I know I owe you a review of Big L’s # 5 album of the decade but I am still mulling it over (and you thought it was easy, right?). I am holding off on # 2 to write a # 1 album of 2009/# 2 of the decade at the same time near the beginning of the year. So it is on to # 6 and I know what you’re gonna say…. Blah, blah, no voice, blah, blah, blah, puppy love songs, blah blah blah. Here are some reasons why Fearless made it on to my best of the 2000s list:
1. Every song, some nineteen of them, are excellent. It is relentlessly, intoxicatingly, consistent.
2. It crossed over country, pop, tween, teen, all demos and all age groups.
3. It resurrected country.
4. Appearances notwithstanding, Swift does not write teen angst, she writes romance angst, Discussing her with my niece Kristen Diab, Mrs. Diab got it wrong. Swift’s lyric sounds silly because she is a happily married world but if you are in the romantic jungle Swift’s truth have a universal ring (for the most part).
Writing more often alone than with pro Liz Rose, Taylor has a melodic simplicity (and a nicely warm production) that gets under your skin every single time. It is really a gift, it is really a kinda genius to be able to write like this. I was already a fan but “Love Story” just blew me away. I couldn’t take the video but the song itself, especially the chorus:a run on sentence reaching the the song, and the albums, high point, a piece of adult like consequencer: “This love is difficult but it is re-eal”. I am less than excited by the sound of Taylor’s voice BUT HER PHRASING here is perfection. The the storyline is tween redux, the maturity is in her poise.
This is true of many songs here, “The Way I Loved You” ends up crying in the rain but before then it is a pure country story, it is “Why Can’t He Be You?” Better still is “Forever And Always” -in both its original and in its piano only versions, the question at the heart of puppy love romance, the authenticity of the feelings being professed, disappears in the emotional whirlpool: “it rains in your bedroom everything is wrong, it rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone”.
Along with Taylor’s melodic gifts, her ability to write songs, her other ace is she means it, man… Taylor names the names, points the figures, disses the cretins who fuck with her estrogen level.
It’s all a little Alanis Morrisettey, as close as the boys get to calling out chicks, they don’t reach the Jonas level of a Swift. Makes you nervous to be around her. But also makes her one of the girls and while a pretty girl not so pretty she feels threatening.
So the little girls understand and the pop boys understand, she presents herself as a good girl, a little young for an age, a little “yo, yo, I knit sweaters yall” but without the misteps that are plaguing Miley. You’d never catch Taylor saying she’d never listended to Jay-Z. taylor dueted with T-Pain.
There is something harmless and yet deep here: when my Great-Niece Miriam is eighteen or twenty-eight years of age, she might roll her eyes when somebody asks her to dance “Ho down-Show Down” but she won’t be doing that over anything Swift has written. It is built to last a career and a life time.