(She makes constant reference to a car crash she’s probably really alluding to a serious snowmobile crash that she and Styles apparently once got into.) But the specifics don’t matter as much as the subtle but genuine arc that the LP traces. She never names him, or even alludes to his name, though clues are there if you want to mine for them. Most of the songs on 1989 seem to concern Harry Styles, the most visible member of One Direction, who Swift dated a while back. This time around, she’s not showing those records off, lyrically or musically, but she’s quietly emulating them. On her last album, Swift was lyrically bragging about how many James Taylor albums she owned. But it’s also a concept album, a ’70s singer-songwriter-style song cycle about the beginning and end of a relationship. On first listen, 1989 sounds like the resistance-is-futile robo-pop hydrogen bomb that Katy Perry’s Prism tried and failed to be. But she’s using those toys to deceptive ends. 1989 gleams and shimmers the way all her past albums have gleamed and shimmered they’re just playing around with a new set of stylistic toys.
Swift’s voice is an instrument capable of both colossal uplift and soft empathy she’s kept the lost-little-kid openness that made her so appealing in the first place. Swift’s albums aren’t singles-plus-filler they’re singles-plus-potential-singles, and the songs that never dominated the radio are just the ones she never got around to releasing as singles. Every one of her albums sounds like a lesser artist’s greatest-hits album 1989 makes her five for five. It’s not easy to put together a resonant, sweeping, universe-conquering pop song, but Swift makes it look easy.
TAYLOR SWIFT 1989 FULL ALBUM LISTEN FREE
She’s free to openly be what she’s always secretly been.īut the level of craft is still the main thing. This time around, she doesn’t need banjos to do the things that synths should be doing she just has the synths do those things. In a way, then, 1989, which Swift has loudly announced as her first straight-up pop album, is her most genuine, least manufactured album. Everything else was pure subterfuge, and her banjos and pedal steels did the same sharp, glinting melodic work that synth beeps and smears would’ve done on a straight-up pop record. She took from mainstream country music the things that worked for her (the clean lines, the mathematically precise structures, the warmly personal and specific storytelling) and jettisoning the stuff that didn’t (the oppositional culture-wars mentality, the truck fetishism, the reverence to past giants). (The review isn’t online anymore, but the Village Voice was nice enough to reprint some highlights.) Back when I wrote that, Swift was ostensibly making country music, but her songs were already masterfully assembled big-pop mechanisms. “Respect motherfucking craft when you hear it.” Writing for Brooklyn’s L Magazine six years ago, that was how I ended my review of Taylor Swift’s triumphant sophomore album Fearless.
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