Somehow I never knew that pop version of "Teardrops" existed—I knew who Swift was in 2007 but didn't get around to playing anything from the first album until 2008 (and if memory serves was underwhelmed by the sappiness and went back to playing Miley.) Upon listening to it, I'm slightly disappointed it's barely even a travesty by 2020s remix standards (if you're not going to go full EDM or get a former best rapper alive to add a totally irrelevant verse, what's even the point?)
I think the three-month chart disappearance is an artifact of Billboard's Byzantine recurrency rules: don't know what the exact regulations were at the time, but likely "Teardrops" hit the age threshold and was dropped from the Hot 100, then got reinstated once the pop mix got pushed to radio. So it really was *that* version that set the table for "Love Story"/Fearless/world domination etc.
(also the reaction at the end of that Pulse thread to the pop version is amusing, could've just read that and saved myself the next five years of "but is she country?" discourse)
Yeah you could have hung out with us folks who were saying “Fearless” was a Lisa Loeb-ish singer-songwriter album as early as Jan 2009! Interesting about the weird chart rules -- my question has always been why the pop version hopped right back onto the charts as if nothing had happened, and that’s where I think the youth audience and Radio Disney probably are important. But I wonder if I’m this case Radio Disney was a proxy or an accelerant -- probably both
The play for teens and teen pop wasn’t subtle!! But there were a few earlier attempts to do this -- Hope Partlow, say -- that didn’t take.
In that video Chapman speculated that Taylor liked working with him because together they *sounded younger* than Taylor working with the other Nashville pros. But because the play was so transparently for a younger audience within country lots of Nashville folks passed, didn’t think there was a big enough market for it.
I wonder if the Hope Partlow situation was similar to the Ashley Monroe situation: they gave up too early because, as entrepreneurs, they were gutless. ("They" being I don't know who in Nashville, I guess, but see next parenthesis.) (Am realizing that I don't remember if Partlow was ever marketed as country. She was Nashville based, but on Virgin. Were there many country acts on Virgin? Wikip says that in 2005 she opened for Jesse McCartney, which is a play for the teen/tween/kid audience, not for the country audience.)
Anyway, my hypothesis is that with the "Teardrops" vid Taylor wasn't just going for the youth audience in country, she was going for the youth audience period.
Whereas Ashley Monroe, only 19 when she recorded Satisfied, was nonetheless running straight for the country market, not a teen niche within. But then, Taylor's "Tim McGraw" isn't kid focused either: it's a *reminiscence* song like "Strawberry Wine," which was performed by a 30-year-old (and - minority opinion here, I guess - "Tim McGraw" is way better written, more detailed, more bloody-hatcheted about how bittersweet it is, and better performed than "Strawberry Wine," and I think Deana Carter is a damned good performer; she's a good lyricist too, but she didn't write "Strawberry Wine").
Satisfied was produced by Mark Wright, btw, another of Chapman's heroes.
Yeah, part of my quibble with the "standard" Taylor Swift story about getting pushed out of country is that I think Taylor courted a much broader youth (and pop) audience from the start, certainly more so than Ashley Monroe -- though probably not any more than Hope Partlow, who was I think just a run of the mill dud, dropped from Virgin the same year the album came out. I just think Taylor's approach was a much riskier bet at the time than it seems now that it paid off!
I should figure out how to go through Mediabase for Radio Disney airplay stats, which are a bit different from the voted-on top tens, to see when exactly they started playing "Teardrops." (I'm not sure there's any way to figure out WHY they started playing "Teardrops") If I had to guess, I'd bet that the RD airplay was relatively organic, with actual kids calling in saying they wanted to hear it, which suggests that the youth phenomenon was happening through word of mouth and online savvy and RD was just an indicator of the phenomenon.
Might dig in to that a little, because I'd also like to write about Miley Cyrus in 2006, about the polar opposite approach to doing something similar to Taylor Swift -- using country music bonafides as an element of courting a big youth audience to cross over to pop radio. I sometimes think of Miley as a sort of inverse of Taylor -- absolutely nothing word-of-mouth about it in the early stages (that was part of what made the "See You Again" story so interesting), firmly rock-based teen pop but with some country signifiers, especially in her show/back story/vocal twang.
Think one thing we both learned from Duncan J. Watts is never to treat any past event as inevitable. I mean, we probably knew it already, but Watts really helps keep me focused on keeping my language clear of hints of the inevitable.
Assume in calling Hope Partlow a dud you mean "commercial failure" not "bad artistically."
Need to go and reread my end-of-decade (the '00s) piece - think I framed Taylor's relationship to country not particularly as country goes teenpop but as country goes *rock*. Or maybe both. Said (iirc) that she shifted the lost-highway adventure from honky-tonks and motels to high-school hallways and lovers' lane. And put her in a line of descent from Dylan through Joni - Dylan for some reason feminized himself in Like A Rolling Stone and so for Joni, Grace, etc. *as* Miss Lonely, their quest, their jungle, their "out in the streets," isn't the streets but rather their affairs with men.
Anyway, though, there's *another* comparison to Dylan, less interesting than the Miss Lonely one but more pertinent to your Taylor series: Bob Dylan is the quintessential singer who jumped from [genre] to pop.
