Taylor Swift‘s “The Man” has been inspiring a lot of people lately! It is easily a favorite of her latest album Lover as it speaks up against the hypocrisy against women in the entertainment industry. It will hopefully be the next single off her album!
Now, all-female, singer-songwriter collective, Song Suffragettes has produced a new version of “The Man” Seventeen Song Suffragettes provide vocals on the track that was produced by fellow Song Suffragette Tasji. The song is available everywhere music is streamed or sold.
Song Suffragettes also produced a music video in support of the song with a humorous and empowering take on bad behavior in the workplace. The music video features all 17 performers on the song (women listed in order of appearance in the music video): Chloe Gilligan, Sarahbeth Taite, Reyna Roberts, Maddison Krebs, Tasji, Regan Stewart, Emily Brooke, Erin Grand, Caroline Marquard, Mia Morris, Michelle Pereira, Nora Collins, Gray Robinson, Raquel Cole, Stevie Woodward, Lexi Lauren and Carter Faith.
The female empowerment themes of “The Man” aligned perfectly with the Song Suffragettes mantra of #LetTheGirlsPlay. Says Helena Capps, Song Suffragettes’ VP, “With our past cover of Keith Urban’s ‘Female’ and our original song ‘Time’s Up’ , we took a more serious approach to female empowerment, but when we heard ‘The Man’, we decided it was time to do something fun. As usual, our Song Suffragettes alumnae didn’t hesitate to be a part of this project, which speaks again to the solidarity of our female singer-songwriters as they continue to strive to make their voices heard within the music community.”
Song Suffragettes remains at the forefront of the disparity and discrimination debate surrounding females in the country music genre. PBS NewsHour showcased Song Suffragettes in a story earlier this year about Nashville’s gender imbalance. ELLE Magazine prominently featured Song Suffragettes in their November 2018 issue with a story titled “The Women of Nashville’s Music Scene Are Calling Time’s Up.” In December 2018, National Public Radio (NPR) touted Song Suffragettes nationally in a Morning Edition piece called “Female Country Music Singers In Nashville Navigate Gender Bias To Be Heard.”
About Song Suffragettes Song Suffragettes is a collective of female singer-songwriters that performs every Monday night at The Listening Room Café in Nashville, TN. In just five years, Song Suffragettes has showcased over 240 talented women out of more than 1,400 who have submitted to play the show. With weekly sell-outs and a mantra of #LetTheGirlsPlay, Song Suffragettes vocally combats wide-spread discrimination against women in the music industry by giving female talent a place to play, grow and evolve with fellow creatives. Since its inception, 16 Song Suffragettes women have gone on to receive record deals and more than 40 have landed music publishing deals. With over 3 million views on their YouTube channel, Song Suffragettes was named by Billboard magazine as one of “Next-Gen Nashville: 16 People, Places and Things Shaking Up Music City”. Featured in ELLE, USA Today, Washington Post, Grammy.com, Boston Globe and on PBS NewsHour and NPR, Song Suffragettes continues to fight for female talent to be heard throughout the country and beyond.
About The LSSW Group Guided by four women with over 100 years of collective experience in financial services, The LSSW Group serves the wealth management needs of business owners, real estate investors, C-Suite executives and family offices, as well as the unique requirements of those in the entertainment industry. The Group has organized its practice to harness synergies and leverage the global resources of J.P. Morgan. Their strategic partnership, where investment advice and service are paramount, is based on a foundation of quality, integrity, transparency and collaboration. In addition, The LSSW Group is the first-ever presenting sponsor of Nashville’s esteemed all-female, singer-songwriter collective Song Suffragettes.
NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series started as a joke between NPR Music and artist Laura Gibson who they tried to see perform while at a bar. The atmosphere was so noisy that they could not hear her perform and joked with her that she should just come perform at their desks. Gibson was a good sport and showed up three weeks later and kicked off what is now known as Tiny Desk Concerts. 11 Years later, over 800 artists have performed for NPR Music, giving them the chance to re-imagine their songs and perform in a atypical environment.
