Taylor Swift’s Expansive 2024 Album

Taylor Swift’s expansive 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” features an impressive 31 tracks in its deluxe edition, showcasing her musical prowess and innovative techniques. One notable aspect of the album is exemplified by the title track’s use of a “fade-out” technique, where the song gradually diminishes in volume until it softly concludes, eschewing the conventional hard endings found in many compositions.

While some youthful admirers of Swift may attribute this technique to her ingenuity, the fade-out has historical roots that extend far beyond contemporary music. The concept dates back centuries, as evidenced by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn’s orchestral masterpiece, “Symphony No. 45,” composed in 1772. Haydn’s ingenious ending involved each orchestra member ceasing to play and exiting the stage, resulting in a gradual diminuendo until the piece’s conclusion.

Similarly, English composer Gustav Holst employed a creative approach during the performance of his orchestral suite “The Planets” in 1914. Holst strategically placed a female chorus in an adjacent room, gradually closing the door as the piece reached its culmination, inducing a natural fade in the sound until silence prevailed.

The fade-out technique was not prevalent in the early days of recorded music due to the limitations of the medium, which involved cutting sonic vibrations onto wax discs. To achieve a fade-out effect, musicians had to manually decrease the volume of their instruments during recording. It was not until the advent of magnetic tape recording in the 1950s that engineers could seamlessly fade a song out by manipulating the mixing board.

The origins of the fade-out are shrouded in various interpretations. Some experts suggest that songwriters adopted this technique due to challenges in crafting definitive endings or a simple affinity for the ethereal quality of the fade. Others posit that the fade-out was a strategic choice to imprint a song’s memorable hook in listeners’ minds, particularly effective when applied to the chorus section.

A prevailing theory proposes that the fade-out was a response to the demands of radio programming. Given the preference for concise three-minute songs on pop radio, the fade-out provided DJs with an opportunity to segue seamlessly into the next track or engage in promotional banter.

Despite fluctuating trends in music production, the fade-out endured as a popular technique from the late ’60s to the early ’90s, as chronicled in a 2014 Slate article. Today, this technique remains relevant in contemporary hits, exemplified by Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That,” featuring a fade-out conclusion, which set the stage for the high-profile feud with Drake that dominated music headlines in 2024 prior to Taylor Swift’s album release.