Actually, I Like Taylor Swift Now
The last time I wrote about Taylor Swift, I said I was done with her. Her music, the gossip, everything. In the years since, she sicced her fans on a private equity firm, educated many people on unethical business practices in the music industry (specifically when it comes to who has the right to own and sell masters), she’s currently in the midst of re-recording all her early albums in order to dilute the value of said masters she doesn’t own because of said unethical business practices, and campaigned nobly (though it didn’t pan out) against GOP parasite Marsha Blackburn. Now I think I love her?
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t go that far. It was nice to see Taylor aim her ire at more worthy targets than ex-boyfriends and unworthy rappers. But none of these actions directly made me love her so much as put me in a position of wanting to love her, or at the very least, walk back an opinion or two. To question whether or not I was being unfair or just an outright dick.
So in that spirit, let’s listen to her post reputation work! Specicially, Lover, folklore, and evermore.
Like the last Taylor Swift article, I’m going to listen to her last three albums (not including the re-releases, although I am kinda curious about those), then write down some thoughts immediately after I’m done with each one. However, there’ll be some differences this time, mainly because…
Where I’m At With Taylor Swift Now (11/10/21)
…I lied at the end of the last article. I listened to all three of these albums within days of their releases. Granted, I’ve only listened to each one once, and each feels like a million years ago in COVID times, so there’s still a sliver of the first impressions gimmick of the last one. But yes, I’ve listened to each one, and I already know that I like all three of them to varying degrees.
What am I going to muse about? We’ll see. But the point is that my attitude about her has shifted in a positive direction, and I’d like to explore why. I didn’t see this shift coming, and I doubt that many of the people who wound up liking the post reputation albums did either, particularly when it comes to the second two.
As I said, I liked all three of these albums, both in terms of their musicality and whatever points I can extrapolate from them. But even if I didn’t, I think these albums offer plenty to think about. To me, Taylor’s later career albums (or late relative to the time of writing this) tell a story about realizing where your talents truly lie. About using your craft for good, or at the very least, taking what works for you and moving in a new direction. Artists must evolve, and Taylor, in her own way, is showing us how.
I’m an aspiring screenwriter. I think about this stuff on a near-constant basis. I can’t help but take her late-career turn and not see something interesting.
Lover (11/11/21)
Before I re-listened to Lover, I went back to a few songs from reputation just to see if they still rubbed me the wrong way. I’m sad to report that the subject matter is still obnoxious and each of the singles still sound thoroughly unpleasant. But this time around, a weird memory came to mind.
I started visiting colleges the summer before my senior year of high school. The first school I visited was Sarah Lawrence, which is where I ended up getting my degree later. I liked my visit there a lot. It was me, my mom, and only a few other families. We gathered in a small room, we had a nice conversation with the campus reps, and then we went on our tour. It felt genuinely intimate.
A few months later, I visited Syracuse. This time, it was my father and I, as well as a few hundred other families. We were herded like cattle into a large auditorium, where we were given a gift bag filled with orange shit. We were shown a Powerpoint, led outside, and we went on the requisite tour.
The difference is that Sarah Lawrence felt like they genuinely wanted us there, the goal being to win us over with affinity and warmth. They weren’t afraid to show a little personality, and to reveal that people who ran this school were, in fact, human beings. (Or at least it appeared that way at the time.) Syracuse, on the other hand, wanted us to be awed by them. It felt like they were the important ones, not the people in the room who would hypothetically be paying their tuition. We were replaceable, and I found that sense of self-importance suffocating.
You see where I’m going here. reputation is an album desperate to convince you of its own momentousness. It’s 2017, after all, and Max Martin’s here to make trap beats and farty synths for Taylor to once again wax philosophical about her bad reputation. Who needs grace when you’re trying to make the biggest pop album on the planet about yourself? And when I say “trying,” I really do mean, in the strongest possible terms, trying.
The greatest accomplishment of Lover, in a way, is that it’s just a breezy pop album for the most part, and not really much more.
If you want to critique this album, you certainly can. It’s ten to fifteen minutes too long, certain songs are a little too obvious in their intent to be singles, you can get much more effective execution on the sounds she’s going for elsewhere, and so on and so forth.
