Farrah Abraham - My Teenage Dream Ended appreciation thread (no trolling)

keepittoyourself

May 19, 2020

The Atlantic, 2012:
"The album is dense, perplexing, and uncomfortable. It suggests everyday teen anxieties and traumas in an uncanny language that's both mesmerizing and at turns horrifying. In that sense, it's reminiscent of David Lynch's film work."

The Brag, 2017:
Indeed, that selfsame longing is the key to My Teenage Dream Ended. The record is a means to an end; an attempt to gain success by releasing an album about success, not to mention a desperate plea for attention auto-tuned to the point of pitched perfection. For Abraham, the record wasn’t some way of satisfying some years long creative itch, or about communicating her soul to the world, or any of those trite reasons that artists dole out for making their art when they are pressed on an album’s publicity tour. My Teenage Dream Ended was reverse engineered. It was as conniving and as calculated as a presidential campaign run.

And in its bare-faced honesty – in its sheer, uncomplicated grasping – it has a genius all of its own.

Fader, 2017:
Usually, I plug someone into the studio and let them record over the music, but she didn’t want to do that. She was just hesitant to sing to it. I didn’t know what to do. But as an engineer, we problem-solve. The only thing I could think of was, “OK, I’m going to give you no music, but I’ll give you a click track,” which is like a metronome, something to keep her on time. At the end of the day, I knew that whatever we recorded had to go back onto the production. She actually recorded everything without ever hearing the music. Like, she’d heard it before and approved it for that song, but as she was recording we never had the music on.