Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, those are just the first six tracks. Now, they're probably the best six tracks on the album, but yeah, it's a hell of an album. Unlike the debut self-titled album, which takes a year of this slow burn social media campaign to hit number one, it debuts at number one on the Billboard Hot 200 chart where it stays for 11 weeks. The longest since Santana's Supernatural in 1999, the longest in the top 10 by a country artist ever, and she became the youngest artist to have what would go on to become the best selling album of the year and the only female country artist ever to have the best selling album of the year. There are a couple of things about this album that I think is worth pointing out because she's more of an adult now and having real-world experiences, she is starting to shift her songwriting from being love songs and breakup songs about things that she may or may not have experienced that are sort of theoretical into I'm now doing autobiographical music. This is about me as a mid-teenager and the things that I'm experiencing. That would go on basically until Folklore and Evermore when she starts to shift and start writing songs about fictional characters, historical characters, and other people again. She had this sort of autobiographical thing of here's what I've been going through the last couple of years of my life for the next decade of her career, and this is really where that kind of starts. That's such a good point because the first album and all those quotes about how amazing she was as a songwriter were about her powers of observation, imagination, and being able to write other people's stories from her perspective, but you're right, yeah. Then there's this long—long from our perspective here in January 2022—middle period of writing about her own experiences and then she comes back to storytelling.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.