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Taylor Swift’s 1989: A Track-by-Track Breakdown
 
After months of being kept tightly under wraps, Taylor Swift’s sure-to-be-blockbuster new album 1989 suddenly leaked online today. We won’t have Carl Wilson’s full review until next week, when the album is scheduled to be released, but in the meantime here’s a complete track-by-track breakdown.
 
1. “Welcome to New York”
By now most fans will be familiar with this synth-pop NYC anthem, co-written with Ryan Tedder, though they might not realize that it makes more sense as the album’s opener. In that context, the song is less about Swift’s real-life change of address and more about her move into full-on pop. Perhaps that’s why the central metaphor the song uses for the city is a sonic one: She says she came “searching for a sound [she] hadn’t heard before” and found “a new soundtrack” and a new beat she can “dance to … forevermore.” It’s as much a welcome to her new sound (for forevermore!) as it is about the city.
 
2. “Blank Space”
“Welcome to New York” may be wide-eyed and innocent, but the acid “Blank Space” is anything but. Those who don’t listen closely might miss the irony, but the song finds Swift—over a hip-hop-influenced drum machine beat recorded with Max Martin and Shellback—sending up her own reputation as a naive heartbreaker, a “nightmare dressed like a daydream.” “I’ve got a long list of ex-lovers,” she warns, plus “a blank space baby/ And I’ll write your name.”
 
3. “Style”
Another song that isn’t quite what it first appears, “Style” is ostensibly about timeless fashions. “You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye,” Swift sings, “And I got that red lip classic thing you like.” But, slowly and subtly, it reveals itself to be something slightly more sinister: a song about a relationship that goes round and round but is never quite healthy. “When we come crashing down we come back every time,” continues the chorus, “We never go out of style.” The arrangement matches the noir-ish feel perfectly, with Nile Rodgers-y funky guitar and a chugging synth riff that would fit right in on the Drive soundtrack.
 
4. “Out of the Woods”
Those who pre-ordered 1989 have already heard this chanting, synth-heavy ballad, written with Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and Fun, but it’s another that makes even more sense in the context of the album. If “Style” is about being stuck in a vicious cycle with (apparently) Harry Styles, then “Out of the Woods” is about breaking out of it.
 
5. “All You Had to Do Was Stay”
Completing what plays like a three-song cycle that begins with “Style” and “Out of the Woods,” “All You Had to Do Was Stay” sees the man who was unwilling to commit (Swift has implied that this one, too, is about Styles) come crawling back to her. He may “want it back,” but—as Swift sings with a nearly audible wagging finger—“It’s just too late.” While perhaps not as memorable as the other two songs, the track gets points for attitude.
 
6. “Shake It Off”
If you haven’t heard this haters-gonna-hate earworm yet, you’ve been on Mars. Welcome back! Here are our posts about its video and what made it a No. 1 hit. (Side note: Does its “players gonna play” line take on extra resonance after the previous three tracks? Maybe.)
 
7. “I Wish You Would”
The most striking thing about this song initially is that it’s the first to actually place the emphasis on guitars. Written to go over a Fine Young Cannibals-sampling track assembled by Jack Antonoff (the original version, at least, borrowed a snare from “She Drives Me Crazy”), the song builds and builds—sliding into half time on the chorus—as it finds the singer wishing a lover would run back.
 
8. “Bad Blood”
Written about a professional feud with another artist who “basically tried to sabotage [swift’s] entire arena tour,” according to Swift, “Bad Blood” is rumored to be about Katy Perry, who may or may not have hired dancers away from Swift’s tour supporting Red. Needless to say, the song is wounded and angry (“Band aids don’t fix bullet holes/ You say sorry just for show”). The equally hard-hitting beat (which reminded me, of all things, of “Grindin’”) is going to rattle trunks.
 
9. “Wildest Dreams”
It’s hard to imagine that this song, which finds Swift quivering and whispering and reinventing herself as a sort of summer-dress-wearing femme fatale, wasn’t inspired by Lana Del Rey. The sultry lyrics describe a surreptitious, doomed affair that the singer enters under only one condition: “Say you’ll see me again,” she sings, “even if it’s just in your wildest dreams.” Swift’s own distinct songwriting voice gets a little lost, but she does a convincing Del Rey impression.
 
10. “How You Get the Girl”
Though it follows immediately after the very sedate “Wildest Dreams,” “How You Get the Girl” is perhaps the most chipper song on the album. Built over strumming acoustic guitars, it’s also the one that sounds the most like Red. (Or her older material, though—with the now inevitable bleeps and bloops—that’s more of a stretch.) Addressed to a hesitant, unsure lover, the titular method for getting the girl is (spoiler alert!) actually quite old-fashioned: Profess that you’ll love her “For worse or for better … forever and ever.”
 
11. “This Love”
The slowest, haziest song on the album, “This Love” opens with a wash of synths seemingly meant to evoke waves on the ocean shore. These ocean currents provide the song’s central metaphor, which is about hoping that, if you let it go, love will come back to you just like the tide.
 
12. “I Know Places”
A song about trying to carry on a love affair while the vultures (the media, presumably) are circling, “I Know Places” has eerie, sinister verses that burst into triumphant, major-key euphoria on the chorus. (“I know places we won’t be found,” Swift assures her lover.) The hunting metaphor gets a little mixed. (“They are the hunters/ we are the foxes” doesn’t completely jibe with “They’ll be chasing their tails trying to track us down.”) But with its manipulated vocals, martial drums, and references to the flashing lights of photographers, the song (which was made with Ryan Tedder) achieves the mood it aims for.
 
13. “Clean”
Employing another water metaphor, “Clean” finds Swift after a breakup drowning in the stuff (tears, presumably), until she is “finally clean” and ready to move on. Written and recorded with Imogen Heap, the sad but ultimately hopeful song is in the vein of similarly-themed Swift album closers like “Begin Again.”
 
Bonus tracks
 
“Wonderland”
Filled with allusions to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this bonus track finds two lovers tumbling down the rabbit hole to a place “where life was never worse or never better.” The boy’s flashing green eyes allude to the Cheshire Cat’s, while the music brings to mind, above all, the songs Sia has written for Rihanna, complete with their usual repetitions of “ey ey.”
 
“You R in Love”
Lena Dunham (whose boyfriend is Swift collaborator Antonoff) has already called this her “someday wedding song,” and it’s not hard to see why. Over warm synths, the song attempts to express the inexpressibility of love (“You can hear it in the silence … You can see it with the lights out”). The killer moment comes when the music drops out, and Swift delivers one of those images that feels both very particular and very universal: “One night he wakes/ Strange look on his face/ Pauses, then says/ ‘You’re my best friend’/ And you knew what it was/ He is in love.”
 
“New Romantics”
Is the title meant to evoke the wave of late ’70s and early ’80s bands collectively called the New Romantics? It seems likely. At the very least, the sound resembles the new wave music that inspired them, and Swift’s lyrics sound unusually goth: “Heartbreak is the national anthem,” goes the chorus, “We sing it proudly.” It’s an appropriate end to an album that seems destined to soundtrack heartbreaks across the country.
 
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Roughly 1,989 Words About Taylor Swift's '1989'! A Track-by-Track Guide
By Chris Willman
 
Remember the girl with the teardrops on her guitar? On Taylor Swift's hotly anticipated fifth effort, 1989 — which leaked on the Internet on Friday, despite her label Big Machine's valiant efforts to keep the album under wraps — there are few tears. And even fewer guitars.
 
She's alternating between sounding ebullient and battle-hardened — a nice combination if you can get it. Anyone who thought Swift played the victim in some of her breakup songs on previous albums will have a hard time finding any evidence of that in this largely un-devastated collection. Even some of the tracks that recall distant or recent heartaches have her sounding almost blithe, with lyrics that show her becoming much more sensible or even hard-boiled about love. Executive producer Max Martin is on board to ensure that even tracks that read like tender confessionals in the lyric booklet into huge, anthemic singalongs that make massive use of pre-EDM electronics.
 
If you're looking for the album's prevailing attitude in a nutshell, you might look to one of the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition, "New Romantics." It seems that Swift's new and improved take on romanticism involves giving up obsessing over why seemingly serious commitments go sour, and instead acting her frolicsome, mid-twentysomething age. "We are too busy dancing to get knocked off our feet," she sings in that track, adding: "The best people in life are free."
 
In another song, "I Wish You Would," she reconsiders a flighty ex and sounds like she might be open to a BFFs-with-benefits relationship. Her more practical-minded take on love on 1989 is a long way from the fairytale romance of "Love Story"… even if she hasn't completely graduated from "Romeo, take me some place we can be alone" to "Romeo, take a hike."
 
There's really only one moment that rings false on 1989, and it's the lyric in "Shake It Off" that has the singer archly echoing her antagonists: "Got nothing in my brain — that's what people say-ay-ay." Two or three years ago, that might have been an accurate assessment of a prevailing sentiment about Swift in playa-hater-dom. But in the year 2014, aren't even her detractors conceding that she's the smartest pop superstar we've seen in our lifetimes? We're talking the kind of savviness that has her conjuring up her own Fortune 500-worthy marketing plans… but also the kind of smart that knows sometimes that the savviest thing you can do is just put yourself nakedly in front of people and open up a vein. To put it in 1989 terms (the year, not the album), she kind of makes Madonna look like Paula Abdul.  
 
If you can handle a few more spoilers, here's a track-by-track guide to 1989:
 
"Welcome to New York" — Or: Dorothy, I don't think we're in Nashville anymore. Talk about setting your suitcase down in new territory: This collaboration with Ryan Tedder sports the album's most pleasingly bombastic production. As an ode to Manhattan, it wields such a sonic sledgehammer that you could call it her "Rhapsody in Black and Blue." While country music is filled with stars busily establishing their small-town bona fides, Swift has joined the small but considerable cadre of genre figures who've uprooted themselves to take Manhattan — Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, and Chely Wright among them. Speaking of Chely: "Boys and boys, girls and girls," Swift sings, extolling gay-friendliness as just one of many selling points for the big city…  a small gesture that will have huge meaning for hundreds of thousands of fans. Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine many young people of any persuasion making their first visit to New York any time in the next 10 years without this bouncing through their heads as they come out of the Holland Tunnel.
 
"Blank Space" — The album's sweetest-sounding melody happens to be paired with the most evil lyric. Well, may "evil" is too strong a word for the mischief Swift is up to here. But she is definitely having us on. At the Secret Sessions listening parties Swift held in various locales recently, she told fans her intention with this track was to take the wrong-headed conception some people have of how she conducts her romantic life and just run wild with it. Thus do you get the album's most absurdly quotable lyrics — like "I can make the bad guys good for a weekend" and "Got a long list of ex-lovers, they'll tell you I'm insane" and "Be that girl for a month" and "Darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream." Her funniest song to date, "Blank Space" will be taken wholly seriously by vast scores of folks, which makes it that much more comical.
 
"Style" — Well, here's one that's obviously about Jake Gyllenhaal. Kidding. This track could well be subtitled "I Knew You Were the Kind of Trouble That's Well Worth It When You Walked In." There are further intimations of the outside dalliances or flirtations that supposedly led to her breakup(s) with the One Direction dude… but this time she doesn't seem nearly so perturbed about it. "I say I heard… you've been out and about with some other girl," she sings. "He says what you heard is true, but I can't stop thinking about you. And I said, I've been there too, a few times." It's a moderately shocking admission, that maybe the trouble with Harry is a little bit the trouble with Taylor, too. There's little mistaking that, to borrow a phrase from Sheryl Crow, the stylin' guy in question is very much her favorite mistake.
 
 "Out of the Woods" — Not much more needs to be said about a song that's obsessed Swifties since it was released several weeks ago. Except maybe: How weird is it that a tune so huge that sounds like it's being chanted by a cast of thousands — thanks to Jack Antonoff — stops to include the exact number of stitches incurred in an emergency room after a romantic vehicular accident? Answer: pretty weird, and pretty wonderful.
 
"All You Had to Do Was Stay" — Swift has her own lengthy and kind of hilarious explanation about why there is an operatic-sounding sample of the word "stay" resounding through the chorus of the song. And she should probably relay that one to you herself. Regardless of how the sample was conceived, it works, as a sort of robotic command conveying a profoundly human emotion. This one sounds like a more sober take on "We Are Never Getting Back Together": "People like you always want back the love they pushed aside/But people like me are gone forever when you say goodbye… You were all I wanted, but not like this." Like, ever.
 
"Shake It Off" — Has this really only been out for 10 weeks? It's already built up 10 years' worth of ubiquity. That opening drum loop is going to provide bumper music for radio talk shows for years to come, and the "players gonna play, play, play" section will be a staple of sports events time-outs for… what, decades? The credits reveal what we suspected all along: that that's a real horn section aiding the earthquake, on an album otherwise mostly devoid of organic instrumentation. Anyway, this is "Mean" redux, sans banjos, sung by the girl after she moved to that big ole city.
 
"I Wish You Would" — Swift will never be accused of staying completely on-message, since this number (written with Jack Antonoff of fun. and Bleachers) sends the exact opposite message of the one heard in "All You Had to Do Was Stay." Which is: We are possibly, maybe ever getting back together. How does she know those are her ex's headlights coming through the window at 2 a.m., and not some random stranger making a Pink Dot run? Because she's Taylor Swift, and she can see for miles and miles.
 
