Hey gal! Sorry for taking forever for my answer. Hope it's worth the wait.
Chanel #2, Yours Truly or My Everything? Choose wisely.Girl, what a terrible question. It's like asking me to choose between two of my own children. How could you do this to me?!
I spent all day listening to both albums on repeat, and I have finally produced an answer. Ultimately I would have to say that I enjoy "Yours Truly" a bit more, but it's an incredibly close thing and I could go either way. Here's why:
I think that "Yours Truly" comes across as bit of a better piece artistically. Ariana put several years of work into shaping the album and making artistic decisions about how the finished product would look. Instead of churning out songs to fill the disc, she actually prepared almost three times as many songs as she actually needed (with several of them actually being written by her), and winnowed them down until we only got the absolute best that she had to offer. And the songs on this album absolutely deliver. Not only do they sound different from everything else that's being played on the radio today, the songs sound different
from each other. A lot of the albums being produced today, especially in the pop genre, tend to be the exact same song with fourteen different sets of lyrics, and that couldn't be further from the truth in this case. The whole thing comes across as a showcase of Ariana's versatility and vocal range, every track gives us something new and different. It's the aural equivalent of eating a box of fine chocolates - every time you dip into the box, you're going to get something different, but it's always going to taste fantastic.
"Honeymoon Avenue" sounds like something that you could hear in a 1950s or 40s period movie. It sounds beautiful and retro, and just a tad melancholy.
"Baby I" is a bit more poppy and electronic, and the "yeah yeah yeah" in the background is reminiscent of Britney Spears in her prime.
"Tattooed Heart" is a beautiful power-ballad type song, it's kind of jazzy and smooth, but the whole premise is sort of ridiculous in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that doesn't detract from the atmosphere at all.
"Lovin' It" is a more mainstream pop song, and it reminds me a lot of the songs I was hearing on the radio in the early 2000s. It's got a lot of repetition and overlapping vocals, which create some good soul.
"Piano" is probably my favorite song on the disc. It's all about taking conventional love song imagery and deconstructing it. It's a meta way of singing a song about songs in a way that isn't quite as overt as Marianas Trench's "Pop 101", but still gets the point across in a memorable way. It's about the artistry and the experience of actually participating in the songwriting performance, it's clever, and it's fun.
"Daydreamin'" is softer, slower, and very romantic. I like the subtlety and the naivete of this romance, it's reserved and thoughtful and lacks a lot of the sexual aggression we see in later songs like "Love Me Harder" and "Bang Bang." On the whole it comes across as a more sensitive need for her partner as a person, rather than an object of pure lust. For an old-school romantic like me, it hits all the right notes.
"The Way" is a beautiful collaboration between Mac Miller. His cadence and hers feed off of each other beautifully, creating two halves of the same whole and artistically pulling the whole thing together. One of the other reasons that I appreciate this album is that there are significantly fewer collaborations. It's less about parading a cavalcade of guest stars around, and more about showing off Ariana's own unique talents.
"You'll Never Know" has a lot more attitude behind it. It's got some of the flavors of a typical girl-power song, but with a bit more subtlety than the subject is usually handled. It's not in your face, empowering herself at the expense of the hapless idiot who was dumb enough to leave her. If anything, it's regretful. The boy won't ever know how good they could have been together, but at the same time, Ariana really won't either. So while she's clearly placing a lot of blame on the guy, they're both losing out in this situation. It's a really neat take on a classic revenge song.
"Almost Is Never Enough" is a very melancholy collaboration with Nathan Sykes. It's a sad song, played slow and soulful, and with a resonance that defies description. The vocals in this song are absolutely sublime, and you can just hear the emptiness and regret in the instrumentals. Even when the two of them are singing together, they manage to sound completely alone and estranged from each other. Seriously, the artistry here is fabulous. "Piano" is my personal favorite for the cleverness factor, but from a purely aesthetic standpoint this track is unbeatable.
"Popular Song" is probably my least favorite song on the album, and that has nothing to do with the song itself, really. I just find it sort of disingenuous to hear Ariana sing about having been unpopular and bullied in school. She was a child star, she was always quite pretty, and she's got a lot of talent. I don't know for a fact or anything, but I really don't see her as the sort of kid who got shoved into toilets. It's also a cover song inspired by Wicked, which is certainly a plus but also makes it feel less authentic than the other songs. But those things aside, I think it's a funny sort of take that towards bullies. It's self-gratifying without being too arrogant or obnoxious, and it's got a catchy chorus that you'll find yourself humming days later. So, from an aesthetic standpoint it's fantastic, but it's just that kind of dubious reaction from me that ruins the experience a bit.
"Better Left Unsaid" comes off like a dance party anthem, with powerful vocals and instrumentals building up to a red-hot chorus. The lyrics tell a neat story, and the whole thing combines a lot of disparate elements into a cohesive whole in a way that works beautifully. It finishes off the album on a high note and leaves the listener eagerly wanting more.
Conversely, while "My Everything" is a fantastic album, I think it suffers a bit from Ariana's career having taken off. She didn't have nearly the same amount of time and effort to devote to the album, and while it's still an absolutely amazing group of songs and contains a lot of her best-known hits, I don't think that it has the same heart and dedication behind it. Ariana only appears in the writing credits for a handful of the songs, and it comes across less as a labor of love or an artistic expression of talent than "Yours Truly" does.
Also, something like half of the tracks feature guest artists. While this does create a lot more versatility in the sound and give us a much more diverse collection of tracks, it also steals away a lot of the focus. Not all of the collaborations are as seamless as the ones on "Yours Truly," and they don't always add much more to the song than "Oh hey here's my famous friend showing up to rap a bit." If you're into that sort of thing, it's a welcome addition, but it doesn't always work perfectly. I like Iggy's interlude in "Problem", and the whole layout of "Bang Bang" is delicious (it's not technically on the album but it's from the same era), but the sheer volume of guest performances makes the whole thing feel a little less special, if that makes any sense.
Lyrically, a lot of the songs are a lot less profound. A lot of the subtlety and subversive tropes that I liked about "Yours Truly" are played completely straight and unironically here, and that's disappointing. Some of the more romantic songs come across as straight-up demanding sex, the vengeful songs basically denounce the ex as evil incarnate, there's self-aggrandizing all over the place, etcetera etcetera. The songs are still fantastic, and they're a huge part of the reason why I started listening to Ariana's music in the first place and why I still listen to her, but from a purely artistic standpoint they've lost a lot of the cleverness and creativity that went into the first album. I think that's just kind of a necessary evil of the music industry. When you're that good and that popular, you just don't have the time to sit down and write profoundly beautiful things on the fly the way you did before you had all of those extra demands on your time and talents.
And, finally, I also kind of felt like "My Everything" is the album that casuals would choose, because it's got all of the more immediately recognizeable songs on it. And I ain't no casual!
Really, though, the difference between them is ultimately marginal at best. If "My Everything" is a slice of triple-decker chocolate cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top, "Yours Truly" is a slightly bigger slice of triple-decker chocolate cake with slightly more whipped cream and a slightly bigger cherry on top. Still fantastic, it's just that "Yours Truly" has all of the same ingredients that I like in "My Everything" and adds just a tad more of them. That's my stance, but someone with different tastes (say, who wants to lose weight and therefore would prefer slightly less cake) would be totally justified in liking the other thing, and I wouldn't disagree with their decision.
Hope that answers your question satisfactorily, Zayday, and thanks for giving me an excuse to binge-listen the albums!
