Tag: album review

Miss Americana and Her Folklore

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Throughout Folklore, once again, Swift showcases her metaphors, insecurity in love and acute self-consciousness. However, instead of putting herself at the central stage of the album, Swift learns to dissolve her personality, her selfhood into a broad range of fictional characters, married or divorced, teenage or middle-aged, men or women. The newest persona of Swift is no persona. Instead of focusing what she has been going through, whether she breaks up again, Swift wants her audiences to contemplate with her phrasing and hum along her soft breath. It is about shutting down the noise, the distractions and the planned agenda of life so that one can take things slow and appreciate what’s important.

What is Lana Del Ray Hopeful of?

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The closing song on Lana Del Ray's most recent album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, is titled Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have. At first glance, it seems too long a title, but in fact, not a single word can be taken out from it. In the minimalist production, Del Ray sings about being a modern American woman with (what she calls) a weak Constitution, reading a suicidal female poet, crying in a church basement and how her audience are perceiving her. It surveys a wide range of emotions and sensations beyond just melancholy and solitude that are featured in most of her old songs. At the end of her most recent and mature album, she concludes with a surprisingly weighty remark with much confession to make and much imagination to inspire.