The latest Tiny Desk Concert invited Pop Superstar, 10 time GRAMMY winner, Taylor Swift to their D.C. office to have her chance at playing the iconic gig.
“Wow, this is a lot of people in a tiny office, I love it! I’m Taylor, welcome to my Tiny Desk Concert.” She continued “It’s great to be in D.C. wow, you guys have anything exciting going on the last couple of weeks or any possible changes in play?” Swift went on to say that “Tiny Desk is one of my favorite corners of the internet. It’s an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music… I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them. So, it’s just me. There’s no dancers, unfortunately [laughs].”
Swift talks about the double standards in the industry
Swift then went on to introduce her first song “The Man” saying:
“I had an album that just came out called Lover [audience cheers], I’m really happy you like it. It’s one of those albums where I wrote everything on one instrument first, so it’s really fun to pick songs to do acoustically because they all started out that way. There’s a song that I have wanted to write conceptually for a very long time because over the course of my life, it has occurred to me that we have a double standard issue in our society. It’s something that I’ve thought about 7 million times a day for the last ten years of my life. I was always just wondering, ‘can 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? 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, but if I was… a man.”
After finishing “The Man” on guitar, Swift handed her guitar pick to a young girl standing near the front before switching over to the piano to perform the title track “Lover.” She spoke about the song before breaking into her performance, explaining:
Taylor explains “Guitar string scar on my hand” line
“There’s a song that I wrote on the album that as soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the title track. Writing songs is strange cause it never happens exactly the same way, but sometimes it happens in a way like this weird, haunting, like you can’t really explain. Like you can’t really explain where these ideas came from and you feel like you didn’t work at all to write it. That’s the best kind of song. Then there are days, most days where you show up and the idea doesn’t and that’s where craft, you have to kind of know the craft of it. You have to try to scrap your brain for something to write cuz you’re not always going to be inspired and that’s ok. There’s a really good Elizabeth Gilbert Ted Talk about that [audience laughs]. One of my favorite things to cry while watching. With this song, it was one of those weird moments where it is just middle of the night, I’m like in my PJs, stumbling to the piano because I got this idea and the song just happened really quickly. There’s a line in the song that I’m really proud of, the line says “with every guitar string scar on my hand, I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover” [smiles]. That line is really special to me because I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing break up songs [audience bursts into laughter] and songs about things not turning out the way you want them to or songs about what you thought would be love and it turned out to not be that at all or you know just kind of the struggle of life. Songwriting is just a therapeutic thing for me. So there are a lot of things I’ve written about in my life that were the harder things I had to go through so I took that [the line] as a metaphor for the times when I was learning to play guitar and I played til my finger bled when I was a kid and I still have those marks from that and all the times I would be changing a [guitar] string and it would pop, and I still have scars from that. It’s also a bigger metaphor for, in life, you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt, you accumulate moments of learning, disappointment and struggles and all that. If someone’s going to take your hand, they better take your hand, scars and all.”
She can still write a good break up song!
Swift then took off her jacket and joked about costume changes fans are used to seeing on tour. She switched back to guitar while describing the inspiration behind her next song “Death By a Thousand Cuts.”
“So, over the course of the years that I’ve done interviews, which I think is about 15 or 16 years now, I’ve gotten a question over and over again that has the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health [she tries to say light heartily]. The question is ‘What will you ever do, if you get happy? Like what will you write about? Will you just never be able to write a song again?’ It’s an interesting question, in the interviews, when I would get that question, as a young person, I kind of would just be like ‘well, I started out writing songs about things I had no idea about. I started writing songs when I was 12 years old and they were usually about heartbreak and I had no idea what I was talking about, but I had watched movies and I had read books, so I would grab inspiration from character dynamics, as you do. So I would say in the interviews, probably just do that, if stuff is going on in the world that’s not just happening to me, maybe I could get inspiration from that. Then I’d go home and I’d be like ‘what would happen if I was ever happy? Would I not be able to do the thing that I love the most in the world? Oh my God. Would I not be able to write breakup songs anymore? I love breakup songs! They’re so fun to write.’ So then I happened to be writing this album Lover which is a very very happy, romantic album. In my life, a few of my friends had been going through breakups, like one of those breakups where you need to talk to your friend all the time, because they need to talk about it all day, every day. So I was having a lot of conversations about breakups, I watched movies that were really well done about breakups, in some of the books I was reading there was some good breakups happening. So this all culminated and I’d be waking up one day with all these heartbreak lyrics in my head and I was like ‘It’s still here! Yes!’ So I ended up writing a song that was a breakup song on the Lover album that I was like this song is my proof that you know, I don’t have to stop writing songs about heartache and misery. Which for me is incredible news.”
