Taylor Swift Lover Review

, her seventh and most epic album, Taylor Swift has entered uncharted territory. For one thing, it’s the 17th song here, and none of her previous albums have run more than 16 tracks. (

Actually contains 18.) More importantly, it’s not about being 16 or 22 or even her not-insignificant current age, 29. It’s about being six or seven, and walking home from school in the snow: “Lost my gloves / You give me one / Wanna hang out? / Sounds like fun.” There’s no beat, no banjo, no metaphors or coded messages. There is, instead, deconstructed steel drum, horn and cooing voices — Animal Collective as interpreted by hip-hop-savvy pop-producers-of-the-moment Louis Bell and Frank Dukes, the song’s co-writers. It’s like the end of

, where a long turbulent journey through outer (and, naturally, inner) space culminates in the sudden appearance of a planet-sized fetus. For two and a half minutes, Swift regresses past all the drama and heartache she’s cataloged since her teen years to curl up in a weird little pocket of beauty.

Lover (live From Paris)

Swift has always been vulnerable, of course. And just as obviously, that vulnerability has been her strength. Female pop stars since Madonna have been expected to constantly reinvent themselves, lest it seem like they’re aging — an impossible standard that vexed Swift contemporaries like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. In sharing her actual feelings about relationships chronicled by the tabloids — and parrying the entire internet’s judgements of those feelings — Swift helped open up a space for Ariana Grande to directly address Sean, Pete, and Malcolm on “Thank U, Next” (to name one glorious example). When Swift went pop, that wasn’t so much a transformation as an annexation of new territory. Grande might’ve picked up something here, too, with her triumphant embrace of hip-hop-style surprise drops. If Ariana, Billie, Halsey and others seem so effortlessly themselves, it’s in part because Swift worked so hard at speaking her truth and smiting her enemies.

Is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated, enjoying a bit of the freedom she won for her cohort. Made mainly in collaboration with Jack Antonoff, female songwriting ally nonpareil, the album’s dominant sound is sleekly updated Eighties pop-rock. In a bonus making-of track destined for a Target edition of the album, Swift tells Antonoff she wants a “dreamy guitar-y throwback, but not camp throwback” sound for the title track, and that’s pretty much the vibe. (Think recent Carly Rae Jepsen, if she made actual hits.) Swift loads “Paper Rings” up with a “1-2-3-4, ” a “hey! ho!” and a key change for a jittery bit of Cars-meets-Eddie Money-meets-Go-Go’s delight. On the terrific “Cruel Summer, ” written with Antonoff and Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent), she tells a simple tale of tortured love in under three minutes of pure pleasure, with what sounds like a smattering of talk box. When she sings “Out the window / I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below, ” there’s no question you’re supposed to picture John Cusack in

Swift adjusts her frame of reference as needed. She claims to be “In my feelings more than Drake” in “I Forgot That You Existed, ” a pro forma, post-trop-house declaration of her “indifference” to the haters. Thankfully, that’s mainly it for the sassy, winking Swift. Instead, she mostly goes for the big moods. “False God” is as minor-key and seductive as anything by the Weeknd, with a chorus, well — I’ll just leave this here: “Religion’s on your lips / Even if it’s a false god / We’d still worship / We must just get away with it / The altar is my hips.” She zags into oblique political commentary with “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, ” a high school parable where she sees “high fives between bad guys” and delivers “O! K!” interjections in her best cheerleader voice. Like

Taylor Swift's Lover Album Is A Romantic Whirlwind

There’s plenty more fodder for the Swifties, haters, and bloggers here. Leo takes a proverbial volleyball to the face on “The Man, ” a usefully blunt indictment of double standards, and the dub-inflected “London Boy” counts all the ways she “fancies” her boyfriend Joe Alwyn. “Soon You’ll Get Better” was recorded with Dixie Chicks, but giving the country-radio exiles a feature isn’t the point — the song is note-perfect ballad for Swift’s mother, whose cancer returned earlier this year. Whatever there is to be read into these songs, they are for one person and one person alone: Taylor Swift. Finally.The pop queen’s seventh studio album finds her balancing private bliss with public unease and making some of her strongest songs along the way

