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Dear listeners,
Perhaps you might have heard that Taylor Swift has a brand new album out at this time — only a wild guess! — and that it’s referred to as “The Tortured Poets Department.” That title alone generated chatter earlier than anybody had heard a word, and it obtained me occupied with a few of my favourite songs that reference poets. And so I stuffed my inkwell, put a quill pen to my chin and cried, “A playlist is so as!”
Though there aren’t any Swift songs on this combine, it does function the 2 poets she name-checks on her newest album: Dylan Thomas (in a shaggy ode written by Better Oblivion Community Center) and that the majority poetic of rock stars, Patti Smith. It can also be considerably shorter than “The Tortured Poets Department” and its 15-song companion piece (recognized collectively as “The Anthology”), which, as I recommend in my evaluate of Swift’s album, just isn’t essentially a nasty factor. And no, my buddies, this playlist doesn’t comprise any Charlie Puth.
It does, nonetheless, spotlight songs by the Smiths, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey and extra. Grab your favourite pocket book, discover a notably pastoral patch of grass to lie in, and press play.
Keats and Yeats are in your aspect,
Lindsay
Listen alongside whilst you learn.
1. Better Oblivion Community Center: “Dylan Thomas”
There are loads of quotable strains on this jangly, stomping spotlight from the only real album launched by Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers’s aspect mission, Better Oblivion Community Center, however I’m keen on this one: “I’m getting used to those dizzy spells/I’m takin’ a bathe on the Bates Motel.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. The Smiths: “Cemetry Gates”
How many individuals first realized that “Keats” didn’t rhyme with “Yeats” due to this music, from the Smiths’ 1986 album “The Queen Is Dead”?
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Simon and Garfunkel: “The Dangling Conversation”
“And you learn your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost,” Simon and Garfunkel sing on this perennial English teacher favourite, from the 1966 traditional “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.” “And we word our place with e-book markers that measure what we’ve misplaced.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Lana Del Rey: “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It”
On this haunting and completely poetic closing quantity from her 2019 epic “Norman _____ Rockwell,” Lana Del Rey likens herself to “24/7 Sylvia Plath, writing in blood in your partitions ’trigger the ink in my pen don’t look good in my pad.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Bob Dylan: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
“Relationships have all been dangerous, mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud,” Bob Dylan sings on this bittersweet music from his 1975 masterpiece “Blood on the Tracks.” Hopefully he’s exaggerating, since Verlaine and Rimbaud’s infamous, stormy affair ended when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and spent 18 months in jail for tried homicide.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Frankie Cosmos: “Sappho”
Greta Kline, who information as Frankie Cosmos, spies on a crush on this muted ditty from her 2016 album “Next Thing,” and wonders, “Is that Sappho you’re studying?” — maybe asking, in a coded manner, if the item of her affection is queer.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Patti Smith: “Land”
Finally, poetry and rock ’n’ roll had by no means earlier than swirled collectively as dizzyingly as they do on Patti Smith’s 1975 launch “Horses,” particularly this ecstatic nine-and-a-half-minute monitor. “Go Rimbaud!” she cries, shouting out one in every of her heroes because the music accelerates towards its climax. “And go Johnny go and do the Watusi!”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“7 Songs That Reference Tortured Poets” monitor record
Track 1: Better Oblivion Community Center, “Dylan Thomas”
Track 2: The Smiths, “Cemetry Gates”
Track 3: Simon and Garfunkel, “The Dangling Conversation”
Track 4: Lana Del Rey, “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It”
Track 5: Bob Dylan, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
Track 6: Frankie Cosmos, “Sappho”
Track 7: Patti Smith, “Land”
Bonus Tracks
Thank you to Jon Pareles for choosing all the Friday Playlist this week, whereas I paid my dues within the Tortured Album Reviewers Department. He selected one in every of my favourite Swift songs on the album — her duet with Post Malone, “Fortnight” — in addition to contemporary tracks from Claire Rousay, Arooj Aftab, Lucy Rose and extra. Listen right here.