Although typically the Tiny Desk Concert series stops after three songs, they made an exception, for fan favorite “All Too Well” to which Swift returned to the piano to sing. Swift explained about her decision to play the song off her 2012 album Red:
Taylor Swift doesn’t google herself, but her dad does.
“I was thinking about how it’s almost Autumn, that’s like my favorite season and people on the internet have been like kind enough, in amongst people who care about my music, to associate Autumn with one of my albums called Red. I guess it’s just a very “Autumny” album. I was thinking about that, how it’s so nice, the crisp fall air is happening. You know, I don’t google myself ever, I recommend you not do it either, but my dad does [audience laughs]. He will like send me, links to things, every once in awhile I’ll see that, but that’s the only way I get my news. He sends me these lists that are like, very nice, like ranking my songs, that’s really nice of people to do, I really love that people do that, I find it really nice and I’m grateful that people care enough to rank my songs. There’s one song that I’m particularly proud of because when the Red album came out, there was this one song on the album where I was like ‘I’m the only one who loves this song this much but it’s only because it happened to me and it’s personal. No one else is going to like “All Too Well” as much as me [audience cheers]. When it came out on the album, like slowly but surely, over the course of that album’s life and beyond, you guys have made that song something way more than I thought that life of the song would be. I’ve just had so much fun playing it in concert and just like screaming it with you guys. The fact that this song went out into the world and it’s just, I think it’s usually #1 on any list that’s like saying what my songs are, which is great, and I’m happy that my opinion lines up with your opinion on that because that was probably my favorite song on Red. So I figured that maybe I would play it for you…. Here’s a sad song about Fall.”
Taylor Swift has finally released her much anticipated album Lover. It was less than two years ago when Swift dropped Reputation, which went on to break multiple records, sell more than a million copies in a week and earn Swift some pretty high accolades. It wasn’t an album she planned on making, it came after what Swift has described as the “summer of the apocalypse.” It was during that time that she decided there would be no explanation, there would just be reputation. It was much needed, not only for Swift, but also for the public. The public needed to see less of her gracing every cover of every magazine, on every TV show, doing interview after interview. The world didn’t need to see her because they didn’t want to.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s not to say that everyone turned their back on Swift. No, her millions of fans still went out and bought her album which sold over 1 million copies the first week alone. They showed up in thousands to sell out her very first Stadium tour (who can even play in stadiums anymore?). However, with celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West skewing the truth, it was almost cool to hate Swift. Would you want to show up to a party knowing nobody wanted you there? Swift herself said in an interview with The Guardian: “when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”
So Swift hid out, fell in love, got to know her lover for 6 months before the world even found out she had one. It was during that time that she realized how wonderful it is to live away from the public eye, to have privacy and to have something no one else knows about, and she wants to protect that. Now, almost 2.5 years later, Swift is still living privately. She hasn’t thrown a 4th of July bash in years (we’ll get to that). She has not been formally photographed with her actor boyfriend, Joe Alwyn of nearly 3 years and they do not post photos together on social media.
Although much of their relationship is private, they have showed up to support one another, whether that be Swift accompanying Alwyn to a movie premiere (minus the red carpet), or Alwyn showing up to many of her concerts.