It is time to take seriously, and literally, Taylor Swift’s threat to rerecord her back catalog, now that it appears to be a promise. In the interest of full disclosure (and receipts), here is her exchange with

So: That’s a promise. Oh yeah. Absolutely. The sordid backstory here—in late June, Swift’s first record label, Big Machine, was sold to a company owned principally by Scooter Braun, superstar manager and professional guy named Scooter, over her vehement objections, in that the master recordings to her first six blockbuster records are now controlled by a cohort of Kanye West—is both a fascinating music-biz conundrum and the 100, 000th installment in the 21st century’s defining celebrity feud. The implications of the world’s biggest pop star redoing and rereleasing all her old albums are staggering, legally and logistically, but set aside the industry intrigue for a second and just think about

Movie Review: Lover Or Hate Her, Taylor Swift Controls Her Own Narrative In 'miss Americana'

What we’re talking about here, specifically, is Taylor Swift, who turns 30 in December, rerecording “Fifteen.” Rerecording “22.” Rerecording “Our Song, ” from her self-titled 2006 debut, famously released when she was 16, a Pennsylvania native with a pronounced Nashville twang and an even more pronounced teenage exuberance as she delivered the lines, “When we’re on the phone and you talk

Now. She’ll be relitigating eight to 12 highest-possible-profile relationships, from that guy to that guy to that fuckin’ guy. Goodness gracious, she’ll be rerecording “Mean, ” from 2010’s

, out on her new label, Republic, and yes, she owns the masters, and yes, it is light-years better than 2017’s stormy

Taylor Swift 'lover' Album Review: Should Walk Away From Pop Stardom

Is alternately lovey-dovey in the extreme (“London Boy, ” from the “Darling I fancy you” refrain on down, is the dorkiest song she’s ever written amid fearsome competition) and something far moodier and deeper and weirder and more startling. (“London Boy” is immediately followed in the tracklist by the single saddest song she’s ever released, and also her best song since

What makes Swift’s back catalog valuable is, of course, the gazillion dollars it stands to generate; what makes it invaluable, to her especially of course, is that every record is a very specific snapshot of a very specific person at a very specific moment in her life. They are time capsules she buries in each and every one of our heads. More than any other pop star of her time or perhaps anybody else’s, she puts out albums that function as vivid eras unto themselves, as self-contained and almost painfully distinct as seasons of a prestige anthology TV series nearly everyone on earth is more or less forced to watch.

. As we contemplate the baffling notion of 2020 Taylor Swift taking another crack at the power ballad 2010 Taylor Swift sang about the Owl City guy, we are perhaps better equipped to appreciate the relentless

Taylor Swift's 'lover' Finds Her At Peak Creativity In A State Of Romantic Bliss

, a sprawling behemoth of clumsy lust and wounded grace, imperfect by necessity but enthralling by design. Messiness once again suits her, just as her ferocious devotion to the present tense always has.

What I’m saying is that for, incredibly, the second straight Taylor Swift album, the first single also turned out to be the worst song.

Was good” is 2019’s foremost hot take, and sure, we can agree that “You should take it as a compliment that I got drunk and made fun of the way that you talk” is actually a pretty great opening line for a song. We can marvel, furthermore, that the record did well enough that she toured stadiums to support it, even if the Netflix documentary of that tour peaks with, uh,

Taylor Swift Lover Review Round Up: Critics Say Album Feels 'evolutionary Rather Than Revolutionary'

’s lovey-doviest moments. Which is to say Track 1 is called “I Forgot That You Existed, ” and is either about Kanye or that other fuckin’ guy, and includes the line “And I couldn’t get away from ya / In my feelings more than Drake, so yeah, ” and has a winsome, giggling, finger-snapping buoyancy that lousy first single “ME!” tried and failed to manufacture. The concept, in a word, is

As “a love letter to love, ” and a smitten dorkiness does indeed animate the likes of “I Think He Knows” (in which she repeatedly sing-raps the line “He got that boyish look that I like in a man”) and “Paper Rings” (which kicks off with her sing-rapping the lines “The moon is high like your friends were the night that we first met