Taylor Swift is the pop star who launched a thousand ships (and at least half of them are gay): the songwriter-chanteuse whose every social media post fans pore over like they’re trying to break the Zodiac Killer’s cipher. Today, Taylor Swift released her latest album, Midnights, to the collective ecstasy of everyone I’ve ever met. “It's her most 'mature' sounding album in part because it is so consistent,” my editor feverishly typed into Slack, even though, lowkey, nobody asked. I’d sent him a video of a person plowing through the tracklist and immediately identifying Jack Antonoff’s fingerprints all over the record. It was made by Caleb Gamman, a video producer who hails from New Zealand, showed off his ear as he blind-identified every Antonoff-produced song on Midnights, usually in just a few seconds. Watch below and try not to let your jaw hit the floor:“My musical background is high school music, and that’s where it stopped… so I have no right,” Gamman said to me on a Zoom call, laughing. And yet: “When that music comes on, my heart rate gets elevated. I'm like, There's something about this that I’m not liking. I can intellectualize it, but really it’s just like, Oh no, that’s Jack.”Upon closer inspection, Antonoff’s sound can be reduced to a few factors—factors that Gamman’s fine with in piecemeal in the work of other producers like Francis and the Lights, A.G. Cook, or Calvin Harris. He broke down the Antonoff sound like this:
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My editor had a slick response to the critique that this musical cohesion is a bad thing. “This boring production style is a good way to showcase lyrics because it puts her voice front and center.” I’m paraphrasing, but… uh, thanks! So, who’s right?It’s true that most of the production on Midnights was helmed by none other than Jack Antonoff, who basically credits Swift with kickstarting his career as a producer in the first place. It’s the eighth album they’ve worked on together, but not everyone is a fan. In fact, one man—the very hater in the video above, which went viral soon after Midnights dropped—told VICE he has a negative physical reaction to Antonoff’s signature sounds, one that’s sharpened into a sort of sixth sense.
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- Vocal clarity
- The same drum samples
- Stereo separation/expansion
- Detuned oscillators
- Reverb
- Breathy vocals
- Busy instrumentation except in the vocal range
- Smooth electronic bass
- Pitched drums
- “He'll low-pass anything”
- Digital harmony/vibrato
- A really clean vocoder
- "Christian music" harmonies
- Digital tinkly stuff