How to rethink Taylor Swift’s transformative new album

LOS ANGELES –

In 2010, newly anointed as a Grammy winner, Taylor Swift released “Speak Now,” her third studio album and her first without a single songwriting collaboration.

Her 2006 self-titled debut and 2008’s “Fearless” had received both acclaim and criticism for her bold bridges and sharp lyricism – these are masterful country pop songs, critics claimed, but a teen idol was certainly not responsible for them. Swift proved her detractors wrong on “Speak Now,” an album released just before her flip from nation’s youngest hope to pop’s newest voice.

The album served as a conclusive document of her burgeoning fame and future career aspirations, and now, 13 years later, it’s back. “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” released Friday, is the third release of the six albums Swift plans to re-record. Instigated by music manager Scooter Braun’s sale of her early back catalog, Taylor’s Version albums represent Swift’s attempt to take control of her own songs and how they are used — a fitting ethos for “Speak Now,” a record featuring her exclusively. own voice is built.

In preparation for “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” The Associated Press reached out to Taylor Swift scholars to discuss all the ways listeners can and should feel about the release.

ADOLESCENCE TO MATURITY

Before ‘Speak Now’ became ‘Speak Now’, the working title was ‘Enchanted’, named after the power ballad of the same name. The mythology (folklore, anyone?) behind the shift is that Swift’s then-label president, Scott Borchetta, CEO of Big Machine Records, told her to move forward with quirky and fairytale iconography — she was in her twenties and this LP warranted a more adult title.

Transition creates an interesting framework for thinking about this album: largely written between the ages of 18 and 20, released when she turned 21, “Speak Now” is a collection of songs on an abyss – of maturity, of fame, of declaring of property but still engaged in the issues that concern a young adult. There are both crushes (“Superman”, “Sparks Fly”) and bittersweet breakups (“Back to December”, “If This Was a Movie”).

“You hear a childhood when you listen to these songs,” says musicologist Lily Hirsch, author of “Can’t Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono.” “It’s all about these romantic relationships. The world revolves around all that, which is so typical of the time. So it’s interesting to hear that the reshoots give a more mature voice to those earlier concerns.”

Elizabeth Scala teaches a course on Taylor Swift’s songbook at the University of Texas at Austin as an introduction to literary studies and research methods.

“I think ‘Speak Now’ is still along the lines of ‘I don’t have enough life experience at my ripe old age of 18 to give you a completely autobiographical thing, but I’m going to use what I read and what I know’. other people,” she says of the lyrical content of the songs, which still manage to “make really beautiful, cohesive things out of the messiness and inaccuracy of our memories.”

IN TALK WITH HER CRITICS AND CELEBRITY

A year after Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, “Speak Now” marks the moment in Swift’s career where she began using her celebrity as a mirror to her inner life.

In this Sept. 13, 2009 file photo, singer Kanye West can be seen taking the mic from singer Taylor Swift as she accepts the “Best Female Video” award at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)

“Mean,” a rock critic takedown, becomes a banjo-led treatise on every kind of animosity; the bluesy “Dear John” revolves around a young woman’s tumultuous relationship with an older man.

“Insults are everywhere in music, and men don’t get the same flak for it,” says Hirsch, referring to “Dear John” and “Mean.” “There’s this idea that women in particular are supposed to take the high road, turn the other cheek and stuff, and men can get away with the low road, and they certainly do in music. It’s kind of a double standard. Women have been labeled “catty” when confronted with bad behavior, as in “Dear John.”

A common pastime among Swift fans is to discover the identities of the subjects of her songs. But according to Scala, “The most boring way to think about Taylor Swift is in terms of her biography.”

During a recent stop on her Eras Tour in Minneapolis, Swift seemed to agree, playing “Dear John” live for the first time in 11 years after this introduction:

“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care what happened to me when I was 19 except for the songs I wrote and the memories we made together. So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not this album release, so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone who you think would have written a song about 14 billion years ago.

Scala sees a continuation between this album and its successors, with ‘Dear John’ as a precursor to ‘All Too Well’ and ‘Mean’ as a foresight on ‘Blank Space’, a song that parodies how they were portrayed in the media. is depicted.

REVISIONIST HISTORY

Much online chatter surrounding the re-recording of “Speak Now” centered on “Better Than Revenge,” a pop punk song that focuses on another woman rather than the man who wronged them both. It takes both sonic and thematic cues from Paramore’s 2007 pop-rock hit “Misery Business,” a similar song on the same subject. (In fact, on “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)”, Paramore singer Hayley Williams lends vocals to a “vault” track, “Castles Crumbling”.)

In the original chorus of “Better Than Revenge,” Swift sings, “She’s an actress / She’s better known for the things she does on the mattress,” a rare lyrical misstep in a career punctuated by poetic turns (in the opening “Mine”, she sings “You made a rebel out of a careless man’s caring daughter”). In her 2023 “Better Than Revenge” version, the lyrics become “He was a moth to the flame / She held the matches.”

“If we think back to 2010, slut rhetoric definitely existed in movies and shows. She’s certainly not the only one who’s done this back then,” argues Hirsch, quick to point out that Swift has also been the target of sexist vitriol. .

Swift’s change of the song in her re-recording follows a line of other pop stars doing the same. Lizzo and Beyonce recently changed the lyrics to songs that are considered offensive. Weird Al is no longer performing his Michael Jackson parodies. And because Swift hasn’t performed “Better Than Revenge” live in over a decade, she hasn’t had to confront this particular song in this particular way.

“We are willing to replace the old version with Taylor’s Versions, because they are exact replicas, as much as they can be,” Scala argues. “If she does something different, it will be a different song.” Another song, this time from Swift.

ART EVOLVES WITH TIME

“From a literary historian’s point of view, when you first heard ‘Speak Now’ you could only look at her career up to that point: it meant something in her creative timeline,” says Scala. “And now we have the rest of her career to compare it to, so it’s hard to listen to the record the same way. You can compare it to the older recording, but it’s deeper and richer.”

Technology has changed since 2010. So has Swift: her voice has matured and no longer possesses the sweet self-control that colored her early releases.

Each release comes with a few “From the Vault” songs, unreleased songs from each album’s period, reimagined for the present moment. They also provide a more complete picture.

AN EXERCISE IN ARTISTIC AUTONOMY

All musical and cultural considerations aside, the fact is: Taylor Swift is re-recording this album to own her work, as she does with so many of her records — but this is the only album in her discography that is entirely self-written, which was celebrated for its rejections of exploitative male characters and poetic embrace of girlhood.

In fact, it’s hard not to think of “Could’ve, Would’ve, Should’ve” from her 2022 LP “Midnights,” where Swift sings “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” reflection of her “Speak Now” self. That song is a creative recovery from the teen who wrote “Dear John” as an adult; “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is the literal reclamation.

“Once she owned these masters, she decided to take back that control,” says Hirsch. “I like what it communicates: that we all have power. We don’t have to sit back and accept these situations, especially when it comes to our own voice.”