“I’ve got a long list of ex-lovers who’ll tell you I’m insane”. That line is the one you kept on misshearing as “Starbucks lovers”, the signature line of the signature song at the heart of the center of the signature album of 2014. A desperately funny sell portrait for kicks, for glamour, for a future pop maelstrom, and for a noisy intense desperation.
In the very first song, Taylor sings
“Took our broken hearts
Put them in a drawer…”
And from there on through to the end she shakes off, nearly, almost clean, a failed romance, embraces her love affair with our city, and ruminates on romances, tells stories about it, kids it out . All three strands of thought never connect, never encroach upon each other, they become not a worldview but a though process and one still moving, one not ready for conclusions. The only thing stopping 1989 from being a mammoth bummer is Taylor’s gigantic enthusiasm which simply won’t let anything stand in its way. This is a Taylor Swift’s method of operation dating from the beginning, from “Our Song” –a boundless excitement, our song is the one song, our love the only love, look at me, speak now, never ever forever and always. Standing in the rain, crying, sobbing, sick beats beats sicks.
In 1989, everything is full lights brights in your face and yet the intensity hides a hopelessness for a woman who believes so hard in attachments. Romantic love with a completeness that has never before brooked any denial. In October 2012 I wrote this about Taylor (quoting someone else): “Everything is turned to love with her. New love, absent love, lost love…” Here there is a gaping hole where New Love should be and New York fails to fill it.
This absence makes 1989 more than just the biggest album of the year, more than a star turned; it is art and by art I mean it changes emotions into another medium: it realizes its author’s deepest most intense feelings in sound.
Again, the lighthearted nature, the pop sheen hides her feelings, even from herself, but why do you think Taylor is obsessed with this mash up?
The reason is, it strips her down. There is no hiding from the feelings here.
1989 is a full-fledged, biggest album of the year, huge artistic statement thing but it is also “The Empire Strikes Back” of rock. It is neither a beginning nor an ending, it is a breather from the romances (rumors of a post 1989 entanglement is all over the place) that have been the essence of her life since “Tears On My Guitar”.
