When Taylor Swift dropped the lead single from her fifth studio album entitled 1989 on a late-August afternoon in 2014, it was not simply a song release—it was a global event.
This may sound like hyperbole to many, but it is hard to deny that Swift (love or loathe her) stands unrivaled in terms of mass musical appeal while she maintains a deeply personal lyrical method to her work. So when Swift announced during her livestream that 1989 would be her “first documented, official pop album,” she did so with exuberant confidence.
Swift knew that she had the power to goose those dog days of summer back into a fever pitch merely by exhibiting pictures of accidental Polaroids and gushing about red lipstick. To be candid, her elopement to pop should not have come as a surprise; in her 2012 blockbuster, Red, she had already been flirting with Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback in a crossover effort to distance herself from her humble country roots while making for the canopy of the charts where she always seemed to have been destined. This time with 1989, Swift boldly doubles down on her investment and, to her credit and the delight of her listeners, she earns it back thirteenfold.
The album opens with “Welcome to New York,” an immaculately polished synthpop number in which Swift declares, “it’s a new soundtrack / I could dance to this beat forevermore.” It is a song that the gals from Sex and the City would have on their iPods, you know, if they had those back in the eighties.
On that note, Swift and her producers do a superb job in bringing that decade’s sonic palette to the album, but they still manage to keep the proceedings distinctly modern. “Out of the Woods” and “I Wish You Would,” two tracks that Swift co-penned with fun. frontman Jack Antonoff, most triumphantly accomplish this endeavor.
Elsewhere, it is clear that Swift borrows from the best of her contemporaries: with her clipped vocal delivery, “Blank Space” screams Lorde while “Wildest Dreams” is completely à la Lana Del Rey.
All the while, Swift still manages to make those songs her own. Even the most seemingly impersonal song on 1989, “Shake It Off” has all the trademarks of a Swift number: an inimitable girlish effervescence, a subtly sublime spoken-word section, and sly ex-boyfriend bashing. And least we forget those hooks—catchy is indeed a gross understatement.
1989 is not a perfect album (“How You Get the Girl” and “This Love” are relatively unremarkable), but it comes pretty darn close. The album closer, “Clean,” in which Swift describes the sobering recovery from a past romance as “a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore” is the most mature track that she has ever recorded.
Perhaps the biggest concern Swift’s fans had with the new album is that the intimate songstress would lose herself in pop and become as faceless as her contemporaries: Katy, Miley, et al.
On the contrary, they can shake those worries off because 1989 is not only Swift’s best work to date and an excellent album in general, but also the one in which she finally found herself.
Leave a Reply