fantasy for you, like you'll be dreaming of me.
Speaker 2: I love that. I love that, and that that wit
Speaker 2: really starting to take off at this phase of her songwriting.
Speaker 2: One of my all time favorite Taylor punchlines is in
Speaker 2: Holy Ground Yeah song I know you love as much
Speaker 2: as I do, And I never hear that song without
Speaker 2: laughing hysterically at the part where she's talking about how
Speaker 2: she's met this guy there. They're soulmates, they get each other,
Speaker 2: They've all these private jokes. They're so absolutely and sinc
Speaker 2: it's meant to be. And that was the first day.
Speaker 2: I just yep, that's the first day. She just goes
Speaker 2: from zero to sixty, and she definitely does that in
Speaker 2: Blank Space.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I love the bridge on it where
Speaker 1: she says boys only want love of its torture. Don't
Speaker 1: say I didn't warn yet. It's very very much like
Speaker 1: the kind of like she's been through it and she's like,
Speaker 1: I told you, Yeah, did you listen to my previous
Speaker 1: four albums? Like have I not told you enough of
Speaker 1: out how this works? Like how this goes. It's such
Speaker 1: like a great great line. Also just I mean the
Speaker 1: way that that light is. It's so funny and it's
Speaker 1: so kind of like direct with a lot of that,
Speaker 1: but I mean just the vocal layering on it. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much newness to how Taylor's thinking about herself
Speaker 1: as an artist, thinking of how a song of hers
Speaker 1: can be produced, thinking about how her vocals can be
Speaker 1: on a song. That is such a big part of
Speaker 1: what makes nineteen nine work so well and sounds so great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and still sounds so I mean, just like I mean,
Speaker 1: just ahead of its time and what we've heard from
Speaker 1: pop music since then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. She talked a lot about being inspired by
Speaker 2: eighties pomp, and it was very much in that mode,
Speaker 2: you know, she she didn't go halfway. The whole album
Speaker 2: sounds so much like the first pet chop Boys album, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and first Erasure album. For much of hearing the album
Speaker 2: for the first time, I was I kept wondering, where
Speaker 2: are the ballads? Where are the guitar ballads? And I
Speaker 2: kept thinking of girls like my niece, who is like
Speaker 2: very young and who, like so many millions of girls,
Speaker 2: learned to play guitar because she loved Taylor so much.
Speaker 2: And I was thinking, what are all these fans going
Speaker 2: to think when they hear her completely throw that overboard
Speaker 2: and start over. And I guess I got my answer
Speaker 2: when my niece was texting me the morning that nineteen
Speaker 2: and I came out, and she said, this is the
Speaker 2: best album of all time. It's not just Taylor's best album.
Speaker 2: I think this was the first time that Taylor made
Speaker 2: a big challenge like that to her audience, and the
Speaker 2: rest of the world was shocked to find out that
Speaker 2: the Taylor audience really liked that challenge. Yeah, and they
Speaker 2: liked that she was always doing something different and they
Speaker 2: loved going along with it. Yeah. And I think for
Speaker 2: a lot of people who must have been wondering how
Speaker 2: this crazy move was going to go over, it was
Speaker 2: a shock that people loved hearing her do this. People
Speaker 2: loved hearing her have fun like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was. I mean, just the amount
Speaker 1: of success and how successful it was, and how much
Speaker 1: of a cultural phenomenon this album in particular was at
Speaker 1: that moment is kind of surreal. And also it's so
Speaker 1: funny to think about in comparison to the moment that's
Speaker 1: happening right now, because that felt so big and all consuming,
Speaker 1: And we had spoken before before we started recording this
Speaker 1: episode of just like the fact that I found my
Speaker 1: year in Taylor Swift from twenty fifteen, and it literally
Speaker 1: is just about how massive and omnipresent she was in
Speaker 1: over the course of that year. And so it's so
Speaker 1: fascinating because this was the one of the last times
Speaker 1: that any artist was able. It was like her and
Speaker 1: Adele where sort of the final two artists to do
Speaker 1: the thing where they dropped the album but didn't have
Speaker 1: it on streaming, and like, obviously no one does that anymore.