"Bad Blood" — There's a fun, sing-songy quality to this tune that makes it sound like one of Avril Lavigne's lighter moments — which puts it slightly at odds with the serious Katy Perry dis track we were expecting. As beef tunes go, it makes "Better Than Revenge" sound like something out of the Death Row canon. But despite the lightness of the Martin/Shellback production, Swift manages to get off some lines with just enough inherent emotion to let you know there was a real wound there before it got turned into cotton candy. "Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes/You say sorry just for show," she sings, as we all leap to imagine the "whatever" face on the frenemy star who inspired the track.
 
"Wildest Dreams" — Here's where we get Swift at her most pragmatic about love… which is not to say completely and utterly un-romantic. But these days, she's all about planned (or at least foreseen) obsolescence. "I can see the end as it begins," she sings, going into soothsayer mode — and yet she sounds utterly at peace and even kind of excited about being in the heat of a relationship that has a sell-by date. Young fans who associate her with the belief in One True Love may be a bit surprised at her embrace of the ephemeral here: "His hands are in my hair/His clothes are in my room…/Nothing last forever, but this is getting good now." Is there joy as well as sensuality in impermanence? Take it up with your philosophy prof, kids… or maybe just with someone who's "so tall and handsome as hell."
 
"How You Get the Girl" — The one song on 1989 that really seems to express a belief in true, perpetually self-renewing love was… written for friends. Same thing with the bonus track "You Are in Love," which Swift wrote thinking of her collaborator Antonoff and his beau Lena Dunham. That kind of romanticism may not be where Swift is at in her life right now, apparently, but she can do a hell of a job of recommending it for pals. This one's so cheerful, it's nearly a girl-group song, in the same way that the title track of Speak Now harked back to that kind of innocent pop.
 
"This Love" — The first real ballad on the album… and one you're not surprised to see bears the name of Swift's original producer, Nathan Chapman, who makes a one-song return here. The acoustic guitars at the beginning are a giveaway (Martin and Shellback use them a few other times in the collection, but more for accents or dynamics than base instrumentation). Eventually, though, even this one gives way to a big, non-acoustic beat, so as not to seem too out of pace with the rest of the collection. It's unusually hopeful about the prospects of reunions working out… which is maybe why Swift is thinking it has less to do with her life right now and is considering dedicating it to military families.
 
"I Know Places" — Swift has said she wrote this about how protective she'll be of her next relationship, when that time comes, aiming to experience new love outside of the view of paparazzi — because "loose lips sink ships all the damn time. Not this time!" Then again, the mention of "green eyes" in these lyrics (and also in one of the bonus tracks) suggests she had a previous romance in mind, too. Although it's a bit celebrity-specific, "Places" suffices as a statement of purpose for young lovers who may face prying eyes that aren't even attached to cameras.
 
"Clean" — The standard edition's last and best song, an electronic ballad co-written with Imogen Heap, gives fans the more vulnerable and gobsmacked Swift they remember "All Too Well" from more heartsick previous albums. Clearly "Clean" is not about the fellow who inspired so many of the album's other songs, because in no way would this guy be considered a favorite mistake. "You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress," she laments, though a baptismal flood ultimately takes care of all that, after it nearly kills her. "Clean" is a reminder that Swift can still open the floodgates to explore the currents of real emotional wreckage… even as it's a happy development that, for the rest of the album, she didn't have to.
 
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Album Review: 1989 by Taylor Swift
 
Forsaking country? That's treason, isn't it?
For all the hullabaloo around Shake It Off (the best or worst single of the year, depending on how hung up on Teardrops On My Guitar you are), it's not like we weren't warned. Taylor Swift has been shooting for pop for some time now, not least on the Max Martin-produced trio of singles from her last album Red. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, 22 and particularly I Knew You Were Trouble put serious daylight between Swift and her customary country leanings. Now she's gone the whole hog.
 
Swift has become too much of a pop star on her own terms to worry about potential competition, but she may as well lay waste to her rivals anyway. It's like Michael Johnson switching between the 200m and 400m just to find a challenge. For Swift's big leap, Martin – the alchemist behind Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys – has a hand in the whole album this time, smoothing her path to a glorious, true pop debut.
 
There's a concept here too, the idea that 1989 (the year Swift was born) was a highpoint for ambitious pop music, with Swift namechecking Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox and even Fine Young Cannibals in interviews. You can hear a trace of Gabriel in the gorgeous ambient wash of Out Of The Woods, otherwise an insistent, looping panic over new love's babysteps, and some FYC in the hurtling, scratchy funk of I Wish You Would. Equally, there's a surprising touch of the One Directions about the bullish skip of How You Get The Girl, so it's not all 80s.
 
But so much of it is. To be honest, it's closer to mid-decade with the Brat Pack soundtrack warmth of the outstanding Style ("You got that long hair slicked back/White t-shirt" is similarly evocative) and big ballad Wildest Dreams, so Swift's reference points may be off. Still, nostalgia's imprecise enough even when you've experienced those events. What counts is how you frame it, and Swift sets her new pop scene like a natural, peeling off choruses like so many dollar bills. And for anyone missing those Nashville roots, maybe she'll go back there now. Job done.
 
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BreatheHeavy Reviews Taylor Swift’s “1989″ 
 
I asked myself: what better way to write about Taylor Swift’s “1989″ than with a Coca Cola and a cat on my lap? The answer is there isn’t.
 
So what “1989″ leaked (“leaked”) ahead of its October 27 release, it’s projected to be one (if not the only) album to hit a million in sales opening week. We just get to enjoy it a weekend sooner.
 
In an attempt to stay relevant and keep up with my fellow blogosphere peers, I decided to give the album several listens and jot down my thoughts. Lucky for me there’s a backspace button. I went in mostly skeptical, expecting to hear Taylor Swift’s interpretation of what she THINKS “in” pop music is – hiring power-house producer Max Martin to churn out some epic jams. That she did, that he did, but something unexpected happened…
 
 
1. “Welcome To New York”
What it is: Taylor says she obsessed over moving to New York City before making the big leap. Most citizens of the Big Apple can’t afford to live in a high-rise, walk around with a luxury pet cat or leave gym workouts in stylish label clothes, but Taylor Swift can! She hit up OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder to pen her unrelatable experience of New York, gifting her robotic-sounding 80′s-vibe anthem for us mere peasents.
 
Standout lyrics:
The lights are so bright
But they never blind me, me
 
What would Britney say: I want a house in New York, L.A., Miami, Vegas and a ranch in Colorado.
 
 
2. “Blank Space”
What it is: If you told me five years ago Taylor Swift’s transitioning to pop eventually, I imagine I’d assume her sound would be this. The production is simple, chorus is catchy and spills the tea. “Boys only want love if it’s torture?” That’s slightly sexist, but I can’t say I disagree. Us men are complex creatures, and anything Taylor Swift says about us is undoubtedly true.
 
Standout lyrics:
So it’s gonna be forever
Or it’s gonna go down in flames
 
What would Britney say: Women don’t need men to feel empowered.
 
 
3. “Style”
What it is: I’m sensing there’s an 80′s theme… She whisper-talks something before dropping into the delicious chorus that’s reminiscent of the track before it. “Style” is perfect for driving with the windows down or a Kohl’s commercial.
 
Standout lyrics:
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time.
Cause we never go out of style
 
What would Britney say: It’s really fun.
 
 
4. “Out Of The Woods”
What it is: Taylor debuted this song a few weeks ago and practically broke the Internet. We were force-fed “Shake It Off,” her attempt to say “LOOK! I’M A POP STAR NOW! LIKE MY SONG WITH MAX MARTIN?” Then she handed us “Out Of The Woods” and we forgave her for that piece of shit she started off with. The beat is thumpy, the vocals fueled by her lost love with ex-boyfriend Harry Styles from One Direction. She uses real life stories no one understands, puts it to a catchy beat and we buy it! Singing about stitches and monsters and hospital beds just sounds silly, but all together makes for a magical track.
 
Standout lyrics:
The rest of the world was black and white
But we were in screaming color
 
What would Britney say: To grandmother’s house we go.
 
 
5. “All You Had To Do Was Stay”
What it is: Five songs in and at this point I’m questioning my integrity: ‘Am I the person I thought I’d be? Who is that staring back at me? You’re enjoying a Taylor Swift album. What is happening?’ Fortunately I’ll remain unapologetic, because “All You Had To Do Was Stay” is another hit that flows perfectly with the tracklist. Love is a tricky little thing: it blindly leads us down a path towards self destruction because we want to believe everyone is capable of loving you more, loving you how you yearn to be loved. Sometimes you know someone better than they know themselves, but by the time they realize it it’s too late. All they had to do was stay.
 
Standout lyrics:
People like you always want back the love they gave away
And people like me wanna believe you when you say you’ve changed
 
What would Britney say: Fedex.
 
 
6. “Shake It Off”
What it is: You’ve made up your mind about this Max Martin attempt. It’s the weakest track for me, and if you’re wondering who pissed in my corn flakes it was Will.I.Am.
 
Standout lyrics:
My ex-man brought his new girlfriend
She’s like “Oh, my god!” but I’m just gonna shake.
 
What would Britney say: I invented Max Martin lol.
 
 
7. “I Wish You Would”
What it is: Don’t you hate people who say they’ve never regretted anything in their life? Sure, life happens the way it’s supposed to happen – even having regrets. Taylor finally admits she’s in the wrong, and that revelation in her song-writing is further proof of her talents. It’s exhausting hearing her blame the guy for the destruction of a relationship, but this time she realizes she played a part. The production fits accordingly.
 
Standout lyrics:
Wish I never had hung up the phone like I did
I Wish You know that I never forget you as long as I’m living
 
What would Britney say: Not a girl, not yet a woman.
 
 
8. “Bad Blood”
What it is: There’s a fine line between love and hate. Breakups leave a scar on your heart forever because you let someone in, showed them the real you and it went up in flames anyway. Taylor slows things down with “Bad Blood,” but maintains the mid-tempo beat heard throughout most of the album. She’s almost yelling in parts of the song, which I suppose fits the theme of the song. Have fun letting someone new in while you have bad blood towards someone else. Let it go.
 
Standout lyrics:
I was thinking that you could be trusted
Did you have to ruin what was shining now it’s all rusted
 
What would Britney say: Are you having trouble focusin throughout the day? Do you find yourself still callin my name.
 
 
9. “Wildest Dreams”
What it is: Very ethereal and light. Taylor sings about a guy she knows isn’t healthy for her, but she has no fucks. He’s handsome, she’s delusional. I mean, romantic. She wants to capture their intimate moment even if it’s imagined only by her. “Wildest Dreams” isn’t necessarily a power ballad or a slow song, but she takes the mood down a notch.
 
Standout lyrics:
I thought heaven can’t help me now
Nothing lasts forever
But this is gonna take me down
 
What would Britney say: A dream within a dream.
 
 
11. “How You Get The Girl”
What it is: A peek of pre-pop Taylor Swift makes an appearance in “How You Get The Girl.” There’s less synth & bumping beats and more live instrumentation. The vocals are calm yet still upbeat as she romanticizes about a guy who broke her heart, realized he’s a useless twerp without her and promises to never make the same mistake twice. Put your rose-colored glasses on for this one (don’t mind if I do).
 
Standout lyrics:
I want you for worse or for better
I would weep for ever and ever
 
What would Britney say: “With love, you should go ahead and take the risk of getting hurt because love is an amazing feeling.”
 
 
11. “This Love”
What it is: An interesting concept is the notion of letting go to get back. Like sand, the tighter you grip love, the faster it slips out your hand. Taylor’s soft and breathy vocals align appropriately for the song’s airy demeanor. I picture Taylor penning a note, slipping it into a glass bottle and sending it off on a still body of water – an example of a fantastically executed and visual song.
 
Standout lyrics:
These hands had to let them go free
And this love came back to me
 
What would Britney say: “With love, you should go ahead and take the risk of getting hurt because love is an amazing feeling.”
 
 
12. “I Know Places”
What it is: The intro is literally a Sia rip-off, but we’ll forgive her since the album’s enjoyable thus far. Taylor’s presumably singing about the dark side of fame and how it affects finding love, finding a solid relationship and maintaining it once something’s established. It’s mid-tempo ambiance is reminiscent of her earlier stuff.
 
Standout lyrics:
Loose lips sink ships all the damn time
What would Britney say: Let’s have a great day.
 
 
12. “Clean”
What it is: On “Clean,” Taylor cleanses herself of the breakup that once commandeered her life. There’s an aha! moment in everyone’s journey where they realize the fight of holding on is harder than simply letting go. Amidst xylophones and hushy background vocals, Taylor realizes this invaluable life lesson.
 
Standout lyrics:
Rain came pouring down when I was drowning
That’s when I could finally breathe
 
What would Britney say: Cause Cinderella’s got to go.
 
 
13. “Wonderland”
What it is: T Swift picks up the pace again. One of the most exciting things about falling in love is the immediate rush, excitement, adrenaline of finding someone special. “Wonderland” is a great way to describe that beautifully fucked up world you escape to when beginning the process of baring your soul to someone. It’s a curious phenomenon – this thing called love.
 
Standout lyrics:
Flashing lights and we, took a wrong turn and we
Fell down the rabbit hole
 
What would Britney say: Something more urban.
 
 
14. “You R In Love”
What it is: I feel I’ve made complete sense analyizing the themes to each song off “1989″ thus far, that is until “You Are In Love.” It seems like Taylor wrote down 343 words, threw them in a hat, pulled out four at a time and wrote this song. No, honestly, I have no idea what this song’s about. Probably about being in love or something.
 
