The First 4 Eras: Results (Miscellaneous)

Although we may only have 13 members of staff working here on this awards ceremony in this nuclear bunker in Birmingham, I can’t say they don’t know their stuff.  At least 12 of them are highly experienced film and music critics, with backgrounds in staging awards ceremonies, so I’m thankful that they’re pulling out all the stops to make this event as great as it can be under these difficult circumstances.  However, their fatal flaw is that, despite their honourable backgrounds as event organisers and critics, they don’t know the difference between the Academy Awards and the Oscars.  What they should be aware of is that the Academy Awards are the glitziest showstopper in the film calendar, held in late February or early March every year since about 1928, honouring the very best pieces of cinema that have graced the screen over the previous twelve months – while the Oscars is a group of impressionists dedicated to promoting the legacy of the playwright behind The Importance of Being Earnest.

One of the regular awards dished out by the Academy every year, of course, is the trophy for Best Film in a Foreign Language.  This award recognises the many incredible filmmakers from around the world, and, at the very least, goes to show today’s English speakers who won’t bother to learn another language that not only is English not a universal tongue, but that the English-speaking world does not own a complete monopoly in the film industry.  Far from it, in fact.  On which note…

THE MISCELLANEOUS SINGLES: THE TOP 5

Just like the English-language films aren’t the be-all and end-all of the film industry, Taylor’s album tracks don’t tell the full story of her musical genius.  The non-album tracks may have only limited recognition on Sporcle, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of being on an album.  Again, far from it.  There are plenty of hidden gems among these odd songs out, and here’s where we find out how you’ve ranked them (well, the top 5 of them)…

5) Crazier
Taylor’s not out to shock anyone at any time – she’s said so herself.  But she’s admitted to having a grand plan to repeatedly surprise us.  In my nearly five years of being a Swiftie, she’s never done anything else, and Crazier is a beautiful case in point.

It features, of course, in Disney’s 2009 Hannah Montana film; Taylor cameos as herself, armed with an acoustic guitar and some angelic vocals.  Unfortunately, then, there was somewhat of a mental barrier preventing me from fully embracing it for quite a while.  I was 15-16 years old when my Swiftie journey began, and my younger sister had just watched and enjoyed the Hannah Montana film.  She’s since lost all her respect for Miley Cyrus, and also switched her film interests to anything starring Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but my 16-year-old self was never going to touch the Hannah Montana film, even with a barge pole!  It was marketed for teen and pre-teen girls, and the “teenage girl Swiftie” stereotype was not being challenged at this time… so I didn’t stand much of a chance of finding Crazier.

I did, though, and I’m very glad I did.  It’s the absolute epitome of Taylor’s breezy country years.  Her vocals are perhaps more romantic here than at any other time, and the lyrics are so wise and rich that they certainly deserved to stand young Taylor in a very high place.  In the words of at least two critics, the Hannah Montana filmmakers made a grave error in asking Taylor to perform Crazier in their movie… because she was so brilliant that she put Miley’s vocals to shame!  This has to be one of the best lines of critical prose I’ve ever read, and it’s been true ever since then as well!

4) Sweeter Than Fiction
Sir Winston Churchill, perhaps the single greatest orator in modern times, once went on record as describing democracy as “the worst form of government… except for all the others that have been tried.”  He was right.  Democracy is not without its pitfalls, but its positives put its negatives in the shade.  This Taylor song poll was a democratic survey – I commissioned it, but you all voted in it, and you are my bosses at the moment, and my job is to report back on what you said!

Why am I blabbering about democracy?  Well, if I were a dictator, Sweeter Than Fiction would take a very easy second place on the overall results board!  However, this is not my list, so it’s not in second place overall!  I can do my personal rankings at any time, but this time is not now!

I could write a War and Peace-sized book about how much I love Sweeter Than Fiction, but I haven’t got the space for that here, so I’d better edit it down to size.  Basically, it’s Long Live Mark 2.  It tells of an ordinary human* called Paul Potts, who was bullied and ridiculed over his supposedly distant dream of becoming an opera singer, with his dream repeatedly running into the ground, until the day when he stepped out onto the audition stage for Series 1 of Britain’s Got Talent, a series which he went on to win.  This story was translated onto the big screen last year in the film One Chance, and when Taylor found out about it, she allegedly pleaded with the producers to let her pen a song for it.  She knew an opportunity when she sensed it, as ever, and the result was an unparalleled epic of Swiftian affection and positivity.  Listen to the euphoric musical lines in the opening and over the chorus.  Feel the “tears of joy” in the middle eight, and the lovingly honest lines of tribute to a man who never knew he had it in him (“I’ll be one of the many saying… you made us proud”).

The first time I heard Sweeter Than Fiction was less than a week before my second University Challenge match was broadcast on BBC Two.  My team had been defeated in the first round, but the four highest-scoring losing teams from round 1 always get a second chance to reach round 2, and we just managed to find ourselves in that position.  Our “second chance” match, which we had to win in order to avoid elimination, was against Loughborough University, an institution which my lifesaving teammates and I have a running friendly rivalry with.  They joined my quizzing teammates and I in our university bar to watch the match live, which we eventually won.  Winning a University Challenge game is something I’ve dreamt of doing since I was 10 years old, but there’s never really been anything remotely special/distinctive about me, and I never really thought I could realistically achieve the dream.  I surpassed my expectations by getting onto the show full stop, and then came very close to outright elimination in round 1, which really would have cemented my unshakeable self-doubt.  But the dream ultimately came true.  Sweeter Than Fiction is essentially my life story.  When (at my request) it was played in the bar right after the end of our match against Loughborough, it was a small moment of out-and-out perfection.  (And this was 13 months ago!  Where has the time gone?)