Speaker 1: There are very few artists who were able to do
Speaker 1: that then anyway, But I mean, that was such a
Speaker 1: big moment because Taylor was sort of fighting against how
Speaker 1: little streaming pays and had taken all her music off
Speaker 1: of Spotify, and kept it off of Spotify for the
Speaker 1: first I think maybe month or a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: or something, and Adele did the same.
Speaker 2: With twenty one twenty one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's the last time that artists had been
Speaker 1: able to do that, and of course this was for
Speaker 1: someone like Taylor to be able to do that. This
Speaker 1: says a lot of fully note her fandom and the
Speaker 1: fact that the album is still able to be as
Speaker 1: big as it was and still is, but the fact
Speaker 1: that it was just the beginning of even more kind
Speaker 1: of wacky career decisions that like only Taylor Swift can
Speaker 1: get away with, and that leading up to a moment
Speaker 1: where you know, Blank Space can chart again because she's
Speaker 1: playing it on tour. But I mean even before she
Speaker 1: re released the re recorded version, people just were excited
Speaker 1: to hear it on tour and it brought back all
Speaker 1: those memories and made the song another big kind of
Speaker 1: chart moment for her. And next up we will be
Speaker 1: joined by Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hyatt to talk
Speaker 1: even more about Taylor Swift Blank Space. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: five hundred Gray Songs, and we were talking with Rolling
Speaker 1: Stone senior writer Brian Hyatt and Brian, I know that
Speaker 1: you love Taylor as much as we do. What did
Speaker 1: you think of blank Space the first time you heard it?
Speaker 1: Is before we heard All of nineteen eighty nine? Of course,
Speaker 1: it was the second single from the album. What was
Speaker 1: your immediate reaction to it?
Speaker 4: All of nineteen eighty nine is obviously kind of a
Speaker 4: huge leap for Tailor. She had hinted a little bit
Speaker 4: at some of this, maybe unread, but this was it
Speaker 4: was a blank slate that she started from that included
Speaker 4: Blank Space.
Speaker 3: She wiped the board and was starting over.
Speaker 4: Sonically, Blank Space is probably the ultimate expression of that
Speaker 4: at the time because of how stripped down and radical.
Speaker 3: And minimalist and electronic it was.
Speaker 4: For an artist who's pretty much everything had been pretty
Speaker 4: organic and non minimalist up until then. Well, the artist
Speaker 4: I think about original wizes prints, you know, and something
Speaker 4: like when doves Cry, maybe kiss a little bit less,
Speaker 4: but when doves cry, you know, just that where the
Speaker 4: kind of the main instrument is a very carefully chosen
Speaker 4: drum machine and a very carefully chosen reverb on the snare,
Speaker 4: and then sure there's other things like a buzzing low
Speaker 4: synth and some synth chords, but the main idea is
Speaker 4: like basically like Tailor in this perfect drum machine, which
Speaker 4: is why for me, Taylor's version is one case where
Speaker 4: I can't quite hang yet with Taylor's version because the
Speaker 4: slight differences that they had to make in the snare sound,
Speaker 4: in the reverb like throw it off for me, because
Speaker 4: it's it's for me. It's all about that exact thing.
Speaker 4: I knew that she was gonna have a tough kind
Speaker 4: of rote a ho with with that, with that one,
Speaker 4: and yeah, that's one Tailor's version that doesn't like kill
Speaker 4: it for me, although it's a valiant effort, it's as
Speaker 4: close as you could get.
Speaker 3: It had to be slightly different.
Speaker 4: And this is a song where if you make it
Speaker 4: even slightly different, it's not right. And that that's sonically right.
Speaker 4: So then it's also the other thing is she always
Speaker 4: was self aware. It's a new kind of self awareness
Speaker 4: and a new level of irony and a new level
Speaker 4: of sort of like postmodern self reflexifity where she's taking
Speaker 4: in the media perception of her and twisting it and
Speaker 4: reacting to it and making art out of it. Is
Speaker 4: kind of a it's it's very pre reputation. In that way,
Speaker 4: it anticipates what she do with the reputation, and you know,
Speaker 4: of course she does it unshake it off as well,
Speaker 4: but this is kind of a more sophisticated way of
Speaker 4: doing it.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's another thing where you could just
Speaker 3: her mind.