Standout lyrics:
Small talk, he drives
Coffee at midnight, polite reflects
The chain on your neck
He says look up
 
What would Britney say: Pieces of me.
 
 
15. “New Romantics”
What it is: Of fucking course Taylor Swift ends the album with a song called “New Romance,” and why not?! Put it out to the universe, girl. You’ll get that dream guy. Just how the album started, “1989″ finishes with a quirky original 80′s-esque jammer.
 
Standout lyrics:
It’s poker, you can’t see it in my face
But I’m about to play my Ace
 
What would Britney say: Bye, y’all!
 
 
The first half of “1989″ is quick and snappy – a perfectly calculated and successful attempt at drawing in a new fanbase, whereas the second half is sure to appease the original die-hards. Congratulations, Taylor Swift. I disliked you whole-heartedly until now. After listening to your new album, “1989,” I must say I love you. I fucking love you and I applaud the direction you evolved to.
 
Album Rating: 4/5
 
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Taylor Swift's '1989' is unexpected
and is pretty freaking brilliant.
 
Taylor Swift is pretty saccharine. She's blonde and pleasant and perfectly preened for the media. She has delightful country roots, sells herself as an open book to her fans, has an adorable Instagram filled with adorable cats. She is, by all accounts, tolerable. But then, then she released 1989. And now everyone should be confused.
 
It's not that 1989 is a good album, one with the sweeping and grand intentions. There is no philosophy espoused here, no blurring of genres, no true experimentalism. But it is perhaps the best pop offering of 2014. Heck, even 2013. (That depends, of course, if you call Yeezus pop.) In fact, nearly every song on the album could be a single. On a second or third listen, the only thing that gets tiring is the sheer catchiness of the entire production. Her hooks are flawless. Here songwriting is intelligent. Every time she channels a breathy, sensual voice, she then doubles down on showing off how capable she is at hitting high notes. 
 
What makes 1989 a real success, a true pop standard, is how totally cohesive it is. Each song fits together, and there is a total story told. Her title is not just the year she was born, but also her main inspiration. Ditching her guitar, she employs grandiose electronics, spacious sounding vocals, taking a page right out of, say, a John Hughes movie or the blonde iteration of the Pet Shop Boys. Readers are going to chuck rotten fruit in our direction, but this album is much more akin to Robyn's Body Talk than anything that comes out of camp Katy or Miley. (In fact, it is like Body Talk for swooning teenagers instead of world-weary clubgoers.)
 
"How You Get The Girl" is perhaps the most familiar-feeling Taylor song, and surprisingly not the lead single. It matches new Taylor with the old, pairing her guitar with smashing beats and a sing-along ready chorus. We have all heard "Shake It Off," which is honestly one of the weaker songs on the album, a tune without the dramatic, heart-holding that permeates all of 1989. Another shout-out to the old is in the bedtime ballad "This Love," which still has driving electronics giving it a bit of non-Taylor edge.  
 
But it is when Taylor becomes unrecognizable, assuming a pop mantle she was apparently working torwards, where the album reaches its truest potential. Songs like "Wonderland" are defiantly loud and gun straight for the Haus of Rihanna (the "eh, eh, eh" is certainly reminiscent of "umbrella-ah-ah-ah") but there is no send-up to hip-hop here. This is Taylor Swift doing her interpretation of pop straight out of the '80s — moodiness, drama, feelings, and all. (In fact, "Clean," she calls on Imogen Heap to almost do a Wilson Phillips thing.) It is clear: This is not a former country star trying her hand at pop. This is a former country outsider showing what happens when epic dance music becomes earnest. 
 
"You can't see it in my face, but I'm about to play my ace," she says, in "Wonderland." There is no naive country girl, here. 
 
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Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’: Country’s Prodigal Daughter Trades In Her Boots and Spurs For Louboutins
 
The 24-year-old’s latest album is chock full of hits and hands-down the best pop record of the year. Good luck shaking these tunes off.
 
The best pop stars are sponges. Ever present, they absorb the viscous lava of contempo culture through their pores, let it course through their veins ‘til a diffuse plexus of melodies and rhythms form, and then release the bubbly potion onto an unsuspecting audience. They’re malleable, altering their form to the capricious world around them, embracing the chaos of reinvention. Sometimes, their mercurial nature can result in a ghastly gruel, like a twerking, tongue-wagging Miley Cyrus, or that time Madonna rap-rhymed “soy latte” with “double shot-ay.” Others, you get something quite magical, like Taylor Swift’s latest LP 1989.
 
Taylor Swift has long been a pop star of the first order. And in an era where the lion’s share of pop divas have songs served up to them on a platter by expert hitmakers—Rihanna’s “We Found Love” was written for Leona Lewis, while Britney Spears foolishly turned down “Umbrella”—the Nashville native is something of an anomaly. She penned every damn song to her 2010 breakout album Speak Now. Her last one, 2012’s Red, went quadruple platinum (this year, by comparison, there have been zero platinum albums) and cemented her status as the world’s preeminent pop diva-in-training. 
 
Much has been made of Swift’s gradual shift from country to pop. It’s silly, and uninformed. Comb through Red and you’ll see precious few vestiges of country, and frankly, what most consider “country” today is really pop music dressed up in boots and spurs. If the late Johnny Cash took one hard look at the state of “country” today, he’d surely go back to Folsom—for murder.
 
Much has also been made of Swift’s private life. As a teenager and twenty-something, she wrote songs inspired by her most powerful emotional experiences—which, as any teen or twenty-something can attest, usually involve relationships. Male rappers can drone on about “bitches” they treat like disposable pieces of flesh, while rockers like Eric Clapton have been lauded for ballads pining over other men’s wives. In a cruel bit of hypocrisy, Swift was branded the Jennifer Aniston of pop; a young woman scorned who was constantly “playing the victim,” milking her revolving door of heartbreak and that one time Kanye West immortalized the phrase Imma let you finish, but… at her expense.
 
That was all pretty much bullshit.
 
Swift is no pop interloper; this brand of tuneage has been in her all along. And 1989 is far and away her most self-aware album (and self-effacing) album yet, poking fun at her boy-crazy reputation and endless shellacking in the media.
 
But the album gets off to a pretty rough start.
 
It’s already attracted its fair share of vitriol due to her much-publicized change of scenery, but “Welcome to New York” is an absolutely brutal paean to the Big Apple; a tourist trap of a tune about starting over that sounds like it was penned by a tween Carrie Bradshaw (“And you can want who you want / Boys and boys and girls and girls!”). Even the harmonized choral accents are hackneyed, ripped straight from her previous mega-hit “You Belong with Me.”
 
Fortunately, it’s an aberration—like a cruel toll you’re meant to suffer through before accessing the album’s proper goods. “Blank Space,” with its lo-fi beats and sing-along chorus, resembles a beautiful marriage of Lorde and Swift, the Goth and the prom queen. Even the inflection toward the end, “Boys only want love if it’s torture,” is to the New Zealand prodigy what Sia’s reggae-tinged delivery on “Chandelier” is to RiRi. The song just screams pop hit.
 
Like the best pop stars, Swift has borrowed from a plethora of genres and influences. In addition to Lorde’s minimalist stylings, there’s “Style,” whose hypnotic beats are ripped straight from Cliff Martinez’s Drive soundtrack, and the melancholic ballad “Wildest Dreams” sees Swift channeling Lana Del Rey’s sultry croon to dazzling effect. Plus, problematic video aside, “Shake It Off” is catchy as all hell—an infectious amalgam of “Thrift Shop” horns and “Happy” gaiety.
 
Meanwhile, “How You Get the Girl” boasts echoing whoas that rival Bastille, while the layered, hushed vocals of “This Love” clearly recall Frou Frou’s “Let Go”—you know, the ballad that played over a bevy of artful montages in Garden State.
 
Swift is a rhythmic and melodic kleptomaniac, and I mean that as the highest of compliments. In the same way Tarantino artfully lifts dialogue and shots from classic films and blends it into a delectable pop culture tapestry, Swift has culled bits and pieces from her musical contemporaries in the pursuit of something vibrant, and timeless. It’s this timelessness, too, that’s integral to Swift’s success. While her lesser rivals (*cough* Katy Perry) cram their songs with dateable references, the songs here deal with universal themes of love, longing, and lust for life.
 
One low point—“Welcome to New York” not withstanding—is “I Know Places.” Whereas the rest of the album is comprised of ace production, courtesy of knob wizards Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic), Jack Antonoff (Fun.), and pop chemist Max Martin, to name a few, as well as clever turns of phrase and soaring choruses, this one seems vacuous and, worst of all, generic—like a disposable, CW-ready pop anthem.
 
The 16-song pop treasure chest comes to a thrilling close with “New Romance,” a remix-ready stomper crammed with witty lyrics. “It’s poker / He can’t see it in my face, but I’m about to play my ace,” Swift sings.
 
Despite the unrelenting hype, 1989 delivers. A beautiful union of past and present, it’s as appetizing a pop album as you’ll find in this day and age. For an impressionably amorphous music machine like Swift, it seems there’s no better place to start over than the buzzing, turbid, and resilient City of New York.
 
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Taylor Swift: 1989
 
After months of perfect secrecy and rumors that Taylor Swift was only allowing people to listen to her new album 1989 on her personal iPhone, the entire album has leaked just days before it is scheduled Monday release date. "Loose lips sink ships all the damn time," as Taylor sings on "I Know Places."
 
(.............)
 
 
The more meaningful question is whether 1989 is actually any good.
 
Taylor wasn't kidding when she called this her "first official pop album." Red sounds like music that could be played at a honky-tonk after listening to the pure pop of 1989. These songs sound as expensive as Taylor's clothing looks. It is expertly produced and perfectly mixed. Swift's voice isn't the best in the industry, but it sounds the best it has ever sounded.
 
1989 is upbeat and fast all the way through. There was some worry—myself included— that, despite Swift's success with songs like "22" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," she would lose her ability to write heartfelt, personal songs when adopting the rhythms and clean sounds of pop music. On 1989, Swift demolishes those fears. This is an album of love songs with a twist such as on "Black Space" where Swift coos, "Baby I'm a nightmare/Dressed like a dream/I've got a blank space baby/ (pen click sound)/ I'll write your name."
 
But it's also an album with the break-up references her fans love. There's the already released "Out of the Woods" that won over Swift fans quickly. But Swift's angry tone on this record is sharper than we've heard it before.  "Cause baby now we got bad blood/ you know we used to be mad love/ so take a look what you've done/ cause baby now we got bad blood/ Now we got problems/ And I don't think we can solve them" Swift chants on "Bad Blood." It's upbeat, sure, but instead of the mournful, slow-building rage of "All to Well," Swift lets herself get mad on 1989, and it works. She sounds powerful and strong instead of brooding.
 
"All You Had to Do Was Stay" has all of the great lyrical qualities of Red. "This Love" is a classic Taylor Swift ballad. There are a couple of missteps here—notably the album's first single "Shake it Off—but they are few and far between.
 
Abandoning country music seemed like a huge risk to take for such a successful artist, but after listening to 1989 it's obvious that there was no risk here for Taylor Swift at all.
 
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Music Review: Taylor Swift's 1989
Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Including Taylor Swift. And the rest of us, apparently.
 
As 1989’s title suggests — and as anyone not quarantined by Ebola heard during the months-long media blitz hyping its arrival — the boy-crazy superstar supposedly changed her tune for her fifth album. Truth is, she’s just come clean. After straining the bonds of her teenage marriage to country by shamelessly flirting with everything from rock to EDM, she’s dumped Nashville like last year’s celebrity beau and moved in with her new crush: Pop. Specifically — and curiously — the sleek, shiny synth-pop of the year she was born.
 
Why 1989? Well, call it a creative rebirth, an attempt to move forward by looking back, a musical palate-cleanser, a loving homage to a past she never had, a calculated piece of fauxstalgia, her latest impulsive dalliance or any number of things. All of them are true to varying degrees. One thing you can’t call it, though, is an unequivocal triumph. While 1989 is Swift’s most distinctive disc, in many ways it’s also her least engaging, sublimating her signature strengths in a bid to recreate an era nobody is that interested in revisiting. At least, nobody who was there.
 
With that in mind, let’s review her lesson plan and see what she did right. And wrong.
 
Lesson 1: Banish the Banjos
Not to mention fiddles, pedal steel, mandolin, live drums and basically all the other acoustic instruments that have decorated Swift’s music to this point. Back in 2007, one of Swift’s first hits was titled Teardrops on My Guitar. These days, the only things on that axe are dust and cobwebs. So if you’re coming for some homey twang, you might want to back away now.
 
Lesson 2: Embrace the Electronics
Taking the place of organic sounds: Vintage (or at least vintage-sounding) synths, beatboxes, drum pads, effects and every other sonic cliche from the heyday of Madonna, Eurythmics, Human League — or anyone else sporting shoulder pads, pastels and asymmetrical hair. Full marks for verisimilitude and detail. What’s missing amid all that faceless artifice: Warmth and humanity.
 
Lesson 3: Cue the Collaborators
Swift’s handlers spent years hammering home the point that she writes her songs. Well, enough of that. This time, she jumps into bed with umpteen collaborators, including fun. frontman Jack Antonoff, hitmaker-for-hire Ryan Tedder and British indie artist Imogen Heap. But the two doing the heavy lifting are Scandinavian producers Max Martin and Shellback, the men behind generic pop-shlock from Britney, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry — plus Swift’s own previous hits We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and I Knew You Were Trouble. Prophetic titles, it turns out.
 
