Are Taylor Swift’s new songs a comment on her relationship with Harry Styles?
We live in the era of the tribute act, when every night small venues are crowded with wannabes offering up variable facsimiles of musical legends, from the Bootleg Beatles and Red Hot Chili Pipers to Re-Take That and J’Adele. Their purpose is to offer cheap and cheerfully intimate access to stars who are no longer with us, or who have become distanced by the stadium scale of their success.
But what can we make of the fact that the biggest pop star of our time is running an impressive sideline as her very own tribute? 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is Taylor Swift’s fourth complete note-for-note remake of one of her own earlier albums, the latest chapter in a mind-boggling re-recording project to assert full control over her music, following disputes with former labels and managers. Without its five new tracks, this album would be almost indistinguishable from the 2014 version, which marked the then 24-year-old’s shift from country sweetheart to mainstream pop idol, and is her best album to date.
With a forensic attention to detail, Swift’s remake is astonishing in its exactitude, another reminder that she is a star of a different magnitude with a mastery of her own talents and a bold business acumen. A decision which might have been a moment’s whimsy has now become an art statement that has redoubled her popularity.
But Swift takes pains to offer value for money, so most attention will be focused on five new tracks, labelled “from the vaults.” These are previously unreleased songs, written contemporaneously but only recorded recently. There was much speculation at the time that the focus of 1989 was a tumultuous romance with Swift’s fellow pop idol Harry Styles, and the new songs certainly seem to bear this notion out. On Suburban Legend she pithily describes the object of her desire as “so magnetic it was almost obnoxious / Flush with the currency of cool.” She cleverly recasts a Hollywood affair as high school drama, but there is an epic undercurrent to her sly declaration “We were born to be national treasures.”
All of the new songs are satisfyingly deft and clever, replete with sinuous melodies, burbling synths and agitated percussion that correspond with the updated eighties stylings of the original. Nevertheless, Swift doesn’t quite set the clock back a whole decade. On the remade album, Swift has gone out of her way to match the tones and inflections of her younger self. On the new tracks, the timbre of Swift’s voice has become noticeably deeper and richer, and her singing glides a little more smoothly than it did before. To be honest, they could have been added to last year’s Midnights and nobody would have blinked an eye.
Nonetheless, they offer interesting spins on 1989’s essential premise of misbegotten celebrity romance, even if none are quite so lethally pop-tastic that their original exclusion offers any mystery. Swift and her producers definitely made the right choices first time around. Instead, what we get is an addendum to familiar favourites, reflecting the same themes in intriguing new lights.
The boldly titled Slut has Swift confessing that she would be prepared to be catcalled just to be seen publicly with her matinee idol paramour (“If they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once / And if I’m gonna be drunk, might as well be drunk in love”). Its opening verse is a great example of Swift’s pithy lyrical scene setting and phrasemaking: “Flamingo pink / Sunset boulevard / Clink clink / Being this young is art.” Four lines, eleven words, and we know exactly where we are and what is going on.
Say Don’t Go is a sensuously yearning track about hanging on to someone who doesn’t love you (“I’m yours but you’re not mine”), albeit it covers some of the same territory as the original 1989’s All You Had to Do Was Stay. Now That We Don’t Talk is a tartly related post-relationship song, with a sweet bridge that has Swift calling her mother for advice, and some snippy aspersions cast upon her ex-boyfriend’s character and tastes (“I don’t have to pretend that I like acid rock / Or that I’d like to be on a mega yacht / With important men who think important thoughts / Guess that maybe I am better off now that we don’t talk”).
The one new song that really punches its weight with Swift’s original 1989 singles is the razor sharp Is It Over Now? Built around an odd squawking sample hook that sounds perfectly of its retro era, it is packed with tight lines in which Swift piles up internal rhymes in strict metre: “I think about jumping / Off of very tall somethings / Just to see you come running / And say the one thing / I’ve been wanting.” The chorus mixing bitterness and regret is masterful (“Was it over when she lay down on your couch? / Was it over when he unbuttoned my blouse?”) a reminder that, then as now, Swift is world class lyricist, whose snappy couplets never come at the expense of emotional truth: “Lets fast forward to 300 awkward blind dates later / If she’s got blue eyes I will surmise that you’ll probably date her / You dream of my mouth before it called you a ‘lying traitor’ / You search in every model’s bed for something greater…” It’s the kind of dazzling songcraft and pointed delivery that reminds us that, when it comes to Swift, we should accept no substitutes.
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