Speaker 4: You can see a mind at work and everything in
Speaker 4: the sonics of it and in the you know, and
Speaker 4: like I said, in the lyrics, in the way that
Speaker 4: she's exaggerating this persona. And I think a lot of
Speaker 4: people didn't quite or at least some people didn't quite
Speaker 4: get what she was doing there. They took it way
Speaker 4: too literally, and they didn't understand that she's she's playing
Speaker 4: a character. She's mocking the character, she's exaggerating the character.
Speaker 4: The character is a version of her. She's pretending like
Speaker 4: she is the version of her from the tabloids.
Speaker 3: And then you know, and it's.
Speaker 4: Just so much going on there. It's just you know,
Speaker 4: it's a brilliant song, and it's one of the songs
Speaker 4: where it's as much as you expected from the artist. Again,
Speaker 4: it kind of wipes the table and you're like, oh,
Speaker 4: I have to expect much more. It's just a you know,
Speaker 4: an amazing, ridiculously great song.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it always shocks me the people who thought that
Speaker 1: it was genuinely her like being very serious about it
Speaker 1: and being like, yes, I'm crazy. Like it's like it's
Speaker 1: very clearly like a funny, satirical song, and it's so
Speaker 1: wild to me that so many people didn't immediately read
Speaker 1: it as like this is very funny, very wacky to
Speaker 1: me that people took that too seriously.
Speaker 2: Her careers is that people fail to notice her sense
Speaker 2: of humor and when it's clobbering you over the head,
Speaker 2: it's a really funny. But with this song especially, it's like,
Speaker 2: how exactly do you watch the video of your ass off?
Speaker 2: It's like, absolutely brilliant. I always it's funny. The video
Speaker 2: I always associate with when your.
Speaker 3: Pinned tweet was like that still from the.
Speaker 2: Video where she's got the knife and she's slashing through
Speaker 2: the curtains. Loved her eyes. I love that you found
Speaker 2: that frame as like the like absolute peak of that video. Esthetic. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's really one of the greatest videos of all time.
Speaker 2: It's definitely her greatest video. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I've had a mixed relationship with her videos
Speaker 1: over the years, but that video definitely her best in
Speaker 1: my opinion, I think number one video for her because
Speaker 1: she just is having a lot of fun. Obviously lyrically,
Speaker 1: we just talked about like there's so much humor that
Speaker 1: she's finding in it. I mean, it's her funniest song,
Speaker 1: and it's like a song where she's able to really
Speaker 1: let loose and try something new for herself and have
Speaker 1: sort of like real anger towards the way that she's
Speaker 1: viewed and the kind of the scrutiny that her dating
Speaker 1: life has faced, as you know, that is frankly unfair.
Speaker 3: The music, I mean, you could argue that the music
Speaker 3: is sort of more youthful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and then you know that her previous you know,
Speaker 4: on read she had all she had songs that kind
Speaker 4: of sound like you too, Like you know, it's like
Speaker 4: it's sort of like I was so much older.
Speaker 3: Than kind of thing.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, like the themes are more adult, but the
Speaker 4: music is very light and youthful by the way that
Speaker 4: the other stuff wasn't always.