Lesson 4: Act Your Age
To go with her musical makeover, Swift revamps her lyrical approach. Sure, she’s still obsessed with love. And still comes off girlish and flirty. But more often, she sounds like the grown woman she is, examining relationships and breakups with perspective and grace instead of just stringing together cryptic barbs at exes. It’s clearly a new attitude, and it shows: While many of these songs are more mature than predecessors, they’re also more forgettable, lacking the sassy spark of her best work. Hey, growing up is hard to do.
 
Lesson 5: Bust Out the Ballads
The biggest problem with all those chilly keyboards and thoughtful lyrics? They don’t lend themselves to catchy, lighthearted singles. So 1989 seems an endless procession of midtempo fare constructed from a soundalike array of robotic rhythms, swooshing synths and broody basslines. The verses are moody and melodic, the choruses sweeping and anthemic. Neither of those is Swift’s comfort zone, and that also shows in her over-sung, over-serious, over-processed vocals. Something she didn’t glean from the ’80s: Girls just want to have fun.
 
Lesson 6: Add a Dash of Basil
Thankfully, there is one oasis of sheer joy amid 1989’s mixed blessings: The infectious single Shake It Off. Its sharply self-aware lyrics (“I go on too many dates / But I can’t make ’em stay / At least that’s what people say”) are set to one of the ’80s most indestructible grooves: The cheerleader-pop thump of Toni Basil’s Mickey. A few more like this would have made 1989 far more enjoyable. Here’s hoping Swift learns that lesson for next time.
 
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Taylor Swift: 1989 review – a bold, gossipy confection
4/5 stars
 
Recently, Taylor Swift was promoting 1989, her fifth album, which reviewers are hearing just once, after signing a lengthy non-disclosure agreement. In Australia she “lashed out” at critics who didn’t care for her candid, confessional songwriting and its narrow focus on her past relationships. Swift called this criticism sexist because, as she pointed out, no one derides Ed Sheeran or Bruno Mars for the same tactic. Touché.
 
Those commentators will be rupturing veins when 1989 finally comes out. Of its 13 tracks, roughly 10 find Swift in love, out of it, or in transition. There are exceptions – such as Shake It Off, Swift’s sassy US No 1 single, which rejects the bile of the haters. Recently revealed online, Welcome to New York is a love song, but to Swift’s new city. As New York songs go, WTNY is not up there in the Jay Z /Alicia Keys stakes, but there’s wisdom among the cliches. “Everyone here was someone else before,” Swift notes, reinventing hard. WTNY is this album’s scene-changing opener, proffering 80s pop as its signature sound. Swift may have been born on 13 December 1989, but here she is claiming the 80s – gated drums, synth-pop –as a formative influence.
The remainder of 1989 is singularly focused on making eyes at boys, severing ties with boys, and what went wrong with whom. Since storming through the genre qua non of break-up songs, country music, with her first three albums, Swift has since become one of the world’s biggest entertainers thanks to these adroit affair postmortems. Songs such as her ubiquitous pop hit, 2012’s We Are Never Getting Back Together, skilfully tease universals from juicy particulars.
 
This album carries on her skilful works, with increased stylistic and tonal variation. “You look like my next mistake,” runs Blank Space, an out-and-out pop song with an intriguingly skeletal undercarriage. There is a rewarding pen click when Swift prepares to write down this man’s name. Bad Blood faintly recalls Charli XCX with its stark beats. Wildest Dreams borrows a bit of glaciation from Lana Del Rey.
 
The allure of Swift’s songwriting has of course been increased immeasurably by the pop star’s choice of companions – a long A-list of singers, actors and boy band members. I Knew You Were Trouble, Swift’s killer hit from 2012’s Red, is universally understood to be about One Direction’s Harry Styles.
 
Now, the bludgeoningly catchy Out of the Woods recounts a certain stuttering high-profile relationship that climaxes in a snowmobile crash. One of its two characters receives “20 stitches in the hospital room”. Even more minxish is Style, a percolating funk-pop number that satisfies on every level: a Love and exes soundbed Swift has never used before, a plot arc about dress sense.
 
Being able to “tag” exes in love songs has been a manoeuvre in pop for far longer than the concept of online tagging has existed – one distributed pretty much equally across the genders through the ages. A generation ago, Cry Me a River found Justin Timberlake angsting over Britney Spears. Swift’s fifth record is a bold, gossipy confection that plays to her strengths – strengths which pretty much define modern pop, with its obsession with the private lives of celebrities and its premium on heightened emotion. The album’s one failing? There’s no obvious single here as unequivocally great as I Knew You Were Trouble.
 
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Taylor Swift “1989” Album Review
Prime Cuts: Blank Space, Style, Shake It Off
 
Taylor Swift's "1989" is heralded by music industrialists as the Messiah of today's music.  According to a recent report by Billboard magazine, none of the albums released in 2014 has sold over a million copies.  The bestselling record this year is the soundtrack "Frozen" which was released last year.  And the only record that is only going to redeem the music industry this year is Taylor Swift's "1989," an album that was expected to ship over a million copies in its debut week.  Unfortunately for this year's most successful record, "1989" doesn't even feel comfortable to be acquainted with today's music.  Hence, the titular and the whole album's tenure harkens back to Swift's year of birth, hoping to bypass today's musical mess by hopping on the 80s bandwagon which is quickly becoming a fashionable trope these days.
As far as the album's direction is concerned, Swift's opener "Welcome to New York" is most telling.  "Welcome to New York" is her Dear John letter to Nashville and country music as Swift indulges in some big whopping dance beats and exaggerated synth works.  However, as far as a tribute to the Gotham city goes, "Welcome in New York" pales in comparison to similar Valentine's to the Big Apple by Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel and  Alicia Keys.  Swift's adoration for the big city is shot in its vocabulary.  Other than being excited about the big lights and the optimism the city holds, the song reads more like an essay written by a high school student.  Much better is when Swift sings about love and relationships.  What makes Swift such a sweetheart amongst teenage girls is that she knows how to speak their language.  Case in point is "Blank Space," you can hear all the young girls nodding their heads in girlie pow wow when Swift sings:  "saw you and I though oh my God/look at that face/you look like my next mistake."
 
Just like her juicy dating life that has been a tabloid folder, her songs also rifle with pinpoint specific examples that we can't help but wonder how much of autobiography is interwoven into the song.  Just as her John Mayer and Joe Jonas have had been at the receiving end, Harry Styles of One Direction gets Swift's personal attention in "Style" especially when Swift speaks of his "James Dean daydream look."  "Shake It Off," the kinetic single that debut at #1 on Billboard's pop chart, shows why Swift spends the big bucks to get Max Martin and Shellback on her production team. Adorned with a boom-clap drum patterns and strong digital hooks, "Shake It Off" brings Swift sonically to the next level.  Take the atmospheric layers of sounds and the electronic almost EDM-sounding drums off, "Out of the Woods" is the closet to Swift's earlier country days.
 
If you are looking for Swift in her quieter and more contemplative frame, "Clean" is a highlight.  Teaming with esoteric British alt-popper Imogen Heap, Swift surrenders more to her collaborator than on any other song on the album.  Its melody has more air and fewer syllables, and it's a song heavy on metaphors with arresting lines like "You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore."  Nevertheless, despite the album's more polished and obviously more costly sound, Swift somehow gets fewer opportunities to let her heart out compared to her earlier albums.  With that said, taking "1989" for what it is, the sound may be more sophisticated but Swift is still Swift, her polysyllable notes, her dicing take on boys and her keening observations on life are all here. 
 
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Taylor Swift's 1989: First Thoughts
 
Hype for Taylor Swift's 1989 has built over two months of pre-release singles, television appearances, and online chatter. The Nashville-bred singer had said the record represented her coming-out as a full-fledged pop—not country—artist, and on Friday, it leaked online days ahead of its planned October 27 release.
 
Below, The Atlantic's Julie Beck, Emma Green, Lenika Cruz, and Kevin O'Keeffe discuss first impressions, what tracks stand out, and what the album means for Taylor Swift the pop star.
 
Kevin O'Keeffe: Ahead of 1989's release, I was tired. I didn't initially like "Shake It Off," but it grew on me. I didn't think much of "Out of the Woods," but I let myself fall in love. I hated "Welcome to New York," as all thinking persons do. With so much promotion—remember that her Yahoo! and ABC News live-stream where she announced the album was on August 18, so we got two months of non-stop speculation—I found myself ready to hate the album.
 
Surprise: I really enjoyed listening to it! It's got a good flow from track to track, and there are some songs that stand with the best of her canon. But maybe I'm just easily impressed because of my low expectations. Emma, how'd you feel about 1989 going into it? Were you ready to love? Or did you need to shake the hype off?
 
Emma Green: I didn't experience nearly as much Swift fatigue as you, Kevin, but I did have a bit of nervousness. I'm a 1989 girl from Nashville, so I feel a natural kinship with Taylor. And with all the hype and all the young things lining up to take Taylor's place, this album drop seems freighted with significance for her career and music more broadly. I've also been slightly annoyed by the narrative around T-Swift's choice to ditch country for the more fertile pastures of pop, largely because I feel defensive about my native Nashville.
 
But in delivery, Taylor does not disappoint. I can already tell that I'm going to get the same kind of sugary emotional satisfaction out of this album as I have had time and time before; the melodies are grandiose and the lyrics satisfying ("he's tall, handsome as hell"). From one '89er to another: thumbs up.
 
Julie Beck: The spectacle of the lead-up to a Taylor album is half the fun. It’s fun to be excited, and it’s fun to be exasperated. The kickoff offered by "Shake It Off" wasn’t the most promising start to Taylor’s transition to pop—it was a little bloodless for my taste, if catchy and fun. "Out of the Woods" reignited my hope for a good album; it had the nods to specific details of Taylor’s relationships that I craved, and I’m a fan of Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers too, so I liked the collaboration. I don’t want to talk about "Welcome to New York."
 
But while Taylor has finally reached the other side of the country-pop gradient she’s been moving across for years, and while I have some quibbles about overproduction, the core of what makes her great hasn’t changed. It’s a classic Taylor album—the upbeat songs shine, the slow songs slog. There’s a dud or two in there, but enough sharp lyrics and catchy choruses on the rest to more than compensate.
 
Lenika Cruz: First, I should say that I like Taylor, but I’m a fan of the casual-but-enthusiastic, radio-listening variety. In other words: 1989 is the first T-Swift album that I’ve listened to in its entirety. I felt neither fatigue like Kevin nor dread like Emma, but I agree with Julie that it’s always fun to be part of the hyperbolic frenzy that precedes the album actually dropping, to the extent that texting your friends with “omg did you hear new tswift!?” is fun (it is). While Beyonce’s surprise release of her surprise album last December epitomized the album-drop-as-spectacle phenomenon (for me at least), cueing up for my first listen to 1989 still gave me mini heart palpitations. While no song will ever quite top “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” for me, this album was, at first listen, a perfect and total transition from Taylor's countrified pop phase to this new cheekily anthemic and more stylistically diverse sound.
 
O'Keeffe: What stands out on this album for y'all? For me, it's "Wildest Dreams" by a country mile. It's sexy—can you believe it? She has been fun, girly, dark, deep, exciting, evocative, and a bunch of other great adjectives, but I would argue she's never before been sexy. Some are calling it Lana Del Rey lite, but I think that's unfair. Lana doesn't have a monopoly on singing about "rosy cheeks" and wearing a "nice dress" with a breathy voice on the chorus. Plus, almost every song on this record is derivative of some other pop artist. ("Shake It Off" as a riff on Avril Lavigne's "Boyfriend," for instance.) Even if this is a bit of a carbon copy, it's one hell of a copy.
 
Green: Mind meld: I've been listening to "Wildest Dreams" on repeat for the last 20 minutes. I loved the urgency of the beat in "Out of the Woods," but the lyrics were a little lame (or, at the very least, repetitive)—"Wildest Dreams" has the same forward motion with much better storytelling. I fervently disagree with the Lana comparison, though. Taylor is unabashed, all-consuming, earnest nostalgia, anticipating that her latest romantic entanglement is going to be a story while she's still in the middle of it. Lana is performative, cool-girl nostalgia, the kind that mocks you a little if you indulge; if anything, she's the wicked witch to Taylor's Glinda.
 
But let's not prematurely dismiss "Shake It Off," which perfectly fulfills its telos as a song to lip sync and head-bob to at the bus stop in the morning. (I was also initially charmed when I thought one of the lyrics was "bakers gonna bake," but, alas, debunked.) "How You Get the Girl" is equally satisfying, especially because it's Taylor at her best: telling a didactic love story about awkward people who just want to be enthusiastically, forthrightly in love.
 
Beck: Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I don’t have a working ranking of every Taylor Swift song ever on an enormous mental spreadsheet. And “All You Had to Do Was Stay” has shot right up there for me, it’s knocking on the door of my Top 5 all-time. Is it better than “Enchanted” from Speak Now? No. Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing is better than “Enchanted.”But this, to me, is the perfect Taylor pop tune. It has a tasteful amount of production, so it doesn’t feel overwhelmingly synthed. It’s danceable, but rather than just instructing you to shake off haters, the lyrics are thoughtful and melancholy (“You were all I wanted/but not like this”). With that first high-pitched “stay,” the chorus hit me in that way that choruses sometimes do, when you know immediately that this is going to be Your Song for the next week. The one you hit replay on for hours at work, the one you blast on your walk home and feel like you’re in a cool movie with it as the soundtrack, the one that eventually becomes an old standby.
 
