![]() ![]() By the chorus, she’s flirty, but back in the verses, she’s skeptical and a little bedraggled. “Midnight/You come and pick me up/No headlights,” she oozes at the beginning of the song. The high mark is “Style,” which recalls something from the original “Miami Vice” soundtrack, all warm synths and damp vocals. The Taylor Swift of this album is savage, wry, and pointed. That vanguard attitude, though, isn’t to be found on “1989,” which is largely filled with upbeat, tense songs on which the singer stomps out much of whatever was left of her youthful innocence. Swift rehearsing in 2007 for the 42nd Academy of Country Music Awards. And yet those songs showed her to be more of a risk taker than she’d ever been, and savvy enough to know her fans would follow. Swift has many charms but stylistic envelope pushing has not always been among them. Martin and Shellback - were also a move toward forward-sounding pop. The best country-defying songs on her last album, “Red” - especially “I Knew You Were Trouble,” another collaboration with Mr. Swift’s old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced “This Love,” a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what’s notable here is their restraint. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now” now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight. ![]() Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. That’s “1989,” which opens with “Welcome to New York,” a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: “Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.” (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves’s “ Follow Your Arrow.”) ![]() Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. In Nashville, she’d learned all the rules, all the back roads. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.īut it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse. “1989” (Big Machine), though, her fifth album and the first that doesn’t at all bother with country, manages to find a new foe. It’s a big box, and a porous one, but a box all the same. That she would one day abandon country has long been clear. But from the inside looking out, even as the genre’s biggest star, she was always something of an underdog, multiplatinum albums and accolades be damned. From the outside, she looked like a conquering titan. It made her a transgressor, which means even her most benign songs could be read with mischievous intent. She faced almost no direct competition there, and it’s a genre that embraces success, grudgingly if need be. And yet country was also a hospitable host body. She could break the rules and make people nervous simply by showing up. For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.Ĭountry music has been - was - a natural enemy for her: hidebound, slow moving, lousy with machismo. ![]()
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