Not everything has to be done in the public eye. Happy Birthdays don’t need to be displayed to show their is no beef or fall out with others. Swift herself discovered this and realized she had created the disillusion that if she did not post about something, it did not happen. That’s changed now, along with her throwing big 4th of July bashes. It’s not that she is no longer patriotic, but only recently that she discovered the true value of what that means. She ties these elements into her album, especially on a song called “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” that Swift describes the “disillusionment with our crazy world of politics and inequality, set in a metaphorical high school.
Not only is Lover Swift’s first album that she owns, but her relationship is the first one she has also been able to keep to herself. What she wants the world to know, she has shared on this new collection of musical enjoyment.
Lover proves she can make a whole album filled with happy, break-up free songs, much to the haters dismay.
A huge part of Swift’s career has always been plagued with this notion that she dates people then breaks up a few months later so that she has material for her album. What every avid Swift fan will fight you on, is that is not the case. They will bring many examples to the table (although the naysayers won’t listen), as there are many songs that are not about romantic relationships at all (“The Outside,” “Change,” “Innocent,” “Long Live,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Never Grow Up,” “Ronan,” “Safe and Sound,” “Shake It Off,” “Mean,” etc), There are also many songs that are about relationships that aren’t sad or because of a break up, but instead filled with hope and optimism. Take for example “Mine,” “Love Story,” “Enchanted,” “New Romantics,” “Mary’s Song,” “Delicate,” “Stay Beautiful,” “Today Was a Fairytale.” It is safe to say that Swift has more songs that are not about breakups than are, Lover proves she can make a whole album filled with happy, break-up free songs, much to the haters dismay.
Some of the songs off Lover are deeply personal, take “Soon You’ll Get Better” ft the Dixie Chicks. This is a song Swift described as being a family decision to put on since it is about her mother’s current cancer battle. She says:
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:’VP0TdQCyQzFgm6mgMd3uWw’,sig:’jmNK4K9eJ5zNebX-exHRauKC8QxPuEQKIrax7zFyja0=’,w:’594px’,h:’416px’,items:’470395564′,caption: true ,tld:’com’,is360: false })});
“This song is one that was hard to write, because it’s something that I’m going through right now. My dad got cancer when I was 13 and he got better, and it wasn’t a very long process, but things with my mom have been very different. This song is special in a lot of ways because when I wrote this one, I recorded it with Jack [Antonoff], and he was working, at the time, with the Dixie Chicks, making their new album. That’s the band that made me wanna do this (music industry). There’s a handful of artists that made me wanna do this. The Dixie Chicks taught me that you can have a strong female voice, saying whatever she wants in music, and experimenting with having a very feminine aesthetic, but very tough resilience to them. And their musicianship, the way that they played their instruments made me wanna play an instrument. Basically, I said to Jack, ‘Can you please play this song for the Dixie Chicks? It’s a really special song for me and my family, and they were such a big part of my life, and I wonder if maybe they can sing background vocals on it, or maybe even play on it if they wanted to.’ And he played it for them, and they got really emotional hearing it, and wanted to sing on it and play fiddle and banjo on it too. So, the background vocals that you’re hearing in this song are the Dixie Chicks, who I’m obsessed with.”
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:’iW_mXmjZR8Jpe8o71Ben3A’,sig:’yP0BVZiot8snPhA9JfsVMSM28HlDSgELYH-A37yGS18=’,w:’594px’,h:’452px’,items:’1169740381′,caption: true ,tld:’com’,is360: false })});
Other songs are more fun and carefree and also give an insight into how happy Swift is. Take the title track “Lover” for instance. Swift revealed the album was almost called ‘Daylight’ (also a track on the album) until she wrote this song. It gives a glimpse into her personal life and how special her relationship is as she sings “I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all.” Swift explains the song writing process for the song, saying:
“Writing the song Lover was one of those magical experiences that you sometimes get to have as a songwriter. I wrote it really quick in the middle of the night. As soon as I wrote it, I knew I wanted it to be the album title. And I knew that writing it kind of would depict the tone of the entire records. So it was a real catalyst for what this album turned into.”