Cruz: I’m not trying to be the contrarian here, I swear, but “Wildest Dreams” didn’t really do it for me. But every album has its Growers—the ones you’re inclined toward skipping or else guiltily force yourself to listen to, before it dawns on you that the song is actually divine. Maybe "Wildest Dreams" is my Grower. So, I really dug “Out of the Woods” (I'm a sucker for those glassy synths and drum machines), but I think “Blank Space” will be my next on-repeat jam, for at least a week. That sneaky, vaguely “Started from the Bottom” snare, dreamy multi-tracked vocals on the chorus, and the way she shouts “And YOU. LOVE. the. GAAAAME!” Also, these lyrics are deliciously pithy, as Swiftian lyrics are wont to be. If this were 2005, “Darling I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream” would go in my MySpace headline. No shame.
 
Green: 2005—what were you, like 10 years old? Sorry, obligatory age shaming; it's one of the privileges of getting older, as Taylor probably also knows. She's come a long way since the "Our Song" days of impossibly perfect curly blonde hair and teenage teardrops all over her guitar, and 1989 makes it seem like she's not going to stop evolving any time soon. As I listen to this album, my confidence in Swift infallibility is reaffirmed; five albums deep, she's still got new stories, lyrics, and styles to share with a grateful world.
 
But I do feel some distance growing between me and Tay—which may not even be an acceptable nickname anymore, since she's moved to New York for a new life as even more of a Bright Young Thing. Her outfits have always been cool, but they're getting cooler; her production has always been smooth, but it's getting smoother. I've always liked to think Taylor is Just Like Us, willingly and happily buying into her awkward, earnest, down-to-earth persona. I'm not so sure that I feel that way any more; she may provide the soundtrack of my workday for the next few weeks, but she definitely seems to have launched into a whole different stratum of fame and life experience.
 
Beck: At its worst, 1989 feels like an advertisement for Taylor-as-pop-star. (To be fair, its worst is still pretty enjoyable.) But starting the album with “Welcome to New York” sends a specific message: We’re not in Nashville anymore. Every Taylor album is a reinvention, and I’ve written before about how as time went on, her increasing business savvy mirrored the rise of pop over country in her music. Both her image and her music are a little more calculated now, a little more polished. But I liked the rough edges.
 
She’s certainly famous enough now to do whatever she wants, and if she wants to climb the ladder of pop music, who could blame her? But Emma is right: She used to occupy a different niche, one that felt a little closer to everyday life, even if it was an illusion.
 
Cruz: This album, regardless of how we all feel about it, is going to blow things up even more for Taylor Swift, not that she was ever in danger of fading from view (or out of earshot). Taylor knows the haters are gonna hate, and she doesn’t care, nor should she. It’s tempting and fun to think of Taylor as a myth or an abstraction or as a cultural object, but in the end she is a popular artist, kind of in the way that Facebook is a popular social networking site. Every now and then Facebook adds new features, and users whine for a bit, but they keep using it. Some of Taylor Swift’s fans may feel betrayed, as if they’re entitled to a never-changing Taylor, but I’ve got no doubts they’ll stick with her for this album (it's a really hard to not like 1989) and whatever sonic shifts come next.
 
O'Keeffe: I don't know what the next step is for Taylor Swift, honestly. I keep thinking she's about to peak, and then she manages to raise the game. Along with Beyoncé (and to a lesser extent, Adele), she is thriving in a pop music scene where almost everyone else is just struggling to survive. I'm not sure how it's going to last, but if 1989 is any indication, the world will be listening to her for a while yet.
 
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ALBUM REVIEW: TAYLOR SWIFT - '1989'
LOADS OF HITS OR TOTAL SH*T? IT'S TIME TO FIND OUT...
 
What's the story?
 
Once upon a time, way back in 1989, a future popstar was born. A shitload of number ones and a pile of awards later, Taylor Swift is back with her fifth studio album and after saying a massive SEE YA to the country roots that led her ascent to fame, she announced that this was set to be a full-on pop album with a nostalgic 80s feel.
 
The question is, could she pull it off this pretty ballsy move without falling flat?
 
Well yes, actually, it turns out she most definitely can - and we're going to go ahead and say she's done it in typical Taylor Swift fashion, by which we mean in a totally atypical fashion. The result is sharp, clever and something that definitely wasn't what anyone was expecting from her.
 
 
How does the album pan out?
 
We could pretend otherwise, but we're just going to go ahead and say what everyone else is thinking: it it so hard to approach listening to this album without wondering if each and every song relates to Swifty's relationship with Harry Styles.
 
Ever since they broke up and never spoke of each other again (at least in public), we've all been wondering what the hell went down and finally, finally, the time has come for a bit of insight from the girl who also happens to be the ultimate in lyrical storytelling. Being so frank and open about her relationships, it seems fair to say that Taylor is often seen as dissing her exes in song (hey John Mayer, how's it going?), but if you were expecting any animosity this time around, you're about to be disappointed.
 
In fact, while there are little hints and nods to her relationships throughout the record - most notably in Out Of The Woods, Style and All You Had To Do Was Stay - this album isn't really about the men in her life at all. Of course they are part of the story, but actually Taylor has turned it 180 degrees and this time it seems to be much more about her - her feelings, her memories looking back on things, and the result is almost like more of a celebration of the good times than an attempt to lament the bad.
 
Ultimately it's a totally new chapter in TayTay's story and the sound is musically just as different, with a distinctly synthy 80s sound that takes you from catchy choruses and big power chord fueled harmonies to the sweeping, atmospheric and almost Lana Del Rey style vocals on tracks like Wildest Dreams. That's not to say the classic Taylor Swift you know and love isn't still in there when you scratch away at the shiny synth-pop surface. Clean is probably the track that reminds us most of the country vibe of old, but her love of telling a story is still evident the whole way through the album, whether it's in a soulful ballad or one of the more upbeat, pop-ified tracks.
 
 
Tracks most likely to top the charts:
 
Where Shake It Off leads, the rest of the album will no doubt follow. There are so many potential number one singles on this album, we barely know where to start. BUT - disincluding Out Of The Woods because of the pre-release - we want need to see Style, Bad Blood, I Wish You Would and How You Get The Girl as singles.
 
Then there's I Know Places because it has a beautifully dark, feverish depth to it that you just know would make an incredible music video, and Blank Space, that is so much more than its catchy as hell chorus, and takes an awesome swipe at all the shit she gets for being a 24-year-old girl who sometimes goes out on dates with human boys.
 
If you're hmm-ing over whether or not to fork out for the deluxe version, DO IT. You do not want to miss out on the bonus tracks. Namely Wonderland for it's dreamy vocals and New Romance, which has an Empire of The Sun meets Fleetwood Mac sort of feeling (for reals) and is definitely up there as one of our absolute favourite tracks on the entire record.
 
 
We'd listen to it...
 
Everywhere, all day long, in a big group or going solo on our headphones. Whether you're driving with the windows down, dancing about in the kitchen or laying on your bed waiting for the boy you're madly in love with to realise you exist, there's a track for every feeling you're feeling.
 
It goes without saying that this album is probably going to be pretty anthemic for all the single gals among us and the storylines that the record maps from start to finish will see you right through the nastiest of break ups. As in one with a boyfriend, a girlfriend or just one with a friend friend.
 
Let's be honest, sometimes breaking friends can hurt way more than a break up with a boyf or girlf and Swifty’s totally nailed all those feelings in Bad Blood, the track that she’s revealed is about a real life showbiz mean girl she was never sure liked her or not until something happened to prove that maybe their friendship wasn't to be. It's punchy, sassy and will make you realise it's them and so not you.
 
 
After listening we felt like...
 
Dancing, then calling up our BFF to debrief about how Taylor has once again read our minds and translated all those feelings into a fricking awesome record.
 
 
What they say:
 
"Swift breaks with the past, skirting victimhood and takedowns of maddening exes, critics and romantic competitors. Instead, there’s a newfound levity. Not only is Swift in on the joke; she also relishes it."
 
 
What we say:
 
This is undoubtedly the best thing she's ever done. It's a less earnest, defiant comeback full of the kind of  bittersweet moments and emotions that make it feel universal.
 
No matter what you think about Taylor, there's no denying that this album is a triumph. When you're in the headlines of every newspaper every single day, it's impossible to hide your personal life and instead of pretending it doesn't exist, she's almost putting one finger up at all the exaggerated rumours that have given her a rep as a serial dater.
 
There's always been a raw honesty to her lyrics and she's not afraid of putting herself out there and admitting that yeah, sometimes she gets her heart broken and yeah, that kinda sucks. She doesn't pretend to have it all figured out or that she doesn't get jealous sometimes, despite the criticism she's opening herself up to doing just that. Ultimately she has a sense of humour and isn't afraid to take the piss out of herself, which is a pretty kick ass way to look at life, if you ask us.
 
Put it this way, this is probably the first time you should be excited for a Monday. Heart eye emojis all round.
 
The album summed up in emojis:
 
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Final verdict:
4.5 stars
 
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Review of Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’
 
The new album of Taylor Swift ‘1989’ has been well received by music industrialists and is termed as the Messiah of today’s music. As per a recent report by Billboard magazine, in 2014 none of the albums sold over a million copies. The current year the best selling record is the soundtrack ‘Frozen’ that was released last year. Now Swift’s ‘1989’ is considered as the only album that could help redeem the music industry. The album was expected to ship more than a million copies only in its debut week alone. Swift’s album ‘1989’ doesn’t seem to be comfortable with today’s music. The titular and the entire album’s tenure tell about Swift’s year of birth. It is hoped that the album could bypass the present day’s musical mess as it hopped on to the 80’s style and is now fast becoming fashionable in the present days.
   
The opener song ‘Welcome to New York’ is the most telling. It is her Dear John letter to country music and Nashville. Swift indulges in some exaggerated synth works and whopping dance beats. Swift’s love for the Gotham city is expressed in the song’s vocabulary. The song seems like an essay written by a high school going girl. It expresses optimism the big city has and shows the big lights the city contains. And Swift’s songs about love and relationship are a delight. She is all time famous among teenage girls because she knows their language. She knows how to express their feelings. On the tune of ‘Blank Space’ one can see young girls nodding their heads.
 
If one wants to have a quieter and contemplative frame, one should listen to ‘Clean’. More air is breathed into the melody and a fewer syllables. The song is heavy on metaphors and has captivating lines. 1989 has all what Swift can give you. Her polysyllable notes and keening observations of life are all there.
 
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Taylor Swift - 1989 
 
Country is a dirty word in the halls of today’s modern pop star. In eschewing in banjos, peddle steel, fiddles, twang guitars and…. well basically anything acoustic, 24-year-old dynamo Taylor Swift has well and truly decided to play the pop megastar game full time.
 
With 1989 she’s in full blown synth pop blast mode, coming off like the lovechild of Stevie Nicks and ‘80s starlet Debbie Gibson with a penchant for Pet Shop Boys records.
 
1989 (her fifth LP) marks the most radical departure in Swift’s prolific career. With 2012’s blurry edged Red, Swift and company dabbled in the electro-pop playground through the dub-step anthemic ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and stadium chanting ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’ with loosely tethered Nashville roots. Here Ms Swift maintains the relationship melodrama that is her wheelhouse with far more assured widescreen pop stylings.
 
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Opening with the positively synth-drenched ‘Welcome To New York’ (co-penned by OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder), 1989 states its intent early. “Searching for a sound we hadn’t heard before” and found “a new soundtrack” and a new beat she can “dance to … forevermore.” Quickly followed by the drum-machine burn of ‘Blank Space’, in which Swift sends up her own rep as a prolific heartbreaker (“I’ve got a blank space baby/ And I’ll write your name.”)
 
‘Style’ is a warm embrace of ‘80s nostalgia that feels ripped from any teen noir film soundtrack. Listen carefully and its lyrics belie the throwaway feel of the chorus. A tale of a relationship that never quite fulfils the initial potential. The chanty electro bombast of ‘Out Of The Woods’ echoes Style’s lyrical sentiment, yet feels far more frantic and scattered, sonically capturing the feeling of uncertainty when your pairing never feels quite right.
 
First single, the instant horn swagger of ‘Shake It Off’ is the most assured pop moment from the LP and warrants its mega-hit status. The middle finger rattle and stomp of ‘Bad Blood’ (rumoured to be about a reported feud with Katy Perry) screams out for future single status with the venom dripped lyrical word play. 1989 bathes is smooth melodies and nagging hooks and it’s here the project shines brightest.
 
The sultry ‘Wildest Dreams’ feels like the result of Taylor on a Lana Del Ray binge. “His hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room” Swift coos and burns throughout a track that feels part homage, almost near parody. 
 
Saving the best until last, pairing with Brit alt-pop maestro Imogen Heap, Swift lets go of her own sound and bathes in the ethereal air and melancholy where the songwriting takes centre stage “You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore”.
 
There’s far less grandeur to be found in 1989. Tracks play around the 3 – 4 minute mark, which for a singer who’s very nature is to spend five and half minutes drawing lyrical sucker punches about wearing an exes t-shirt is refreshing.
 
Taylor Swift’s beauty as an artist is in how familiar her transition feels. It is nothing we have heard from her before, and trust us, she goes to some strange new places, but everything about her progression as an artist feels note perfect. Rather than breaking up with country, she leaves it on friendly terms, with her undeniable songwriting cred in check. 1989 sets up the next stellar phase of an already dynamic career.
 
