Music / My Teenage Dream Ended

I'm on my own...

At that point, I had still never heard any lyrics, but I jumped in blindly and sent her over a couple tracks that weekend. I thought she’d write something at home, but it turns out she had already written all of the lyrics in her diary. It was a little notebook, and on the first recording day she showed it to me. It was really personal, and I don’t think it was even written with, like, “Let’s put this to a song.” I tried to explain to her, “Well, you’re going to have to warp the words in these poems into something rhythmic and melodic…”

—Fredrick M. Cuevas, the album’s producer

My Teenage Dream Ended is a 2012 album and avant-garde piece of Accidental Art by reality television star Farrah Abraham.

Farrah Abraham first came to prominence for being featured in the first season of 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom, which covered her time raising a daughter as a teenager after the father died in a car crash. My Teenage Dream Ended came about as an autobiography with an accompanying soundtrack album, with each song corresponding to a chapter of the book. Not knowing much about music, she directed the album's producer to create contemporary dance pop inspired by the music she liked, while her vocal recordings were done to a completely independent click track and added to the instrumental later with the help of Auto-Tune.

The result of this production process is a completely unique sounding album that in spite of its alienating sound and premise, won praise from critics for being such an unconventional but sincere attempt at making a conscious pop album. Some reviewers have suggested that the album is an influential example of early Noise Pop or Hyperpop, and it has sincerely made it on to several best of the year and even decade lists.

An article about the album's production which helps to contextualise many of its creative quirks, featuring an interview with producer Fredrick M. Cuevas, can be found here.

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Tracklist:

1. "The Phone Call That Changed My Life" (2:49)
2. "After Prom" (2:58)
3. "Caught in the Act" (1:43)
4. "With Out This Ring..." (2:52)
5. "Liar Liar" (3:37)
6. "Unplanned Parenthood" (2:31)
7. "Searching for Closure" (3:49)
8. "On My Own" (2:54)
9. "The Sunshine State" (1:44)
10. "Finally Getting Up from Rock Bottom" (2:22)

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Tropes in this album:

• Auto-Tune: The album's most distinctive production feature is the use of Auto-Tune on Farrah's vocals, which effectively stretch her voice out across an entire pitch range.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: "Finally Getting Up from Rock Bottom" is the most upbeat and positive song on the album.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: What gives Farrah's vocals its unique sound, as she refused to listen to the instrumentals while in the recording booth, causing the Auto-Tune to go all over the place trying to keep up.
• Lyrical Dissonance: A very odd example. The music is very competently produced if simplistic turn-of-the-2010's dubstep and dance pop, while Farrah's vocals are brutally personal and delivered through heavy and atonal autotune.
• Outsider Music: One of the more modern examples of such. Farrah had zero musical experience, and wanted to turn her poems and journaling into music without fully understanding the limitations of music production. Frederick did have music production experience but worked as an audio engineer by trade (the two met while doing ADR sessions for 16 and Pregnant) and this was both his first full musical project and the first time he made music that was this overtly electronic. These factors combined to make an extremely atonal and experimental album.