But Lover isn’t trying to trade on its inventiveness. It’s not trying to be the album event of the year, and it’s not trying to be some sort of grand artistic statement. Instead, it’s trying to be a balm. You’ve been through the storm, and Lover is trying to be what it sounds like when you come out the other end.
In fact, Lover announces its impressions pretty clearly on its opening track “I Forgot That You Existed,” a song about the moment it strikes you that you’re over your ex when you weren’t really thinking about it. The signature Taylor Swift bite is still there. But when you hit play on this album, you aren’t treated to massive bass and trap. You’re greeted with a cheery groove and relatable circumstances, and it more or less maintains this feeling for the rest of the album.
It’s impossible to know how I’d feel if this was my first Taylor album, and I listened to it divorced from any context. But something about this album pulsates with a sense of newness, not in the inventive sense, but in the way that something just feels fresh. And its not just in the aesthetic either. She’s working with new people, mainly Frank Dukes and Louis Bell, with the majority of the production being handled by herself and Jack Antonoff. (And one with Sounwave. Also, yes, Antonoff has plenty of credits on reputation, but that album feels like Max Martin’s baby.)
She’s exploring old ideas from new angles. She’s finally willing to admit flaws and tell stories where she’s not necessarily a sympathetic figure. (“Afterglow” deals with that pretty directly.) There’s a new perspective we haven’t seen from her. One that doesn’t come with the weight of bitterness dripping off reputation. One that doesn’t even want it in the first place.
I don’t have a burning passion for this album, but I’m happy it exists. It’s a bummer that the reasons I like are tied so much to reputation. But everyone’s allowed a low point or two, and in listening to this album both the first time and this time, it made me ready to move on with Taylor from what came before.
folklore (11/23/21)
At some point during quarantine, I listened to folkore. At some point during quarantine, I remember liking it.
I remember thinking it was almost revolutionary in its departure from everything Taylor had done up to this point, and I remember being somewhat evangelical about it to a certain degree. I remember questioning whether or not I was a convert to the church of Taylor, willing to go do online battle and badmouth Katy Perry or whatever it is us Swifties are supposed to do. I remember taking off my earbuds after listening and thinking, “Fuck yeah!”
Then a few weeks passed and I promptly forgot everything about folkore.
It wasn’t the album’s fault. I look at my top ten albums of 2020, and save for two or three albums, all of it is loud and boisterous because that’s apparently what I needed at the time. (I didn’t even put folklore in the honorable mentions, which was an oversight.) On top of that, I listen to a good hundred or so albums a year, if not more, and you’re releasing intentionally low-key music during a specific time period where my brain turned to porridge. Some people needed the sonic isolation of folklore to get them through the worst of the pandemic. (“Worst” relatively speaking, of course.) I needed Rina Sawayama and Run the Jewels. And while we’re here, we can say the same thing about evermore. (Another oversight in the honorable mentions section.)
Going back to it now, it’s not as revolutionary as I thought it was. For the most part, each song follows a familiar stripped down pattern. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. On top of that, the album covers a lot of familiar artistic ground. Break-ups. Relationships. Reputation. If you only read the lyrics on Genius, you might walk away thinking nothing much had changed.
Yet I still think this album’s very much the achievement it was when I first listened to it. I may not be as passionate about it now, but I still like it a lot, and I respect the absolute hell out of it.
In a nutshell, what I like about folklore is the aesthetic and the subdued sound Taylor, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner put together. It’s folk that doesn’t beat you over the head with its folkiness. Country from a period of country that wasn’t trying too hard, or at the very least, wasn’t injecting trap for radio play. (A country fan needs to sit me down and explain what the fuck happened to country.) And yet, despite the toned down nature of it, it still has a sense of identity. A distinct sound that’s assertive in its lightness. It finds that one thing many albums that sound like this are chasing but most of the time don’t catch, and that’s a sense of grace.
It’s this elegance that also elevates Taylor’s writing on this album. As of writing this, I haven’t gone back and reread my original Taylor Swift article. But I’d be willing to bet that at some point, I pined for a more experienced Taylor album. One where she’s writing from the perspective of somebody older, who’s able to be more reflective and self-aware. If I did write that, then folklore is very what I wanted.