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Review: Taylor Swift, 1989
 
When Dolly Parton first reached a mainstream audience back in 1977, she made a point to soothe the nerves of longtime fans and Nashville’s record industry. “I’m not leaving country,” she famously vowed with a scarlet smirk, “I’m just taking it with me.” Taylor Swift opens her fifth album 1989 with a contrary pledge, to leave her successful past in a Tennessee junkyard. “Welcome to New York” is, on the surface, a paean to her recently adopted home. But as is her wont, the song also plays as a meta-statement about Swift’s life choices, both artistic and personal. “Everybody here was someone else before,” she sings without a whiff of regret. Lest anyone misunderstand the point, Swift follows with 1989’s fundamental credo. “It’s a new soundtrack,” she warns, while lost in whirling sonic euphoria. And then, a crucial addendum: “I can dance to this beat…forevermore!” The times have a-changed, y’all.
 
Taylor Swift’s vast and diverse fanbase has long anticipated the prospect of a Total Pop Reinvention, either with nagging gloom or escalating delight. For those who still regard Taylor Swift and Fearless as her purest works to date, the other shoe has dropped at last. And it lands with a pulsing synth chord. For the rest of us – we who’ve cheered as she’s abandoned banjo-and-fiddle confessionals, little by little, first on Speak Now and then on Red – our perseverance has paid off. Swift’s abundant promise is finally realized, with delirious brio, on 1989.
 
The big question has never been if Taylor Swift would become a twang-free superstar diva, but how that transformation would unfold. The first hint at an answer came a few months ago, with a shrewd bit of misdirection. “Shake It Off,” the pop music equivalent of a caffeine overdose, seemed to confirm everyone’s suspicions and fears. Lighter than helium, but with a chorus sturdy enough to bore through titanium earplugs, 1989’s lead single presented Swift in a familiar context, one that goes back to “You Belong with Me”:  the precocious beauty, the unselfconscious dork, the whip-smart everygirl, the outsider punching bag. “Shake It Off” has become a smash – so, mission accomplished. It’s also totally unrepresentative of the album it heralds. Therein lies the song’s logistical brilliance. It acts as a point of entry into alien territory for Swift’s core audience, a demographic no doubt unfamiliar with 1989’s stomping grounds, the kaleidoscopic contours of an FM landscape that reached a pinnacle right around this album’s title date.
 
“Shake It Off” isn’t merely a gateway drug to much better stuff. It has a secondary purpose, to shove back at a threadbare narrative. The artist who looms high above 1989 is no meek Jane Doe, a young woman on the defensive. Taylor Swift is at her most effortless and assured here, buoyant and full-blooded at once. She’s the former girlfriend you’re afraid to call, as you drive past her place late at night (“I Wish You Would”). She’s the current girlfriend who will see you through a life-threatening mishap, even though she’s been ready to dump your dumb ass for some time now (“Out of the Woods”). She’s the jilted friend, responding to a betrayal with bile and a killer melody (“Bad Blood”). She’s the maneater, a “nightmare dressed like a daydream,” adding her next target to a “long list of ex-lovers” with a vicious pen-click (“Blank Space”).
 
1989 has less in common with the latest Billboard juggernaut than Taylor Swift’s earlier works. But it doesn’t stand alone in 2014. 1989’s rebellious elder sibling is Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence. Don’t be surprised by the connection; it goes beyond “Wildest Dreams,” Swift’s homage to Del Rey’s unique vocal phrasing. Both albums are interested in world building, right down to their cover art, while also remaining far apart from current sonic fashions. Where Del Rey sways along with the sounds of classic Hollywood, Swift finds her inspiration in the music of Pet Shop Boys, Book of Love, and Roxette. Forget Gwen Stefani, if “Shake It Off” is indebted to anyone, it’s Toni Basil. And just as Del Rey cannily tapped Dan Auerbach to shape her silver-screen fantasia, Swift’s DeLorean pulled into all the right driveways (those of Max Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder, and Jack Antonoff) before heading skyward. (Our destination? My birth-year, fellas!)
 
1989 is a fabulous pop record. It’s not perfect – I’m looking at you “Shake It Off,” and you too “This Love.” But it comes so close (play “Style” on repeat for a bit, and see if you still disagree). How often do we stumble across pop perfection, anyway? 1989 would have been just as impressive thirty years ago, against much fiercer competition. It’s also proof that an expert songwriter, one who happens to sing and dance (somewhat less expertly), can rule our dreary charts. Taylor Swift stands atop names we haven’t bothered to learn and then forget. 1989 isn’t a “crossover” success. It’s the album every subsequent blockbuster must now reckon with.       
 
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Taylor Swift turns the corner with 1989
 
Ever since she was 11 years old and knocking on doors in Nashville, Taylor Swift has always been one to go big. The multi-platinum singer’s latest album, 1989, is no exception. 
1989 is a rollercoaster of sounds — ups, downs, synths and drums — none of which have ever been heard before from Swift. These elements interact and culminate to create a pop album that is musically brilliant and serves as a perfect milestone in her career, lending sophisticated musical credibility and a launchpad for her new pop prospects. At the age of 24, Swift’s music has finally lost the diary-like naïveté and angst it once possessed and moved on to bigger and better things. This album, bursting at the seams with optimism, offers a realistic, mature twist on many of the same issues Swift has previously written about.
 
Swift’s songwriting has always yanked emotion out of even the hardest-hearted of listeners, but its girlish drama was a turnoff for many. 1989, though, manifests the same emotional pull but with a more sophisticated, levelheaded and, maybe more importantly, assured approach.
 
In typical Swift fashion, the songs on 1989 center almost entirely on her romantic adventures. This time, however, she approaches them with the pragmatic realism of a 24-year-old woman, instead of the jaded idealism of an 18-year-old girl. Swift’s fresh take on love comes to light and emphasizes her maturity. “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” for example, continues the trend of relationship songs, but presents them in a very different light than anything else she has ever written. The title gives the impression that this song will once again sully one of Swift’s many exes for not staying, but she instead admits her own part in a bungled romance. This approach makes obvious the fact that Swift has done a lot of maturing in both her personal life and her songwriting.
 
“Style” brings to a positive light a failed relationship — something that is rare in Swift’s songwriting. It is nostalgic but grounded and, though it has the potential to be another Swift kick in the you-know-whats to a certain British pop sensation ex-boyfriend, the song doesn’t paint him in a negative light. The newly sobered Swift instead opts for a change of pace, taking responsibility and acknowledging the fact that relationships are a two-way street. In fact, none of the songs on 1989 place full blame on her exes. Swift’s ex-shaming days appear to have finally come to a close, which is a refreshing change and makes the entire album immediately more likeable.
 
Even “Bad Blood,” a song about catty competition reminiscent of “Better Than Revenge” that tells the story of a frenemy who did Swift wrong, has a more diplomatic perspective of the conflict at hand. Swift makes it clear that anyone who tries to instigate a fight with her cannot do so without sounding like a guileless, whiny girl-done-wrong.
 
1989 opens with the highly criticized “Welcome To New York,” one of the most upbeat tracks on the album. This song, with its confident testament to new beginnings, serves as an analogy for the entire album — it signifies Swift’s break from country and her transition to a world of mainstream popular music that she has managed to make all her own.
 
She then moves into two tracks that solidify her transition to pop. “Blank Space” and “Style” are chock-full of synth and electronic sounds and couldn’t be considered country even in the cursory sense that Swift once incorporated into Red. “Blank Space” shows a mature approach to Swift’s notorious dating.  “Got a long list of ex-lovers / They’ll tell you I’m insane,” she crows knowingly. “But I got a blank space baby / *pen click* / And I’ll write your name.” Funny and astute, the song is the first sign that Swift has ever acknowledged her own part in her infamous relationship issues.
 
“I Know Places” goes into a place darker than any Swift has ever delved, with a surprisingly deep, enigmatic intro that proves she is still fearless. The chorus, though, plunges once again into the upbeat character that underlies all of 1989. The positive spin on this album that is prevalent in some way on every track is one we’ve been waiting for from Swift. An obviously genuine optimism toward life, love and critics shines through her work and is guaranteed to help any listener “Shake It Off.”
 
Swift also brings in breathy pieces with styles she’s never explored before. “Wildest Dreams” and, especially, “Clean” prove that Swift can not only successfully make a pop album, but that she can go almost anywhere she wants to with her music. “Clean” is Swift’s token ballad, but it is also unlike any ballad she has ever produced. It encompasses the deeply emotional undertones of songs like “All Too Well,” but in an entirely different style. Light and ethereal, her collaboration on this track with Imogen Heap is evident and very successful. Swift transforms a beautiful ballad, one strength she has had since her very first album, into something brand new and different that slides effortlessly into the last spot on 1989. It is the perfect ending to an incredibly daring album.
 
Swift’s endeavor into uncharted territory was a huge leap and it paid off. Her realism and maturity are refreshing and don’t drag down any of the 13 upbeat, strikingly catchy songs. This notable synthesis of fun and verism sets up an album brimming with impressive musical acumen and, more than ever before, undeniable credibility.  1989 sounds nothing like any previous music Swift has ever produced — it deviates from her more poppy songs (think: “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “Red”) — while also maintaining her heightened emotion and the confessional quality that have already endeared her to so many fans. Her newfound maturity and optimism practically radiate off of every striking track to generate a truly impressive and unique album that brings her out of the woods and onto the pop scene in a transition as drastic as it is superb.
 
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Taylor Swift - 1989
Reviewed by Craig Manning
Rating: 8.5
 
Over the past five or so years, no artist’s progression and growth has been more interesting to watch than Taylor Swift’s. In 2008, she was a global superstar with a multiplatinum album and a few world-conquering singles. In 2009, she was the Grammy darling. In 2010, she did the unthinkable for a pop artist of her stature and wrote an entire album without a single co-write. In 2012, she released her most ambitious work to date with a record that hopped half-a-dozen genres and showed immense growth in songwriting craft. And this past summer, she announced arguably the biggest move of her career so far by bidding farewell to country and fully embracing pop music.
 
In some ways, Taylor’s move to pop wasn’t terribly surprising. The biggest singles from 2012’s Red, “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” were both deliriously catchy pop gems, while 2010’s Speak Now was arguably just a pop album dressed up in organic full-band country arrangements. But for an artist who got her start in Nashville and who always made storytelling the core of her songs, the news that Swift was going to go full pop on her fifth album—titled 1989—truly was shocking. 
 
Because Swift really has always been a country artist. One with a stockpile of hooks and the voice and look of a pop star, sure, but also one who always found her best moments in a twangy chorus or an acoustic ballad. The idea of an artist like that leaving country behind was a risk because it threatened to rob her of the things that have always made her most special: her honesty, her vulnerability, and her relatability. The thought of Swift trading all of that for streamlined, larger-than-life 80s pop had myself and many other fans worried, because we weren’t sure how she would translate her appeal into such a new setting without airbrushing all the quirks, flaws, and stories that have always made her so compelling and unique.
 
One listen to 1989 proves that those fears were unfounded.
 
The remarkable thing about Taylor Swift is that, even though she’s probably the biggest music star in America right now, she has never seemed fake. She’s never been afraid to write candidly about her relationships or about the things going on in her life, and she’s never made an attempt to be someone or something else in pursuit of mainstream success. Arguably the biggest accomplishment of 1989 is that it mostly carries those superlatives forward. These songs are still more streamlined than her past work, of course. For one thing, they rely more on catchy choruses than on striking lyrical verses. In other words, you shouldn't expect any couplets here to be on the level of “And there we are again in the middle of the night/We’re dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” But Taylor still crams an awful lot of herself into these verses and choruses, to the point where most of these songs hit a new sound, but are still unmistakably her. 
 
Take the lead-off single “Shake it Off,” a horn-infused hook-fest that is essentially about not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks. “I go on too many dates, but I can’t make ‘em stay/At least that’s what people say,” Taylor chuckles in one of the song’s early verses, before launching into the chorus: “And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate hate…I shake it off.” It’s not a unique message, and the song itself—complete with a cheerleader breakdown section in the bridge—is shallower than usual Taylor Swift fare. Still, the melody is nothing short of infectious, and there’s enough of Swift’s usual charisma on display to bring down a skyscraper. The song is a winner.
 
But while “Shake it Off” shoots off the “words can never hurt me” message in gleeful fashion, the rest of the 1989 makes it clear that what the tabloids say does bother Taylor Swift. That was already evident, of course: Swift has essentially stopped dating since Red because she was tired of her love life being made into a spectator sport. And that fact made many people wonder about what kind of stories she would tell on this record. After all, how many people have accused Swift of being a bad songwriter because she “only writes about her relationships”? Or made unfunny jokes like “Don’t go out with her, or she'll turn you into a song”?
 
On the best songs from 1989, Taylor is more or less throwing up a middle finger to the people behind those comments, and the result is one of the most exhilarating pop albums in years. She does it in two ways: first, by writing great songs that aren’t about her broken heart; and second, by spitting out venomous lines about how fucking tired she is of becoming the gossip rag punching bag. “You look like my next mistake/Love’s a game, wanna play?” she quips on album highlight “Blank Space,” dropping line (“Let’s be friends, I’m dying to see how this one ends”) after biting line (“Cause darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream”) about her own tabloid image. 
 
