Taylor Swift's eighth album, which has won Album of the Year, is a radical detour into the deepest collection of songs she’s ever come up with. Grammys
. She’s always relished her dramatic creative zigzags, but this is easily her most audacious move, full of story-telling depth she’s never come close to before. Some of us have spent years dreaming Taylor would do a whole album like this, but nobody really dreamed it would turn out this great. Her greatest album — so far. self-consciously summed up the first 30 years of her life, bringing all her musical passions together. But on, she leaves her comfort zones behind.
It’s amusing, in retrospect, how people actually worried that being happy in love might mean Swift would run out of things to write songs about. Not a chance. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories: A scandalous old widow, hated by her whole town. A scared seven-year-old girl with a traumatized best friend. A ghost watching her enemies at the funeral. Recovering addicts. A fumbling teenage boy.
It’s going to take weeks if not decades to puzzle out all the intricately interwoven narrative details of these songs. “Mirrorball” is about the same nervous dance-floor poseur of “New Romantics,” six years later, except tonight she feels like the disco ball that reflects everyone’s most desperate insecurities. “Mad Woman” expands on the familiar topic of witch hunts, but it also sharpens the feminist rage of “The Man.
“Betty” is a first — she sings in the voice of the 17-year-old boy in a Taylor Swift song, reckoning with the fickle behavior detailed by the girls in “Cardigan” and “August.” It takes off from the harmonica solo in Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” — which feels appropriate for the only tale on the album where she goes back to high school.
Remember when she was threatening to spend this year rerecording all her old albums? She does the opposite here — she refuses to repeat her most reliable tricks. So many of the world’s favorite Swift-ian trademarks are missing. No country moves, no synth pop, no first dates, no “Taylor visits a city” song, not even a laugh.
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