Somehow I never knew that pop version of "Teardrops" existed—I knew who Swift was in 2007 but didn't get around to playing anything from the first album until 2008 (and if memory serves was underwhelmed by the sappiness and went back to playing Miley.) Upon listening to it, I'm slightly disappointed it's barely even a travesty by 2020s remix standards (if you're not going to go full EDM or get a former best rapper alive to add a totally irrelevant verse, what's even the point?)
I think the three-month chart disappearance is an artifact of Billboard's Byzantine recurrency rules: don't know what the exact regulations were at the time, but likely "Teardrops" hit the age threshold and was dropped from the Hot 100, then got reinstated once the pop mix got pushed to radio. So it really was *that* version that set the table for "Love Story"/Fearless/world domination etc.
(also the reaction at the end of that Pulse thread to the pop version is amusing, could've just read that and saved myself the next five years of "but is she country?" discourse)
Yeah you could have hung out with us folks who were saying “Fearless” was a Lisa Loeb-ish singer-songwriter album as early as Jan 2009! Interesting about the weird chart rules -- my question has always been why the pop version hopped right back onto the charts as if nothing had happened, and that’s where I think the youth audience and Radio Disney probably are important. But I wonder if I’m this case Radio Disney was a proxy or an accelerant -- probably both
Oops, put this comment on the wrong thread:
https://theotherdave.substack.com/p/how-you-get-the-world-reflections-8fa/comment/41437351
The play for teens and teen pop wasn’t subtle!! But there were a few earlier attempts to do this -- Hope Partlow, say -- that didn’t take.
In that video Chapman speculated that Taylor liked working with him because together they *sounded younger* than Taylor working with the other Nashville pros. But because the play was so transparently for a younger audience within country lots of Nashville folks passed, didn’t think there was a big enough market for it.
I wonder if the Hope Partlow situation was similar to the Ashley Monroe situation: they gave up too early because, as entrepreneurs, they were gutless. ("They" being I don't know who in Nashville, I guess, but see next parenthesis.) (Am realizing that I don't remember if Partlow was ever marketed as country. She was Nashville based, but on Virgin. Were there many country acts on Virgin? Wikip says that in 2005 she opened for Jesse McCartney, which is a play for the teen/tween/kid audience, not for the country audience.)
Anyway, my hypothesis is that with the "Teardrops" vid Taylor wasn't just going for the youth audience in country, she was going for the youth audience period.
Whereas Ashley Monroe, only 19 when she recorded Satisfied, was nonetheless running straight for the country market, not a teen niche within. But then, Taylor's "Tim McGraw" isn't kid focused either: it's a *reminiscence* song like "Strawberry Wine," which was performed by a 30-year-old (and - minority opinion here, I guess - "Tim McGraw" is way better written, more detailed, more bloody-hatcheted about how bittersweet it is, and better performed than "Strawberry Wine," and I think Deana Carter is a damned good performer; she's a good lyricist too, but she didn't write "Strawberry Wine").
Satisfied was produced by Mark Wright, btw, another of Chapman's heroes.
Yeah, part of my quibble with the "standard" Taylor Swift story about getting pushed out of country is that I think Taylor courted a much broader youth (and pop) audience from the start, certainly more so than Ashley Monroe -- though probably not any more than Hope Partlow, who was I think just a run of the mill dud, dropped from Virgin the same year the album came out. I just think Taylor's approach was a much riskier bet at the time than it seems now that it paid off!
I should figure out how to go through Mediabase for Radio Disney airplay stats, which are a bit different from the voted-on top tens, to see when exactly they started playing "Teardrops." (I'm not sure there's any way to figure out WHY they started playing "Teardrops") If I had to guess, I'd bet that the RD airplay was relatively organic, with actual kids calling in saying they wanted to hear it, which suggests that the youth phenomenon was happening through word of mouth and online savvy and RD was just an indicator of the phenomenon.
Might dig in to that a little, because I'd also like to write about Miley Cyrus in 2006, about the polar opposite approach to doing something similar to Taylor Swift -- using country music bonafides as an element of courting a big youth audience to cross over to pop radio. I sometimes think of Miley as a sort of inverse of Taylor -- absolutely nothing word-of-mouth about it in the early stages (that was part of what made the "See You Again" story so interesting), firmly rock-based teen pop but with some country signifiers, especially in her show/back story/vocal twang.
Think one thing we both learned from Duncan J. Watts is never to treat any past event as inevitable. I mean, we probably knew it already, but Watts really helps keep me focused on keeping my language clear of hints of the inevitable.
Assume in calling Hope Partlow a dud you mean "commercial failure" not "bad artistically."
Yeah commercial only, I adore that album!
Need to go and reread my end-of-decade (the '00s) piece - think I framed Taylor's relationship to country not particularly as country goes teenpop but as country goes *rock*. Or maybe both. Said (iirc) that she shifted the lost-highway adventure from honky-tonks and motels to high-school hallways and lovers' lane. And put her in a line of descent from Dylan through Joni - Dylan for some reason feminized himself in Like A Rolling Stone and so for Joni, Grace, etc. *as* Miss Lonely, their quest, their jungle, their "out in the streets," isn't the streets but rather their affairs with men.
Anyway, though, there's *another* comparison to Dylan, less interesting than the Miss Lonely one but more pertinent to your Taylor series: Bob Dylan is the quintessential singer who jumped from [genre] to pop.