There’s a song on the album called “the last great american dynasty.” It is, in many ways, folklore’s song about Taylor’s reputation. But whereas her reputation songs in the past were, to me, her artistic lows, this is one of my favorite songs from her in general. It tells the story of Rebekah Harkness, a wealthy widow whose means came from her late husband’s oil fortune. She lived life as she pleased, and as a result, she was heavily gossiped about and hated. Taylor ended up buying one of her houses. One may see the connection there.
Taylor’s reputation songs of the past were, to put it mildly, kind of gross. They’re unintentionally dismal and hard to take, like someone having a breakdown who suddenly turns their wrath on you, despite the current mess they’re in being their fault. Yet, this time, it sounds like fun. It still has a cynical edge to it, but it’s one presented with poignancy. A message that when it comes to who gets outraged by what and who fuels the cycle of gossip, nothing’s really changed. Surely, Rebekah probably did some shitty things, but that doesn’t mean that circus around her life wasn’t driven by something worse than anything she could possibly have done. The American 20th century, after all, clearly loved women.
What I see in this album is Taylor using her gifts for something more substantial. Of all the turns on this album, my favorite one is how narratively driven a lot of the songs can be. Some of the songs are autobiographical (or at least appear so) and plenty are not, but either way, Taylor writes in little details that make her characters feel alive. The way the protagonist of “august” imagines herself in bed with her lover. Taylor sending gifts to the children of her exes not as a “fuck you,” but as a means of expressing that she’s moved on. Betty switching her homeroom class.
It glances outward just as much as it glances in, and every song feels crafted, unlike much of what’s come before that feels assembled and designed. I don’t want to be pushy about this album. But I can see why I wanted to be, if only for a moment.
evermore (11/26/21)
evermore was one of the last albums I listened to in 2020, and I remember walking away from it thinking I was more of a folklore guy.
Not that it has to be a competition of course, but nerds do what nerds do, and I couldn’t help but compare them. I remember thinking that folkore felt brisker, in spite of the fact that evermore is actually shorter, if only by a few minutes. That the songs felt less rambling and more structured, and that somehow this led to what I perceived as the vision of folklore being a little more clever. folklore was an intentional break away from most of what we knew to be Taylor, whereas evermore was just more of that in an album that felt longer. Not that I hated it or anything like that. It just didn’t feel as consequential.
Looking back now, I wonder how much of that feeling had to do with the fact that folklore has “betty,” a strong contender for Taylor’s best song. It’s a song that’s clear not only in its literal meaning, but also in its subtext. It is, after all, a song about a repentant person made by someone who’s known for being rather unrepentant. There was a lot grousing in music fan circles about Taylor’s intent and her personality, and with “betty,” maybe, just maybe, she might’ve agreed with us. Misogynist implications aside, a little self-awareness is always interesting when it comes from pop artists, especially when it doesn’t come wrapped in major label cynicism like breakout era Kesha. (Note: I’m also on team Kesha now. Rainbow is great.)
Now that I’ve just finished listening to evermore again, it’s the occasional lack of clarity, the moments where what Taylor is talking about isn’t as immediately clear, that might push it over folklore for me now.
Musically, there isn’t much to say here that I didn’t already say about folklore, other than the percussion on “closure” rules and I hope she does more stuff like that in the future. Where evermore got to me this time is in the writing.
As I said, it wasn’t always immediately clear to me what each song was about. (Another note: Though I read along with the lyrics on Genius while listening to it, I try my hardest not to read any interpretations of what any of the songs are about. At least not until after I’ve made an impression in my head.) Some of the songwriting is intentionally vague, but I think it wasn’t clear to me because I was too busy enjoying the aesthetic of the words she chooses over their literal meaning. It’s almost like that’s how poetry works!
Case in point: I didn’t immediately know how to phrase what I thought “gold rush” was about, except to say that what she was describing made me feel a general kind of unease and anxiety. Literal gold rushes involved all manner of people flooding a spot at once, and as someone who doesn’t like crowds, particularly in coronaworld, her talking about not liking gold rushes and not wanting to flush made me think about having to navigate crowds at the outdoor shopping mall I go to in order see movies. Why that particular crowd as opposed to any other, I don’t know. But brains and thoughts and so on.
