Taylor Swift

1989

The big ol’ city was imaginary; but on 1989, Swift writes and inhabits a fully-realized fantasy of self-reliance, confidence, and ensuing pleasure. Her music was no longer just a diary entry. You can almost hear her winking on every track.

Her metropolitan butterflies aside, Swift’s songwriting is as consistently razor-sharp as it’s ever been. 

Too often on 1989 she’s trying to win at somebody else’s game, whittling her words down to generic love stuff over flowy synthesizers.

A cold, somewhat distant celebration of all the transient transparencies of modern pop, undercut by its own desperate desire to be nothing but a sparkling soundtrack to an aspirational lifestyle.

‘1989’ is Taylor Swift’s radical reinvention: one to finally alienate her country audience and plant her flag firmly in pop soil.

Swift’s self-empowerment is so irrepressible that you can actually hear her kiss off the haters with the help of a brass backing section.

No longer writing love stories that naively set out to rival Romeo and Juliet, the Swift on 1989 is very aware of the transience and the fun of everything she’s writing about – but she’s also aware that that doesn’t mean it can’t sound larger than life.

1989’s standout tracks retain the narrative detail and clever metaphor-building that distinguished Swift’s early country songs, even amid the diversions wrought by the aggressive studio production on display throughout.

1989 is a testament to Swift's transition as a woman, and it's admirable to anyone embarking on the difficult journey of finding themselves.

It has moments of magic, passages that gleam so perfectly. But then it stalls. And it splutters. And it parks itself, enticing first impressions undermined by an unreliable core, as Just Another Pop Record.

The little personal details she inserts into otherwise fluffy songs are what make tracks like Out Of The Woods so resonant. If anything, 1989 proves that those skills, and not the marketing campaign, are the source of her success.

1989 is a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.