What’s really bizarre is that the song has never quite succeeded in making me cry.

3) Eyes Open
At some point in 2011, my sister mentioned that she had started reading a dystopian young-adult novel called The Hunger Games, which sounded similar to the Doctor Who episode Bad Wolf, in which people from all over the future Earth are randomly forced to compete in warped, futuristic versions of familiar gameshows, with the losers meeting their maker.  As brutal as it may sound, Bad Wolf isn’t really that violent, but it is very unsettling, and it remains one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes.  So I was intrigued to hear that The Hunger Games was being adapted into a film… and even more so to hear that two songs from its soundtrack were to be Taylor-penned!  Yes, I am a Hunger Games fan as a direct result of being a Swiftie.

Eyes Open, the less aggressively-marketed of the two Swiftian Hunger Games songs, is the most consistently underrated Taylor song ever, in my eyes.  At face value, it’s all about Katniss’ paranoia at having to grow up so quickly after landing in the Games’ arena, with fatal danger possibly awaiting her at every turn.  It encapsulates these emotions incredibly beautifully, with a pulse-setting rock-influenced sound that says “peril”, “fear” and “hauntingly resonant” all at once.  But Eyes Open is so much deeper than that.  I take no credit for the claim I’m about to make, but this claim is so true that it hurts: Eyes Open is a metaphor for life in general.  “Yesterday, we were just children”… “But now we’ve stepped into a cruel world…”… “Everybody’s watching to see the fallout”… “They never thought you’d make it this far”… “Nobody comes to save you now”…

In today’s celebrity (and, sadly, civilian) “take-down culture”, where the proliferation of social media and semi-barbaric TV talent contests is rife, all of these lines are painfully on point.  No wonder Taylor’s also released a song called Never Grow Up.  In short, Eyes Open is a titanic triumph.

2) Safe and Sound
It was this one, rather than Eyes Open, which caught my eye and led me down the road to becoming a Hunger Games fan.  I would have been a complete fool not to have followed that road after listening to the truly angelic (in more ways than one) vocals and lyrics on offer here.

The accompanying music video, according to one interpretation (which I have willingly accepted), depicts Taylor as a ghost walking around the ruins of (I won’t say where, in the interests of spoiler prevention), and some equally haunted, ghostly countryside settings.  Whether the lyrics, in the context of the film, are intended for Peeta, Prim or someone else altogether has been open to interpretation as well.  Either of these two characters would work beautifully as a subject.

There’s not really that much else to say about Safe and Sound, other than that it should have beaten Skyfall to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Film Song in 2012-13, and that it’s been my default “ultra-relaxing-song-to-listen-to-after-a-stressful-day” song for the last two years.  And that says a fair bit.

So it turns out that, with all these film soundtracks jostling for Oscar glory, it’s been snatched away from all of them!  What else would snare the number one position on this miscellaneous list?  What else, indeed?  I hereby declare that the Award for Best Miscellaneous Song goes to…

1) Ronan
aka the song that one critic described as “Taylor’s finest hour as an artist”.  There isn’t really much of a counterargument to this view.

Released on a limited basis in September 2012, with all proceeds being donated to cancer research charities, this is the song that cannot be reasonably compared with any of Taylor’s other work.  We all know its backstory, which I don’t want to repeat here.  To the best of my knowledge, it has been performed live exactly once, this one performance being in the name of Stand Up to Cancer.  Taylor’s voice is regularly on the verge of breaking during this one performance, and the vocal emotion on offer is absolutely palpable – but a huge amount of credit is also due to The Agency for providing such a tender, heart-rending backbeat during this one performance.  Basically, the morals of this story are that Taylor and her band have golden hearts, and that no other songwriter in the world could have painted such a lyrical picture in light of such a sad story as Ronan’s passing.  RIP Ronan.

There’s always something innately sad about songs like this, in which the title is not in the lyrics.  It’s almost as if mentioning his name would be enough to trigger floods of tears.  The story goes that although Taylor sang the entire song, she was struggling to keep her composure for the most part, and caved in backstage minutes after it was over.  That says it all.  Again in the words of Sir Winston, this was her finest hour.

So now we’ve seen all 76 officially-released Taylor songs thrown under the spotlight.  25 of them have found their places in their respective Top 5 lists.  The Best Picture – sorry, Best Taylor Song Of Them All – nominees are now firmly in place.  Representing the four albums, Our Song, Love Story, Long Live and All Too Well are in the ring.  Is it possible that Ronan could outclass them all and win the ultimate Swifties’ Choice award…?  Find out soon!  In the words of many an overexcited continuity announcer, you won’t want to miss the next instalment of this awards ceremony…

NEXT TIME… we reveal our Swifties’ Choice Award winner.

*Ordinary Human is the OneRepublic-penned theme song from the film The Giver, in which Taylor has a role.  I had to slip that in.  Taylor’s music aside, I’ve never been so chilled and haunted by any other song.