I ended up caving and looking at the Genius explanation:
“gold rush, the third song on Taylor Swift’s ninth studio album evermore, is a song depicting the jealousy she has because she is attracted to someone who everyone admires. Because of this, she has to stop picturing her life with them. She is singing about dreaming for someone that everybody else wants. She is daydreaming about someone then snapping out of it. She is catching herself getting the idea of this person stuck in her head. The narrator’s dislike of jealousy and anxiety in relationships, and possible self-esteem issues, leads them to decide their fantasy relationship isn’t worth it without giving it a try.”
So I was in the ballpark. Sort of. Also, let us remind ourselves that Genius isn’t a holy document or anything like that.
Still, despite the clarity of that explanation, and only half of it carried any emotional weight with me. Being attracted to a popular guy isn’t particularly out of the wheelhouse for Taylor, but the emphasis on not liking how doing so makes her feel is, at least to me, new. In most Taylor songs, she loses herself in the fantasy, as is the case on my beloved “Wildest Dreams” and “Style.” But “gold rush” is about doing the exact opposite.
It can be said that evermore, and folklore while we’re here, are both albums about healing. About a certain kind of peace that comes after dating the men Taylor has dated and living the kind of life Taylor has lived. The difference, however, is that folklore is a little more about replicating those moments, and evermore is about how they make her feel. It’s more interested in aesthetic and evocation than they are about drawing relatable narrative parallels. (Though to be fair, evermore has plenty of the that as well.) It’s for this very reason that I’m willing to bet that folklore has more fans. But it’s also why I think I like evermore a little bit more now.
Also, it’s got a murder ballad. Who doesn’t love a good murder ballad?
I finally re-read my old Taylor Swift article. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. But it’s still pretty fucking bad, and I think it makes me sound like a condescending asshole despite my distractingly clear intentions on not doing so. Writing little things to let myself off the hook and stuff like that.
I knew that would probably be the case. Yet, it was still pretty disappointing. In the years since I wrote that article, I’ve not only listened to a lot more pop and country, but I’ve been thinking about pop stars and our relationship to fame. Some of it had to do with a script I was writing (or really, am going to write when I don’t distract myself with another project at the last minute again). But it was something more than that as well. Read a news headline or two from the last few years or so. Clearly, our relationship with fame hasn’t been going well for us.
I stand by my general sentiment on everything I said about the music itself, though I wished I phrased just about all of it differently. However, I feel increasingly like whenever we talk shit Taylor for the inconsequential stuff in her personal life, or really a lot of female celebrities for that matter, there’s an apparatus of misogyny slowly turning its wheel in the same corner of our mind that we use when we think we’re sounding smart. To a lot of people, I’m sure this was obvious. Clearly, it wasn’t to me. I thought I was above that apparatus. Clearly, I wasn’t.
And granted, some of the critiques I made are just outright stupid for reasons that don’t require a lot of insight, and some of it’s legit. Still, it reeks of a kind of grossness that’s been hurled at her for a very long time now. A grossness that I somehow convinced myself was her fault.
I don’t love all her music now, nor do I think she’s capable of never doing wrong. But when I don’t like an artist, I want to make sure I’m not liking them for the right reasons, and when it comes to all the stuff I projected onto Taylor back in that first article, I don’t think they were coming from the right place, and I certainly don’t think it was for the right reasons. A lot of PR was thrown behind Taylor’s relationships and controversies. In fact, that was practically the point of reputation. But so what? When it comes to pop stars, why are we acting like this makes Taylor new or different?
People change. Artists evolve. I wish I could see that the person who made Fearless could one day make evermore. I didn’t. Instead, all I saw was the bullshit. I acted like I didn’t, but I did. I see that now.
So unless we’re talking about reputation or a song or two from her catalog, I don’t have any negativity for Taylor anymore. After all, with Lover, folklore, and evermore, I see an artist who wants to move forward. I wrote a shitty article back in 2017 and I want to get better, like Taylor did. For the first time, I relate to her.