Speaker 1: It's such an inverse of like what a lot of
Speaker 1: others exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all proven formulas for how you graduate from being
Speaker 2: a teenaged pop star to a full fledged adult is
Speaker 2: you go away from the bouncy pop stuff and you
Speaker 2: start doing you know, serious stuff. Towards Michael going into
Speaker 2: his double era, it's like, I'm going to do a
Speaker 2: video where it's just me and an acoustic guitar, because
Speaker 2: that's how you prove your serious artist. We can see
Speaker 2: that pattern, you know, that's traditionally how artists they start
Speaker 2: out doing dancy pop stuff as teens, and then they
Speaker 2: prove their adults by let's say, dressing in flannel and
Speaker 2: growing a beard and putting out an album literally called
Speaker 2: Man of the Woods. But like that's traditionally the trajectory, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like marking your evolution as an artist. And it says
Speaker 2: so much about her confidence but also about her extremely
Speaker 2: widescreen sense of pop history that she knew all the
Speaker 2: tricks of how this has been done in the past,
Speaker 2: and she was going to do it the opposite way
Speaker 2: that she had this blockbuster formula with you know that
Speaker 2: was like very much focused around her acoustic guitar, and
Speaker 2: that she was going to cross over to dance pop
Speaker 2: from the more adult pop style. That's not how you
Speaker 2: do it. It seemed like absolute commercial self sabotage at
Speaker 2: the time. It's weird how this being so successful in
Speaker 2: retrospect nineteen eighty nine, but also the song blank Space.
Speaker 2: In retrospect it looks like a total non brainer move,
Speaker 2: where at the time it seemed like the absolute craziest
Speaker 2: thing she could do.
Speaker 4: When Jewel did it with three oh four, it was
Speaker 4: not as much of a success, you know, and then
Speaker 4: and that was it was the exactly good.
Speaker 3: It was the it was the exact move. I can't
Speaker 3: a perfect example.
Speaker 2: Also, that should have been huge.
Speaker 3: It had some songs I really liked on it. I
Speaker 3: gave it.
Speaker 2: Its always a band.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it just shows that people had tried
Speaker 4: it and it didn't work.
Speaker 1: I mean, again, great album I would love. I know
Speaker 1: she's doing she's doing the Exilent Guy Bill tour, but
Speaker 1: where's the anniversary tour for lis Fair self titled?
Speaker 4: But right that the two artists who come to mind,
Speaker 4: who tried it, at least commercially, did not succeed, So,
Speaker 4: you know, and.
Speaker 3: I also were so reviled for us.
Speaker 1: There was so much anger towards both those artists for
Speaker 1: moving away from what was seen as much more kind
Speaker 1: of authentic music, kind of more authentic ways of doing
Speaker 1: their songwriting. I mean for Taylor to move into this
Speaker 1: mode to make a pop album as her kind of
Speaker 1: adult shifting album, but also to work with someone like
Speaker 1: Max Martin, who's, you know, such a big name in
Speaker 1: pop music, to kind of have that not only be
Speaker 1: someone who's kind of almost like a teacher, like her
Speaker 1: kind of own sort of makeshift college lessons of songwriting,
Speaker 1: where she has talked about kind of working with him
Speaker 1: on Red as a way to sort of learn a
Speaker 1: new way of writing and to learn more about being
Speaker 1: a pop songwriter, and then to bring him into that,
Speaker 1: and to bring also someone who was not known for
Speaker 1: working on pop music before, Jack Antonov, who had was
Speaker 1: this was his first big album as a songwriter and
Speaker 1: producer outside of Fun that he was working with someone
Speaker 1: else and kind of behind the scenes. But I mean
Speaker 1: to even have that balance of like someone like Jack
Speaker 1: who's a big part of the album and hadn't done
Speaker 1: this before, and.
Speaker 2: With Max Martin, he's got like some brilliant production yes
Speaker 2: on nineteen eighty nine, and then he's got a there's
Speaker 2: where it's like, oh, he's still learning how to do this.
Speaker 4: It's really interesting the way that Taylor was allowed to
Speaker 4: sort of quiet quit country.
Speaker 3: It's really interesting. It's sort of uh.
Speaker 4: I actually do remember asking her about that during I
Speaker 4: guess read and and she was just sort of like
Speaker 4: like more or less she was like, I'll be fun
Speaker 4: like like she just was like she had absolutely no
Speaker 4: concern about it. What you know as to whether you know,
Speaker 4: country fans will be mad about it at her.
Speaker 3: Or or anything. She was like, she's like not worried
Speaker 3: about it. And she was totally right. It never really
Speaker 3: became a thing. Yeah, Nashville never got really mad at her.
Speaker 3: Nothing ever really happened.
Speaker 4: It just sort of it's almost like she she she
Speaker 4: hypnotized people into forgetting that the country thing had ever
Speaker 4: been a thing, and it's just slowly it's like.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, weren't you a country or just some points
Speaker 3: he's like, don't worry about it, you know.
