{"id":491309,"date":"2019-10-16T07:57:17","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T13:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=899721"},"modified":"2019-10-16T07:57:17","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T13:57:17","slug":"taylor-swift-plays-intimate-tiny-desk-concert-details-inspiration-for-lover-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/taylor-swift-plays-intimate-tiny-desk-concert-details-inspiration-for-lover-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift Plays Intimate Tiny Desk Concert, Details Inspiration for \u2018Lover\u2019 Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Taylor Swift<\/a> joined NPR\u2019s Tiny Desk concert series for an intimate acoustic set featuring three songs from her latest LP, Lover<\/i><\/a>. The singer-songwriter \u2014 and recent Rolling Stone<\/em> cover star<\/a> \u2014 approached the mini-show like an episode of Behind the Music<\/i>, detailing the inspirations behind \u201cThe Man,\u201d \u201cLover,\u201d<\/a> \u201cDeath By a Thousand Cuts\u201d and Red<\/i><\/a> highlight \u201cAll Too Well.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTiny Desk is one of my favorite corners of the Internet,\u201d Swift noted before the performance. \u201cIt\u2019s an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music. So you\u2019re kind of inundated by overwhelming opportunity and choices. I decided of take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them. So it\u2019s just me. There\u2019s no dancers\u2026unfortunately.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She opened on acoustic guitar with \u201cThe Man,\u201d her earnest strums subbing in for the album version\u2019s booming synths. Before playing the single, she explained that the song\u2019s core themes had been bouncing around her head \u201cfor a very long time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cOver the course of my life, it has occurred to me that we have a bit for double-standard issue in our society,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s something I\u2019ve thought about about 700 million times a day for the last 10 years of my life. And I was always wondering, \u2018Can I write a song about this? Is there a concise and catchy way to write a song about this? What angle would I take if I were to write a song about this?\u2019 So I decided the most fun thing to do would be to imagine what my life would be like, and what people would say about my life, if I did all the same things \u2014 but if I was a man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Swift switched to piano for Lover<\/em>\u2018s title track, a slow ballad that she said originated from a sudden, mysterious burst of inspiration. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was one of those weird moments: in the middle of the night, in my PJs, stumbling to the piano because I got this idea,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a line in the song I\u2019m really proud of: \u2018With every guitar string scar on my hand, I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover.\u2019 That line is really special to me because I\u2019ve spent quite a bit of time writing breakup songs, and songs about things not turning out the way you wanted them to, or songs about what you thought would be love and it turned out not to be that at all \u2014 just the struggle of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSongwriting is just really a cathartic, therapeutic thing to me,\u201d she continued. \u201cSo there are a lot of things I\u2019ve written about in life that are the harder things I\u2019ve had to go through. So I took that as a metaphor for the times I was learning to play guitar: I\u2019d play until my fingers bled when I was a kid, and I still have those marks from that; those times I\u2019d be changing a string and it\u2019d pop, and I still have those scars from that. But it\u2019s also a bigger metaphor for \u2014 in life, you accumulate scars. You accumulate hurt. You accumulate moments of learning and disappointment and struggle and all that. And if someone\u2019s gonna take your hand, they better take your hand, scars and all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The vocalist returned to guitar for \u201cDeath By a Thousand Cuts,\u201d which, as a breakup song, is an outlier on what she calls the overall \u201cvery, very happy, romantic\u201d Lover<\/em>. <\/span>During the album\u2019s writing process, several of her friends went through breakups, and she wound up inadvertently immersed in the mood of heartbreak. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis all culminated in me waking up one day with all these breakup lyrics in my head,\u201d she continued. \u201cSo I was like, \u2018It\u2019s still here! Yes!\u2019 So I ended up writing a song that\u2019s a breakup song on the Lover<\/i> album. I was like, \u2018This song is my proof that I don\u2019t have to stop writing songs about heartache and misery, which for me is incredible news.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Swift finished the show with a piano set take on one older song, \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d which, as she noted, many critics \u2014 including our own Rob Sheffield<\/a> \u2014 have ranked as her greatest song to date. <\/span><\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taylor Swift joined NPR\u2019s Tiny Desk concert series for an intimate acoustic set featuring three songs from her latest LP, Lover. The singer-songwriter \u2014 and recent Rolling Stone cover star \u2014 approached the mini-show like an episode of Behind the Music, detailing the inspirations behind \u201cThe Man,\u201d \u201cLover,\u201d \u201cDeath By a Thousand Cuts\u201d and Red […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-music-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-22 01:43:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}