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Holiest Dreams

Red + All Too Well included in Pitchfork’s Top 200 ‘10s Albums/Songs

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59. Taylor Swift: Red (2012)

Red is a portrait of a young woman eager to feel everything on her way to the top. Its songs are self-aware enough to be funny and guileless enough to be honest, capturing the temptation of risk-taking, the rush of memory and disappointment, and the transformative power of grown-up romantic love felt for the first time. The album gave Taylor Swift her first No. 1 hit (the irresistible “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”) and inaugurated many of her famously over-the-top marketing tactics: commemorative Keds sneakers, Papa John’s pizza boxes, weaponized tabloid gossip. Aside from her pop leanings, the chipper breakup-to-makeup story “Stay Stay Stay” and melancholic renewal ballad “Begin Again” would be some of her final acoustic-forward recordings of the decade. Soon after Red, nobody in America could ever again plausibly ask, “Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway?” –Anna Gaca

 

57. Taylor Swift: “All Too Well” (2012)

”All Too Well,” the hidden gem of Taylor Swift’s Red, captures everything that makes her a world-class songwriter: her emotional intelligence, her candor, her economy of words, her ability to find beauty in vulnerability. Swift tells a big story by freezing time and honing in on small details, the kind that could seem like background noise to others: the scarf that her ex (reportedly, Jake Gyllenhaal) kept as a memento, the refrigerator light that illuminated midnight dance parties. All these hyper-specifics, rigorously chronicled, protect Swift’s pain so she can tend to it; when she sings, “It was rare/I was there,” she asserts her own experience against those who would trivialize it. As the song builds, its initially mild-mannered guitar gains energy, cymbals begin to crash, and Swift’s voice steadily rises. But she doesn’t really need volume to convey the magnitude of the damage. It’s the quietest moments that serve this story best—they make you lean in close enough to see every tiny fissure in her broken heart. –Olivia Horn

 


Honestly surprised they included anything by her at all rih1 slay, I guess!

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