Vertimus

Agreed. NFR could use something light with some lift.

I agree. It's not commercial in the least.

****NFR SPOILERS**** Not too much detail, but the album is just what she said it is. It's low key, sleepy, piano-based and meandering. Clearly this is the kind of record she wanted to make right now. There's a shout-out to Joni Mitchell and Mitchel's early LA era. Maybe LDR's gotten to the point like (the admittedly much older) Kate Bush did in 2011, where she no longer feels obligated or interested in turning out 3-minute-ish pop songs. Tori Amos has been producing NFR-like, piano-based gems like 'Indian Summer,' 'Garlands' and 'Oscar's Theme' for a decade, but then tacking them onto 'banger' albums as b-sides or as video bonuses, where few can find them. By doing this, she's shooting herself in the foot and almost condemning some of her best work to obscurity. Songs aren't ever going to make 'the Great American Song book' if few ever hear them. So I'm glad LDR did just what she wanted here. I especially like Bartender.

About the leak, as I've said before here--c'mon. It's 2019. Everything leaks. LDR, Jack and Interscope, if they have any sophistication at all--and they do--expect/anticipate the album to leak. They're mentally and emotionally prepared. It's not as if it they were planning to release it in late August and it was leaked in March or April. It leaked a few weeks before its release date, and if they were really concerned and really cared, then they would be ready to rush release it the moment it leaked. And they apparently haven't done that. No fan is going to be happy with the LQ phone version. They're almost all going to buy the album regardless, less they don't care for it at all. So maybe $30 to $40 thousand has been lost to them, which is peanuts to them in the scheme of things. They're all millionaires many times over.

I appreciate how you always express yourself as you feel without apparent fear of reprisal. Your opinion are rarely polarized consistently, which is human. Keep being yourself.

Why didn't she just rerecord it with Jack? Even with new, weak lyrics, a new recording with a different arrangement would have made it sound more like the rest of the album, presumably.

I agree. If drugs don’t play some role in her life, why would she write about them year after year after year? Especially when she knows that glamorizing drugs may be harmful to others, especially impressionable young people?

I think it’s the quality and distinction of the melodies that makes a lot of the difference to fans. For me, most of UV and HM just aren’t very melodic, or, they’re melodies just don’t speak to me personally. . There are definite similarities.

Does anyone else hear what sound like male backing vocals on the front end of TG?

It works on two levels, the second being about the end of the world—with the narrator and her “friends” safe elsewhere.

Not being released at midnight.

Video Games is what plays, not FIILY.

To me it sounds a lot more like ‘13 Beaches’ and nothing at all like Flipside. Musically, a lot of it is in the ‘Hope’ vein. To me, it sounds like a mix of ‘13B’ and ‘Hope.’

It’s probably a technical issue preventing them from being posted at midnight.

Someone else already beat you to that.

I would almost add Leonard Cohen to that songwriting list, but until his middle period, EVERYTHING he wrote was brilliant, and LDR doesn’t have that kind of unparalleled songwriting history, though her catalogue is still unbelievably great. LDR definitely has her own unique POV and identity, there’s no one else like her. She should continue being herself and writing from her own POV, that’s her greatest gift to the world.

No, he wasn’t like that, so we have to hear the title song to understand why she picked him specifically as a symbol. Maybe there is no symbolic value and his name merely sounded better than Andy Warhol or Pablo Picasso. Since the real Norman Rockwell is and was associated with an idealized, tradition image of America, that fact, to me, seems the greatest reason why she chose him, but we still don’t know what her take on him is on the title track and entire record.

These songs are placing LDR in the Bob Dylan/Joni Mitchell/Tori Amos category of songwriting.

You’re a ‘good man’ and individual.

I agree.

The mixing of metaphors is brilliant, and the literal and the figurative.

I am so glad to her ‘siren’ voice on TG, the ‘wasted’ and ‘facing’ vocal parts, which is what entrances me most about her, along with her songwriting. Siren voice also heard on ‘24’ and ‘13 Beaches,’ among others.

It’s very sad, sadder than ‘Hope.’I could see how some could find it even depressing. But despite the fade out ending, it’s cathartic, and that keeps it from being depressing to me.

Well that’s all certainly fair, thank you. I can see the irony in ‘lit’ from that perspective; by lit she essentially means licked, defeated, broken, finished. I see can’t help see it as her ‘Major Tom’ with the narrator looking back on loss a la ‘Old Money,’ but on a grander, global scale.