When you go back to Folklore after hearing “Marjorie,” it’s a whole new album, because you can hear echoes of her in the stories, like the scandalous old ladies of “Mad Woman” and “The Last Great American Dynasty.” Right now, somewhere in the universe, Marjorie and Rebekah are arguing over who got a better song. She’s going for bigger emotional stakes now.)
#YOUTUBE SIRDS SINGING HOW TO#
“I should have asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should have kept every grocery store receipt / Because every scrap of you would be taken from me.” (The way she drops the word “receipt” is a truly Swiftian move: Her clever flashback to the the Reputation era, when “receipt” just meant petty social-media score-settling. “I should have asked you questions,” Taylor sings. The song’s power comes from Taylor’s hushed vocal over the seething electronic pulse, a nod to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” (It says a lot about the year we’ve had that the idea of Taylor Swift entering her Steve Reich/Terry Riley phase doesn’t even make the top thousand weirdest surprises of 2020.) Bryce Dessner orchestrated it, with vintage synths and strings, with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on background vocals. As Taylor sings, she died with “All your closets of backlogged dreams / And how you left them all for me.”
But she didn’t live long enough to see her become a star. It makes you imagine the conversations she’d have with her granddaughter as she made a life in music, the kind of life Marjorie could only dream about. I became a sort of straight man for the show’s M.C.” In a news clipping from her hometown paper, as seen in the video, she says, “My Spanish was bad enough to be funny, and the audience loved it. She sang with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and the supper clubs of San Juan, such as Club La Concha in Condado. She majored in music at college, and in 1950 won a talent contest to go on the radio show, “Music With the Girls.” Her career took off in Puerto Rico, where she lived with her husband after some time in Havana. Such a powerful image, especially when you consider all the songs Taylor would go on to write with these hands.įinlay was a classically trained virtuoso who grew up singing in her high-school choir in Mexico, Missouri. In one scene, she shares a piano bench with her granddaughter Taylor is just a toddler, but Marjorie is already showing her where to place her hands on the keys. Let’s just say the lady seems right at home in front of a camera-she’s the essence of grandma realness, glammed up in her bouffant and lipstick.
#YOUTUBE SIRDS SINGING FULL#
Swift made a video for “Marjorie,” full of family footage.
They’re both songs about living with the dead as you grow older, and feeling their spirit in your bones. But they both inspire their granddaughter to visit some scary places creatively. (Are Track 13s the new Track 5s?) Dean was her father’s father, Finlay her mother’s mother. Like “Epiphany,” “Marjorie” is placed at Track 13-a number near to the songwriters heart. Just as Evermore is a sister album to Folklore, this is a sister song to “Epiphany,” the stark ballad of her grandfather Dean and his World War II combat experience on Guadalcanal. When she announced the album this week, Swift called it “one starring my grandmother, Marjorie, who still visits me sometimes…if only in my dreams.” She brings in Finlay’s voice at the end-when she confesses, “If I didn’t know better / I’d think you were singing to me now,” we hear Marjorie’s soprano voice singing along with her. She wrote “Marjorie” with Dessner, as a tribute to her real-life grandmother Marjorie Finlay, an opera singer who passed away in 2003. Related: 173 of Taylor Swift’s Songs Ranked by Rob Sheffield
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