Taylor Swift's lover: a perfect snapshot of her life now

It's time to take seriously and literally the threat of Taylor Swift to re-register her new catalog, now that it seems like a promise. In the interest of full disclosure (and recipes), here is his exchange with CBS Sunday morningTracy Smith on this subject, as transcribed from an interview broadcast Sunday:

"Can you do that?" Smith asks.

"Oh yes," Swift said.

"It's a plan?" Asks Smith.

"Yes, absolutely," says Swift.

So: it's a promise. Oh yes. Absolutely. The sordid backstory here – at the end of June, Swift's first Big Machine label was sold to a company owned primarily by Scooter Braun, director of the superstar and professional, named Scooter, despite his vehement objections. The blockbusters are now controlled by a cohort of Kanye West – is both a fascinating musical enigma and the 100,000th part of the defining celebrity feud of the 21st century. The implications of the reopening and re-editing of all his old albums by the world's biggest pop star are staggering, from a legal and logistical point of view, but leave aside the plot of the sector for a second and reflect there as it will seem weird.

It is precisely Taylor Swift, who turns 30 in December. He registers "Fifteen" again. Record again "22." Record again "Our Song", taken from its first title of 2006, which was made famous at the age of 16 years. , a native of Pennsylvania, with a pronounced Nashville twinge and an even more pronounced adolescent exuberance while she uttered the lines, "When we're on the phone and you're talking very slow / & # 39; Because it is late and your mother does not know it. "Imagine her singing the words even your mom now. She will raise eight to twelve relationships of the highest possible level, from guys to guys, to men. Thank God, she will re-record "average" from 2010 Speak Now, with the additional motivation of the 6 billion additional people who have been mean to her for 10 years.

Today we welcome Swift's seventh hit album, Loveron her new label, Republic, and yes, she owns the masters, and yes, it's better at light-years than 2017 Reputation and probably its best pop album to date, and yes, it's (probably) counting the years 2012 red like a pop album. Lover is alternately lovey-dovey to the extreme ("London Boy", taken from the chorus "Darling I Fancy you", it's the most dork song she wrote in a scary competition) and something very much darker, deeper, stranger and more surprising. (London Boy) is immediately followed in the list of songs of the saddest song she's ever released, as well as her best song ever since redIt's too good, at least.)

What makes Swift's catalog valuable is, of course, the billions of dollars it can generate. What makes it invaluable, especially for her, is that each recording is a very specific snapshot of a very specific person at a very specific moment in her life. These are capsules that she buries in each of our heads. More than any other pop star of her era or perhaps of anybody else, she produces albums that function as living eras, as distinct and almost painfully distinct as the seasons of one's life. series of prestige anthologies, almost everyone on Earth is more or less forced to watch. American Taylor Story. As we contemplate the disconcerting notion of 2020, Taylor Swift again speaking in the 2010 power ballad Taylor Swift sang about the guy from Owl City, we may be better equipped to appreciate the shade of Lover, a sprawling giant of clumsy lust and wounded grace, imperfect by necessity but captivating in its design. Desolation suits him once more, just as his ferocious devotion to the present has always been.

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

Lover, at first glance, will be considered primarily (and charitably) through the prism of Reputation, A 200 ton excursion in the Gothic phase that was not, ugly first single side, as ugly as it appeared. "Actually, Reputation was good "is the hottest song of 2019, and of course, we can agree that" you should take it as a compliment that I got drunk and that I mocked the way you talk "is actually a very good song entry. We can marvel, moreover, at the fact that the record did quite well that it visited stadiums to support it, even if the Netflix documentary of this tour culminates with, uh, redAll is well.

But the first thing that makes Lover higher is that it dispenses, immediately, with celebrity anxiety-fever that weighs even ReputationThe darkest moments. That is, track 1 calls "I forgot you existed" and concerns either Kanye or that other fucking guy, and understands the phrase "And I could not more distant from you / In my feelings more than Drake, so yeah, "and has a mesmerizing, chuckling buoyancy, that slams the finger that first shabby single" ME! Tried and failed to manufacture. The concept, in a word, is whew. His relief is also yours.