Earlier this year, Swift wrote an essay for ELLE UK Magazine in which she said “step into the daylight and let it go.”
Those became the lyrics to the song “Daylight” in which Swift sings about believing love once used to be burning red but now it is golden, like daylight. She even foreshadowed her future in the album forward for Red.
“There’s something to be proud of about moving on and realizing that real love shines golden like starlight, and doesn’t fade or spontaneously combust. Maybe I’ll write a whole album about that kind of love if I ever find it.”
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:’oijLXZv3SQlS1_HL-EDXtQ’,sig:’E2s6j9kaKdZSyQQv8jajC-0FumDF9K1E5_aRsdbJgjA=’,w:’594px’,h:’378px’,items:’1163599028′,caption: true ,tld:’com’,is360: false })});
So now she sings on “Daylight”:
I once believed love would be (Burning red) But it’s golden Like daylight, like daylight Like daylight, daylight
Lover is that album! It’s her first entire album filled with love and the many faces of it. After being in a relationship for three years, Swift has found that there are still hardships to overcome, there are still times of jealousy as she sings on the title track “I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you.”
In fact, Swift is so in love she sings about getting married with paper rings instead of the traditional diamonds (shiny things). The ability of this album to encompass so much love but also many other important aspects of life and relationships. Take “Cornelia Street” for example. A song where she reveals if the relationship were to ever end, she would be so heartbroken she would never be able to “walk Cornelia Street again.” Other songs like “The Man” showcase what life and careers would be like for a woman if they were in fact a man.” She sings:
I’d be a fearless leader I’d be an alpha type When everyone believes ya What’s that like? I’m so sick of running as fast as I can Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man And I’m so sick of them coming at me again ‘Cause if I was a man, then I’d be the man
“The Man” is a favorite off the album and for all those who can’t stand a whole album of love songs, Swift has managed a break up song for you. That’s the amazing part about being a songwriter. Most of the time, artists write what they know, but they also write about things that inspire them. For instance, Swift wrote a song on 1989 called “This Love” that was inspired not by her personal relationship but a relationship of two friends. She has also written songs for movies like “The Hunger Games,” “One Chance” and “Fifty Shades Darker.”
The song “Death By a Thousand Cuts” was inspired by a Netflix movie Swift saw called “Someone Great.” The full circle moment is that the writer of “Someone Great” was going through a break up of her own and used Swift’s song “Clean” off 1989 as inspiration for the movie!
I cried watching [Someone Great] and so for about week, I started waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario. I woke up and was like oh my god I’m writing a breakup song.
There’s something for everyone off Lover and Swift has successfully shown that she can be madly in love and still write amazing songs. That she can draw from different experiences and once again put out an album that has songs unrelated to romances, songs with a bigger picture, with metaphors, and for wanting more for her family, her country, for women, for the LGBQT community and even herself.
Lover wasn’t written to prove anything. It is an album about healing, moving forward and using her voice to do more and say more. Swift even sampled music from The Regent Park School of Music in Toronto in the songs “It’s Nice to Have a Friend”. All of the royalties from that sample go to funding the school and it’s programs.
“Thrilled to announce that the first artist to officially support our Parkscapes music library is none other than Taylor Swift. Taylor’s song “It’s nice to have a friend” from her new album “Lover” uses “Summer in the South” and features voices and instrumentation from our own RPSM students. Every time you stream, download or purchase the song, a portion of the proceeds directly supports our school. Thank you Taylor and Frank Dukes for giving us this opportunity. We’re so proud of our kids and what they’ve accomplished by being a part of this project.”
Lover is finally out, it is available on streaming services (for the first time immediately following release) and it’s already broken records for the most albums sold in 2019, and that happened in only two days! It’s going to be another big week for Swift and we can’t wait to see what she does going forward.
Here is us buying the album!
Trusted Source for news regarding Artists and Entertainment you love!