On paper, those lyrics read like Swift stoking the fires of her critics. You know the type: the people who say she hops from celebrity boyfriend to celebrity boyfriend, actively seeking heartbreak and strife so that she can exploit it and turn it into woe-is-me pop music. But the way she delivers phrases like “I can make the bad boys good for a weekend” or “I’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name” is sarcastic, self-deprecating, and more than a little bit aimed at protest. And Taylor should protest. It’s a sick and stupid double standard that she gets called out and dehumanized for writing songs about her relationships when virtually every artist of all time, from classical composers to modern folkies, does the same exact thing. “Frankly, I think that’s a very sexist angle to take,” Taylor said recently in a radio show interview. “No one says that about Ed Sheeren. No one says that about Bruno Mars. They’re all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life and no one raises a red flag there.” Amen.
 
Swift's justified frustration manifests itself over and over again on these songs, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to call 1989 her “rebellion against fame record” as a result. The fascinating thing, though, is that, even when she’s rejecting the worst parts of being a pop star, she’s doing it in the middle of her most irresistibly pop-centric album ever. For example, on the Jack Antonoff co-written “Out of the Woods,” she finds herself second-guessing her own relationship, wondering if her romantic entanglements are doomed to fail because of who she is and what she does. “Looking at it now, Last December/We were built to fall apart/And fall back together,” she sings, before asking the song’s core question: “Are we out of the woods yet?” Are we past the point where this thing falls apart? Again? There’s more than a little bit of bitterness in these lyrics, but you could hardly tell from the music, a relentlessly catchy nighttime drive of a track that splits the difference between Savage Garden’s “I Want You” and Bleachers’ “Rollercoaster.” 
 
The radiant hooks continue throughout the duration of 1989, from the M83-flavored “All You Had to Do Was Stay” to “Style,” a song that is almost certain to get stuck in your head after just one listen. But even when Taylor is making a record where literally every song could be a single, she’s baring her soul as much as she ever did on Red. On “This Love”—the album's lone ballad, and the only track produced by Taylor's old partner-in-crime, Nathan Chapman—she sounds like someone halfway through a wine-drenched night of heartbreak and regret. “This love is good, this love is bad, this love is alive, back from the dead” she intones, her vocals multi-tracked in ghostly fashion to each speaker. When she mutters a line like “Tossing, turning, I struggled through the night with someone new,” it’s maybe the most heartbreaking moment of her catalog. 
 
Part of it is Chapman’s production, which pulses with electronic drumbeats and pure unadulterated pain, ripped apart with desperate cries from the disembodied Swifts in the background. But the other part is Taylor’s vocals, which have leaped forward once again on this record. After spending most of the album belting out huge choruses and giving 100%, she cuts back here with a beautifully fragile delivery. On that particular line mentioned above, she sounds about five minutes away from coming apart entirely. She’s desperate to fall in love; to find the right person; to get away from all the scandal and find a real-life fairytale with all the vivid feeling and care that she sings about in her songs. But on “This Love,” she’s wondering if she will ever find that given her current line of work, and it’s fucking devastating.
 
That “This Love” is sequenced right next to the primal “I Know Places” only hammers that point home further. “Something happens when everybody finds out” Taylor sputters angrily in the song's first verse, before rocketing into a hazy hunter-and-hunted game between herself, her lover, and the flashing lights of the paparazzi's cameras. “I know places we can hide,” she claims in the chorus. But as we’ve learned throughout the rest of this record, true escape from the limelight or from the judging eyes of strangers is only ever temporary for Taylor Swift. 
 
1989 is not a perfect album. While Taylor manages to fit her own unique narrative into most of these songs, there are moments where she falls into the natural traps of writing a full mainstream pop album. Case-in-point is the Ryan Tedder co-written opener, “Welcome to New York,” a catchy-but-shallow pop song that essentially plays as a repetitious loop of two choruses. It’s an enjoyable enough track, and it’s a fitting place to start, given that Taylor’s current chapter is very much informed by her move to the big city. But the song simply doesn’t have a lot of personality. It sounds like something that could have just as easily been on a Katy Perry album or an Avril Lavigne album, and it’s the only time on the record where the co-writing feels truly faceless.
 
Max Martin, Swift’s main confidante this time around, does a much better job at tailoring his assembly line of hooks (no pun intended) to fit Taylor’s strengths and stories. However, some of the Martin tracks don’t quite hit the mark, either. The worst offender—and arguably the worst track Taylor has ever put on an album—is “Bad Blood,” a grating tune that was supposedly penned as a takedown of Katy Perry. On an album about trying to escape the hearsay that has poisoned her life, it just seems odd that Swift would want to write a song about a celebrity beef. Also a bit disposable is “Wildest Dreams,” a dreamy slow-burn that sounds like Taylor’s attempt at writing a Lana Del Rey song. Del Rey is an interesting influence for Taylor to adopt, but the song ultimately feels too imitative for its own good, and Swift’s authorial voice gets misplaced in her struggle to sound like someone else.
 
Arguably the record’s best co-write, though, doesn’t belong to Martin or Antonoff, and certainly not to Tedder. Instead, the award goes to Imogen Heap, who helps Taylor deliver four and a half minutes of ethereal magic to end the record with “Clean.” “You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore,” Taylor utters in the first few moments of the song. It’s the best line on the record, and it kicks off a finale that captures all of 1989’s themes in heartrending fashion. When Taylor says she’s “finally clean” in the chorus, she’s not talking about an addition to alcohol or drugs. Instead, addiction serves as a metaphor here for Swift's long cycle of relationships in recent years. And while she’s stopped dating and gotten “clean” to avoid all of the gossip and bullshit, it’s a sacrifice she’s not entirely happy with. 
 
“10 months sober, I must admit/Just because you’re clean doesn’t mean you don’t miss it/10 months older, I won’t give in/Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.” The bridge gets right to the heart of the matter: Taylor misses the personal connections she forged in her love life, but is afraid to seek those connections again because she’s tired of getting hurt, tired of being made out to be the bad guy by the media, and certainly tired of never having a shard of privacy in any part of her life. It’s a dramatically different “final statement” than Swift’s past closers, which echoed with uplift and resilience. Instead of paying tribute to her band or basking in the rays of a new love, she’s weathered and world-weary here, steeling herself for another battle while all the while knowing that she's lost something precious in the war. And as this album proves time and time again, she wants that something back…even if she has to fight against her own fame to find it.
 
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TAYLOR SWIFT ARGUES FOR POP DOMINANCE ON “1989;” ALBUM REVIEW
 
 
With "1989," Taylor Swift attempts to create songs indicative of her stature in popular music.
 
A sense of frustration lies at the center of “1989,” and it is not of a variety one has ever encountered on a Taylor Swift album.
 
Yes, the singer-songwriter unveils some angst over a relationship (presumably with Harry Styles) gone wrong. Yes, the music phenom directs ire at a rival female (believed to be Katy Perry). But the frustration at the core of Swift’s new album is not directly tied to her personal life. It is not fueled by a lack of respect from a segment of the critical community.
 
Rather, Swift’s drive seemingly stems from an incongruity between her stature in the mainstream music community and the ubiquity of her music.
 
When it comes to popular music, there is no star as big as Taylor Swift, and there has not been one capable of filling her shoes for a while. She garners immense attention from the media. She moves millions of copies of her albums. She fills stadiums around the globe.
 
She is not simply someone everybody knows; she is somebody about whom everyone has a clear understanding and strong opinion. Her face and voice are instantly recognizable. Her personality and musical proclivities are easily dissected. She is the epitome of a pop superstar.
 
But either despite that stardom or perhaps because of her unique presence as a pop juggernaut, her music–and particularly that released to mainstream radio–tends to operate at a distance from the pop community. It has occasionally been very successful. It has occasionally been very buzzworthy. It has occasionally been ubiquitous.
 
That success, however, almost always comes with elements of qualification. The songs, many will argue, succeeded because of Taylor Swift’s involvement, not because of their inherent appeal. The songs, many will argue, garnered buzz and recognition because of the gossipy lyrical targets rather than the quality of those lyrics or the strength of the music.
 
While those arguments are subjective, there is a very objective disparity between her stardom and their performance. Songs like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” performed well, but pop-friendly releases like “The Story of Us,” “22” and “Everything Has Changed” petered out in ways recent songs by pop radio darlings like Maroon 5 simply do not.
 
One could not even begin to discuss the last decade in popular music without devoting significant attention to Taylor Swift. One could, however, get by without spending too much time on her individual singles.
 
Particularly vexing about that reality is the fact that the country radio, despite some ill-will concerning her transition into a more overly pop sound, continued to embrace her music. Not everything was guaranteed a stay at number one, but her singles, by and large, occupied the country format in the way her persona–but not necessarily her music–occupies pop.
 
On new album “1989,” Swift allows that frustrating, annoying situation to transform into ambition. It is an attempt not simply to deliver a great, cohesive album. It is an attempt not simply to achieve more uniquely personal and emotional connections with her listeners. It, most notably, is an attempt to solidify her music as the sound of a generation. It is a statement that she is not only the biggest name in pop but also the creative force behind pop’s biggest songs.
 
To get into position for that strike, Swift re-teamed with heavyweight pop writer-producers Max Martin and Shellback, enlisted the help of pop hitmaker and OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder and collaborated with friend and prolific alt-pop musician Jack Antonoff (fun., Bleachers). She severed ties with country (and thus removed any asterisks or qualifications from her effort) by declaring “1989” her first official pop album. And she introduced the project with her most lyrically innocuous, commercially polished single to date in “Shake it Off.”
 
All logical, respectable and seemingly harmless tasks, the collective reality of the situation requires a rather significant compromise. In so aggressively and ambitiously chasing unadulterated pop dominance, Swift was, for the first time, writing to a sound rather than utilizing sounds as tools for broadcasting her personal messages. And insofar as her signature invocation of vivid, specific imagery, anecdotal storytelling and frank emotional conveyance is more fundamentally country than it is pop, Swift was absolutely going to have to abandon some of her old self in an attempt to meet the demands of the new sound.
 
Whether measured at its best moments or its worst moments, “1989” operates at a clear distance from any previous conception of Taylor Swift. The lyrics, while perhaps rooted in real life stories, convey emotion from an uncharacteristically broad and conceptual perspective. The individual narratives and messaging, while all originating from the mind of the same singer-songwriter, lack cohesion and can even be contradictory (good luck reconciling “Shake it Off” with “Bad Blood”). The songs’ characters, while almost surely intended as representations of Swift and others she knows, are generic prototypes rather than naturally flawed, nuanced human beings. The presentation, while very obviously from Swift’s unique voice, feels filtered for the sake of being more overtly universal.
 
What listeners will encounter on “1989” is not a Taylor Swift album that happens to be poppy. It is Taylor Swift’s calculated attempt to develop a credible pop album.
 
But while the “1989” experience is fundamentally different from that of its previous albums, it is not necessarily weak from a musical standpoint. And it is certainly not unsuccessful in its overall goal.
 
From top to bottom, and through its highs and its lows, “1989” functions as an album that is both startlingly consistent with the sound of contemporary pop music and different enough to feel like the work of a true superstar. It demonstrates that while Swift might have carved a unique niche with her previous approach to pop-country songwriting, she is a legitimate musical powerhouse whose appreciation for melody, awareness of tone and articulation of emotional sentiment is second to none.
 
With its fierce, punchy chorus beats and intoxicating central riffs, the production behind songs like “Blank Space” and “Style” could realistically create hit records for many upper echelon pop artists. Few, however, would able to navigate the songs the way Swift does.
 
Aware of when to swim with the current (she completely captures the 80s action movie vibe on “Style”) and when to swim against it (her delicate, Ingrid Michaelson-inspired delivery clashes with the bolder, hip-hop inspired tones on “Blank Space”) is not performing others’ creations. She is expanding those creations with a sense of savvy and personality unrivaled by others in the pop music space.
 
As dialed into her flaws as she is to her strengths and ambitions, Swift uses “How to Get the Girl” as a mulligan for underperforming “Red” single “22.” Crafted from the same sensibility, the track nonetheless relies on a more calculated, less conversational lyrical perspective and a significantly more resonant chorus to present itself as something that absolutely could be a hit.
 
Swift makes no attempt to hide the Lana Del Rey influence on “Wildest Dreams,” but she also recognizes the vast distance between her own aesthetic and that of the “Summertime Sadness” singer. As such, she wisely attacks the track with a more frank, conversational and innocent vibe that captures the emotional gravitas in a manner true to her signature persona.
 
“This Love” is more constricting and processed than the epic ballads that populated her albums “Red” and “Speak Now,” but Swift compensates for the limitation with the album’s most haunting, emotional and tasteful vocal presentation. Swift’s recognition that she can use her vocals to turn a bottled composition into a tidal wave of emotion similarly garners the Imogen Heap-co-written “Clean” an important place in Swift’s discography.
 
The biggest–and most unavoidable–compromise associated with a transition to pure pop involves the lyrics, and there is no denying Swift made that sacrifice on “1989.” The precise imagery, cute anecdotes and clever references are as lacking as they have ever been on a Swift album, and the result is an artist who is harder than usual to know and a set of storylines that are harder than usual to visualize.
 
What Swift did not abandon, however, is the lens through which she conveys her messages. The lyrics for “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” in particular, come directly from Taylor Swift’s playbook. They might not rely as significantly on her signature storytelling devices, but they absolutely reflect her authentic perspective.
 