Swift describes Lover at Vogue as "a love letter to love" and a hit dorkiness actually animates characters like "I think he knows" (in which she repeatedly sings the phrase "He got this childish look that I love in a man ") and" Paper Rings "(which begins with his singing rapping replicas" The moon is high as your friends were the night we met / We are went home and tried to track you down on the Internet / Now I've read all the books next to your bed ") Bravo to Joe Alwyn, Swift's boyfriend for about three years, a nice actor and a pleasantly empty ship (you probably remember Emma Stone saying "What a dress! The favouritebut do not remember the outfit) so that their love can be reduced to song at we drink and watch rugby together and others as pleasant as I am Smitten; It is the English vagrancy of celebrities. LoverThe album title, a mix of country and country dusty and blatant, was the best received among the pre-release singles of the record, very sweet and, as always, very specific: "And I am very distrustful of anyone who sees you, she purrs. (Not really.) "I've enjoyed three summers now, darling, but I want them all." (Absolutely.)

For those who search every new Taylor Swift pop album for clues that she might one day make a country album of old guard Taylor Swift, "Lover" is almost the top of this album. Almost. I'm here to tell you that "Soon, you'll get better" – the Dixie Chicks, as threatened as they are long threatened – immediately enters the top 5 of his songs of all time, and not at no. 5. This concerns the ongoing experience of Swift's mother in cancer and constitutes a step backward in both instrumentation (acoustic guitar, painful violin Dixie Chick Martie Maguire) and d & # 39; 39; unbearable intimacy, especially the sound of Swift's voice when she sings: "You're better soon / because you to have at. "It made me cry at first listen as I watched an 8-year-old group buzzing during football practice; it's a devastating reminder, if you needed it, of the reason why it's worth supporting all of Swift's tabloid drama and why it's at its best when it comes to put it completely out of the way.

LoverS 18 tracks are produced mostly by Joel Little (best known for his work on Lorde's debut album, Pure heroine) and your old friend Jack Antonoff, best known for his debut in popular pop in 2014 1989, not forgetting Lorde's second album, Melodrama. ("Cruel Summer", the song that would have been written by Saint Vincent, has by far LoverThe biggest chorus of the song, whatever its value.) There is a morbid and narcotized part of this record, an up-to-date Spotify-core subset of electro-pop music that will never be Swift's specialty, but who can always agree it very well. "Miss Americana and the Prince Chagrin" (co-produced by Little) is a small note of hypnotic and mesmerizing faux-chillwave puree, a highly prospective approach to regression in high school, drawn from her vividly scary speech ("All the School Launches fake dice / You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes ") to the cheerleading team supporting Swift in the middle of all this decaying beauty:" And I do not want you (Go!) / I do not really want (Fight!) / Because no one is going (Win!). "

Moodier is still "False God", which, with its huge saxophone moaning and dreamy and quirky dream voice, looks more like Carly Rae Jepsen singing a Blood Orange song than Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes who writes a Carly song Rae Jepsen. It's an Antonoff joint, as is "The Archer," another well-received first single that propelled Swift into a deafening synthesizer reverie, but presented it to his most direct and most hurt: "They see through / can you see through me? / They see through / They see through me / I see through me / I see through me. "The panic in her voice that was rising as she came to" I see through me "is another reminder of almost unparalleled craftsmanship here, fueled as always by the daring sound threatening to drown her, but still able, sometimes, to cut it.

In terms of generating titles, reflections and exhortations to calm down, LoverThe brightest moment is "The Man", a lush, sharp pop jam that resembles Haim, with a chorus that begins: "I'm fed up with running as fast as I can / I wonder if I'm I would arrive faster if I were a man. It is indeed Swift's kind lament in the sense of "If I had been a boy" of Beyoncé, but with the very distinctive meaning of Swift and the generation of content: I let the players play / I would be like Leo / in Saint-Tropez. "

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This song, a bit like the last verse of the somewhat opportunistic jam "You need to calm down", denounces in part the insistence of society to compare female pop stars to each other, so sorry for Haim and Beyoncé . But Swift is at its best when she is angry about something (or better yet, Someone & # 39; a) very specific, but still light and light enough to sharpen this anger to a deadly point. Lover is a mixture of private happiness and perpetual public discomfort; unlike its opening track, it has not forgotten that its different enemies exist, and at no time you will do it. But it contains some of her best songs, her official pop era or whatever, and even though she's moving from the intimately painful to the clumsy universal, she's her most effective balance to date between the imperfect human and megacelebrity even more imperfect.

So it's absurd to imagine 2020, Taylor Swift fully reinstating, say, the Taylor Swift who evoked the teenage-queen triumph of 2008 Without fear, this album will also feel terribly out of date for its biggest fans in a decade, and probably so much for her. It is, by design, a perfect snapshot of an imperfectly flagrant moment; that's what makes Lover, in his greatest moments, so great.