“Out Of The Woods” written for Harry Sykes by Taylor Swift with help from Jack Antonoff and produced by Max Martin, is where all pretense at being country, which barely survived the Red tour, is absolutely over, and all pretense of being a singer songwriter with a humongous cult are dropped and Taylor emerges as the modern pop star after finishing school. She is a Jane Austin heroine with a Yamaha DX7.
The track is excellent, the hook is so simple, she just sings “are we out of the woods” over and over again, but, while not on the first listen, but definitely by the fourth, you’ve begun to project against and you begin to think, yeah this is Tay though it sounds so not like her. It is as if she listened to all her friends, all the Sheerans and Cyrus’s and Gomezes in the world and took Martin and sort of absorbed them into her DNA and what came out on “Shake It Off” was a swinging sling of a song, a missing link between “Never Ever” and whatever was coming next. And “Out Of The Woods” is what is next, a sci fi morphed out beat surrender. Here is what Jack said to Rolling Stone: “I used a Yamaha DX7 a lot on that song, which is so uniquely Eighties, but then countered it with a super-distorted Minimoog Voyager in the chorus. That sounds extremely modern to me. It’s that back-and-forth.”
It sounds at first like pro-rata dance track but clicks very fast, unlike Taylor at her catchiest, it takes a little while to sink its teeth and unlike “Shake It Off” she isn’t releasing it as a single. It lacks the immediacy. But give it awhile and you’ll get there.
Grade: A