Her conversational, pre-chorus asides in “Blank Space” present corny sentiments (“I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream”) with Swift’s signature self-awareness, while the spoken-word/chanted bridge in “Shake it Off” rolls its eyes at the type of conversational interplay that supposedly passes for authentic in young women.
 
While not as snarky, “Style” features the same carefully constructed clash between the wondrous and the jaded, depicting a woman who is able to curb her fantasies with the barriers of reality.
 
Surely owing to their legitimate friendship, no songs, however, are as faithful to Swift’s lyrical style as her collaborations with Jack Antonoff. Their “Out of the Woods,” which shined upon its promotional release and holds up as the album’s standout, is Swift’s most successfully application of her lyrical voice to an ambitious pop production. And while their “I Wish You Would” swallows Swift from a rhythmic standpoint, it does play host to common Swift tropes like “2AM” and being in “your car.”
 
Unfortunate insofar as “I Wish You Would,” lyrically, so notably reflects the most familiar iteration of Swift, that clash between Swift and production is far rarer than one might expect for an album as aurally ambitious as “1989.” The only other such failure is “I Know Places,” which finds Swift emulating far too many vocal and lyrical styles–including those of Lorde, who realistically should have been tapped to sing the second verse–to create even a hint of comfort.
 
While the requisite lyrical broadening did not prevent Swift from leaving her stamp on the album’s standouts, it did allow for some total failures. Whereas Swift’s lyrical sensibility has historically been enthralling enough to overcome limitations in the composition and production, the transformed version on “1989” steers two potentially promising tracks in the wrong direction.
 
“Welcome to New York,” which features the rhythmic and melodic elements needed to be a successful New York anthem, fumbles in the lyrical department. Swift’s words are neither personal to her nor specific to New York City, and the result is a track that serves to overstate the extent to which she needed to mute her personality for this album. Tragically placed at the top of the tracklist, it spurs undesirable–and inaccurate–pessimism about the level of honesty resting within Swift’s first official pop album.
 
On previous Swift albums, there was always an enjoyable “game” associated with identifying who she was targeting in her honest, aggressive, yet coyly protective diss tracks. Had Swift not explained “Bad Blood” in an interview prior to the album’s release, it is doubtful anyone would have even discussed it.
 
Supposedly a response to a female artist (purportedly Katy Perry) who, after a period of subtle, backhanded digs attempted to sabotage her live tour, “Bad Blood” features the most generic, emotionally disconnected lyrics ever included on a Taylor Swift album. Comprised only of broad generalities and weightless sentiments there for no other reason than to sound interesting (“band-aids don’t fix bullet holes”), “Bad Blood” does nothing to unpack the incident–or resulting emotions–for viewers. That the lyrics are presented with vocal indifference in the verses and a grating quality in the chorus does the song no favors.
 
And it is a song that, from a production standpoint, realistically should be a force at radio.
 
The album’s two key misses help to define what “ambitious” means within the context of “1989.”
 
Accepting more modern, forceful, swallowing production in an effort to create music more independently appealing to the pop community is only one half of the battle. For someone like Swift, who has always used sound to enhance her message rather than a message to enhance a sound, there is also an additional battle: assuring that message is not completely silenced in the process.
 
Not all of Swift’s songwriting tendencies will work on a pure pop album. But everything should still feel uniquely reflective of Taylor Swift.
 
The good news is that the majority of “1989” achieves that goal. It finds Swift doing no more alteration than is needed to fit the overall essence of the album. It also proves that Swift’s sense of melody and confident, yet vulnerable delivery can indeed synthesize with masterful production to produce legitimate pop music.
 
The album’s few weak spots, however, prove that the adjustment is not complete. Much in the way Swift needed “Fearless” to perfect the youthful, down-to-earth vibe of “Taylor Swift” and then “Red” to better articulate the epic emotional resonance of “Speak Now,” the singer-songwriter will need additional time to complete the transition to pop.
 
What “1989” proves, however, is that Swift already has the raw toolset required for that transition. It proves that Taylor Swift is not simply capable of making pop songs that fit into the contemporary scene but ones that stand above–not merely beside–those being created by other pop superstars.
 
“1989” is not a seamless, organic evolution of the Taylor Swift listeners met on “Taylor Swift,” “Fearless,” “Speak Now” and Red.” But if its goal was to position her music at the top of the pop world, it is very successful.
 
Taylor Swift’s “1989” is now available.
 
1) Welcome to New York
2) Blank Space
3) Style
4) Out of the Woods
5) All You Had to Do Was Stay
6) Shake it Off
7) I Wish You Would
8) Bad Blood
9) Wildest Dreams
10) How You Get the Girl
11) This Love
12) I Know Places
13) Clean
 
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Taylor Swift makes a glorious transition to pop with '1989' 
 
Taylor Swift recently moved from Nashville to New York City. She craved a change in scenery that would match her new outlook on life: an outlook devoid of famous ex-boyfriends and full of famous girl-friends, an outlook that required her to cut her hair and look effortlessly put-together at all times, an outlook that saw her finally make the switch from country to pop. And it’s an outlook that is not-so-subtly evident on her fifth album, 1989.
 
To be sure, Swift’s in-your-face approach to her newfound pop persona works tremendously well. Throughout 1989 we hear a Taylor Swift that is more confident, bold and self-aware than ever before. It’s clear that she knows exactly what she’s doing. Her welcoming embrace of pop freed her from the constraints imposed on her by the “country” label, she’s experimenting with new sounds, intonations and writing techniques.
 
The 13-track album begins with “Welcome To New York,” a love song co-written with Ryan Tedder that pays homage to, you guessed it, The Big Apple. If 1989 had been filled with 13 songs like this, it would have been an uninspired disappointment — the lyrics play on clichéd ideas of being young and independent in New York City and the production, though technically sound, presents nothing that new. But by predictably opening 1989, her first pop album, with a song about moving to New York, Swift feeds into our expectations only to immediately turn around and shut them down. “Took our broken hearts / Put them in a drawer,” she declares. And on the rest of 1989, though she opens that drawer a few times, she proves that her heart is anything but broken.
 
On the ironic “Blank Space,” which follows “New York,” Swift directly acknowledges these expectations and the image of her that have been constantly perpetuated in the media (“Got a long list of ex-lovers / They’ll tell you I’m insane”). She’s in on the joke and she doesn’t really care if you believe her or not. This sentiment is also echoed on the album’s first single, “Shake It Off,” which is another direct call at her haters who, regardless of what she does, will continue to “hate hate hate.” 
 
Most of 1989’s standout moments are the ones during which we hear Swift’s voice in settings where we haven’t heard it before. On “I Know Places,” her voice is eerie and pointed in its verses but as soaring and hopeful as ever in the refrains. “Wildest Dreams” sees her channeling Lana Del Rey’s enchantingly drowsy vocalization in a call to past lovers to remember her. “I Wish You Would,” one of two songs written with fun.’s Jack Antonoff (who also happens to be the boyfriend of Swift’s pal Lena Dunham), would fit right in with the late ’80s electro-pop that Swift said inspired most of the album.
 
Perhaps the most anticipated track on 1989, “Bad Blood,” lives up to its hype. The foot-stomping, hand-clapping, anger-fueled track was written about a fellow female popstar, who’s all but confirmed to be Katy Perry, that apparently scorned her unprovoked (something tells me John Mayer, an ex they both share, had to do with it). It’s a clear single candidate and represents a rare example on 1989 of Taylor doing what we have come to expect from her in the past — singing songs written about famous exes (friends and boyfriends) in a tongue-in-cheek manner, baiting us into guessing who they’re about. The funky “Style,” another probable single, also exemplifies this Swiftian tendency, albeit (again) not-so-subtly. Let’s just say there’s only one member of One Direction that she used to date and who essentially shares a surname with the song’s title. While 1989 excels by playing down this celebrity callout style of song, what it’s lacking is another quality of songwriting that has become classic Swift: that of little, personal details that accentuate the imagery in her music.
 
Part of what made Taylor Swift’s previous work so special were those instances where she got so specific with her writing that, at least on the surface, it appeared as though we were present in those intimate moments with her. Though we do get some of that on 1989, like on the building ballad “Out Of The Woods” when she sings about “[moving] the furniture so we could dance” and “Remember when you hit the breaks too soon? / 20 stitches in the hospital room,” there is markedly less detail here than on her past efforts. Is this a result of Swift’s heavy collaboration with pop mastermind Max Martin? Probably. But it’s also not necessarily a negative. Sure, we all loved that knack for detailed lyricism that characterized Swift’s first four albums, but what we get on 1989 is more honed-in songwriting and more complex lyrical structure. We get songs that are more universally relatable. In other words, what we get is massive, glorious, no holds barred pop. 
 
There was a lot riding on 1989. Swift’s break-up with country music was risky and had the potential to turn away loyal country fans. The aggressive marketing and social media presence surrounding its release implied that there is something to be wildly excited about. The troubling decline in music sales this year only increased that pressure (as did the fact that Swift’s last album, Red (2012), is the most recent album to sell over a million copies in a week). But, just like she knows exactly what people think of her and her image and her music, Taylor Swift knew this. So she delivered.
 
1989 is as fresh a pop album as we’d ever hope of having the pleasure to listen to, especially these days when producing a cohesive album seems to be the last thing many single-track-minded pop stars have the intention of doing. It may have been inspired by an era of pop that ended 25 years ago when Swift was born, but it brings something new and something much-needed to the mainstream pop landscape. 
 
Taylor Swift: the pop star who will never go out of style.
 
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Taylor Swift Is So Much More Fun Now That She's Jaded
On 1989, she shows off a new, synth-driven sound and new, entertaining self-awareness. 
 
“She wears high heels / I wear sneakers / She’s cheer captain / and I’m on the bleachers.” The image of the outcast, the good-hearted girl who’s continually being ignored and wronged, has clung to Taylor Swift ever since she sang those lines in “You Belong With Me,” one of her earlier hits, released in 2008. Even though she’s not a sneaker-wearing nerd—she’s a successful, wealthy, beautiful, super-tall woman whose crushes definitely always know who she is now—this aura of innocence has followed her throughout her career, and she has perpetuated it in her music. “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” she sings on “Dear John” from the Speak Now album. (To be fair, John Mayer, the reported subject of the song, was 33 to Swift’s 20 when the album came out.) In “All Too Well,” a song from her 2012 album, Red, a scarf she left at an ex’s house is said to “remind [him] of innocence.”
 
Compare that to “Blank Space,” the second track on Swift’s new album, 1989. “You look like my next mistake / Love’s a game / Wanna play?... Ain’t it funny/ Rumors fly/ And I know you heard about me.” This is someone who’s aware of her reputation. Her jadedness has made her wry, and she’s having fun with it. “Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream,” she laughs at one point in the song.
 
Throughout the album, Swift seems a little more grown up, a little more self-aware. Her first 1989 single, “Shake it Off,” was all about people’s perceptions of her, after all. The relationships she continues to describe with her trademark insight are a little more twisted. The midnight tryst described in “Style” is a far cry from the Romeo & Juliet “Love Story”s or “Enchanted” meet-cutes of earlier albums. It’s certainly the sexiest album she’s ever made—that guitar on “Style” is carnal in a way that’s uncomfortable when you consider that the song is almost certainly about boy bander Harry Styles. And “Wildest Dreams” goes languid-sexy, à la Lana Del Rey, as she anticipates the end of a relationship while she’s still in it.
 
If you listened to her first, self-titled album and then listened to 1989, it would almost sound like the works of two completely different people. But each album in between was a firm footstep on the path to where she is now, tracking how she’s grown up from high-school hallways, and grown away from country toward pop. 
 
But the core of what makes Taylor Swift so successful hasn’t changed. What Swift is good at, what she’s always been good at, is the precise evocation of specific slices of emotion. She finds simple but effective turns of phrase (“You were all I wanted / but not like this”) or off-the-wall metaphors (“You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore”) that sum it all up. And the '80s throwback sound she's using this time lends itself nicely to her lyrical style, with the driving beats and bright synths making the simple seem anthemic.
 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the most effective songs on 1989 are the upbeat ones—"Blank Space,” “Out of the Woods,” “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” “I Wish You Would,” and “How You Get the Girl” standing out. The slow jam “This Love” is a bit of a chore, and “I Know Places,” a song that many have noted sounds like an outtake from a Hunger Games soundtrack, doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the album. The closing song, “Clean,” with Imogen Heap on backing vocals, is the more engaging of 1989’s ballads.
 
No longer is Swift a “crumpled up piece of paper” after a breakup, as she described herself in a song from Red. She shows herself in these songs as complicit in her troubled relationships now, the temptress as often as she is the victim. (If you were looking for some symbolism there, you’d find it in the numerous mentions of red lipstick. She really wants us to associate her with red lipstick—it’s referenced in three of the 12 songs, and red lips feature prominently in two of those choruses.) Sassy “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” Taylor rears her head in “All You Had to Do Was Stay”—”Let me remind you/ this was what you wanted,” she sings to a remorseful ex. But the starry-eyed Taylor who loves-fairy tale romance is by no means completely gone. “I Wish You Would” and “How You Get the Girl” both imagine and long for a big romantic gesture from the one who broke her heart.
 
Maybe songs about James Dean look-a-like boyfriends and New York’s glittering lights aren’t quite as relatable to the average Taylor Swift fan as the tales of small-town love that started her career. But she’s not sitting on the bleachers anymore, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that she was. Her primary currency has always been emotional honesty, and these songs still feel true—true to where she is now. A little more adult, a little more aware, just as honest.
 
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