Speaker 1: It was like, yeah, I think it was a mixture
Speaker 1: of two. Like I mean, even with like love Story,
Speaker 1: she was already becoming such like a pop artist, yeah,
Speaker 1: and like it was a very gradual yeah, and like
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, she had her first number one hit
Speaker 1: with we Are Never Getting Back Together and that kind
Speaker 1: of being it. But I also do think blank Space
Speaker 1: is such a country song and it's writing like that's
Speaker 1: the hook is like very Miranda Lambert, and it feels
Speaker 1: very like revenge country vibe to it, and I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel that way about a lot of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, where I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: the lyrics, not every song, but I feel like songs
Speaker 1: like style and blank Space and like all you had
Speaker 1: to do is stay is like they feel very country
Speaker 1: lyrically in terms of that, because she's always been so
Speaker 1: good at bridging what makes country songs so catchy and
Speaker 1: so fun and so sing alongable with a really excellent
Speaker 1: earwormy hook. Because I remember my the first time I
Speaker 1: heard the song was because I went to a I
Speaker 1: was writing about the videos. Is one of my very
Speaker 1: first like Rolling Stone articles was to write about the videos.
Speaker 1: I had to go to like a secret room to
Speaker 1: hear about the app that they were doing, the interactive
Speaker 1: app that they were getting launched with blank Space so
Speaker 1: so twenty fourteen, and that there was an interactive app
Speaker 1: that they that they were doing with it, and I
Speaker 1: remember just being so like genuinely blown away by how
Speaker 1: different it was, I mean, just in terms of the
Speaker 1: combination of the visuals and what she was singing, because
Speaker 1: I think that now she sort of she's done this
Speaker 1: sort of playfulness repeatedly in her music in her videos,
Speaker 1: but I mean, just to kind of fully see that
Speaker 1: on such a level from her from blank Space, like
Speaker 1: shake it Off almost got there, but like it was
Speaker 1: a little like that video was a little like disjointed
Speaker 1: in how it kind of tried to get there, and
Speaker 1: Blank Space her kind of going all the way through,
Speaker 1: like the running mascara and like the bloodcake and like
Speaker 1: all this stuff combined with those lyrics like you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a nightmare dressed as a day dream and the
Speaker 1: long list of X lovers and all that stuff. Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, just the fact that it's so completely over
Speaker 1: the top was such a major moment.
Speaker 3: I love that, Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2: She does it in Aerostour, Yeah, her and the dancers
Speaker 2: with their golf clubs like beating up the car. I
Speaker 2: was wow, Like it's very much still celebrating that spirit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there was a resurgence over the summer with the
Speaker 1: song too. I mean, all the I mean every song
Speaker 1: that was an Aerostor had like a chart moment. But
Speaker 1: of course, like this crack top fifty where people we
Speaker 1: were getting back into blank space again.
Speaker 2: It's kind of funny. Also, it's a song where every
Speaker 2: time I hear it anyway, I'm shocked at how short
Speaker 2: it is. Yeah, because there's so many brilliant details packed
Speaker 2: into it, and it's like wow, like classic Max Martin
Speaker 2: trick for sure, but like getting them in so so
Speaker 2: many of those in such a short period of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean a lot has changed in how people
Speaker 1: even are listening to her music. We have the re
Speaker 1: records out now, and we have you know, even more
Speaker 1: albums and the tour and all that. I feel like
Speaker 1: we could talk about this for much longer we have before.
Speaker 1: But I appreciate, appreciate you Brian for coming by and
Speaker 1: chatting today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to Rolling Stone's five
Speaker 2: hundred Greatest Songs. This podcast is brought to you by
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone and iHeartMedia. Written and hosted by me, Rob
Speaker 2: Sheffield and Britney Spanos and with our genius guest today,
Speaker 2: mister Brian HyET. Executive produced by Jason alex Dale and
Speaker 2: Christian Horde and produced by Jesse Cannon with music supervision
Speaker 2: by Eric Seiler. Thanks