There are three storylines at play on Taylor Swift’s excellent fifth album 1989, sixth if you include the Christmas album and seventh if you include the live album:
1. The trip from Nashville to New York City.
2. The trip from country to EDM.
3. The trip from the heart to the feet.
It is a straight continuation from her previous album, Red, both musically and thematically, it negotiates between memories of a lost love and the sort of songwriting professionalism she has nailed on earlier movie songs like “Safe And Sound” and “Today Was A Fairytale”. With an exuberance mistaken for egotism and shielding melancholia, she expresses life as a twenty something at the top of the pop pile: Big Apple Red, if you will. But everything edges towards a sort of loneliness and a making do: it is sad in many ways, it keeps on looking back at the hopes of the teen Tay and making do, it diminishes her hope in the happy ending, but it won’t admit it to itself. Taylor’s just going to dance, dance, dance.
That’s the first confusion on 1989, when she sings “This love is good, this love is bad,this love is alive back from the dead, these hands had to let it go free and this love came back to me” it sounds like the world of imagination in ways “I say I heard that you been out and about with some other girl… He says, what you’ve heard it’s true but I can’t stop thinking about you and I said I’ve been there too a few times” doesn’t. Piecing this story together, the story inside, it is just a long goodbye where Taylor settles for a second best relationship at odds with the hopes of “The Story Of Us”. So, to settle down the storyline, she fakes it a little.
Then she added Max Martin and Shellback and some stuff with the dreaded Ryan Tedder and the excellent Jack Antonoff, and produced it into a sleek big machine hook and tune laden masterwork: yes, a diary, but a diary where she daydreams what she can’t actually do, and like one of those weird daydreams that turn dark on you she loses herself inside them. It works from one end to another because Taylor’s calling card, her songs, survive and sometimes thrive whatever the arrangement. 1989‘s weakest song is the Tedder co-written “I Know Places” and it is perfection in the voice memo demo piano only version, it was hurt in the arrangement.
This is essentially the story of relationship that began with “I Knew You Were Trouble” on Red and ends with ‘Clean”, the last song where she compares the finishing end of her romance to a recovered addict. It is one of her great songs as is “You Are In Love” (off the deluxe Target version – not the first time Tay has left a masterpiece off an album and given it to them: the elegant “Ours” was as good as anything on Speak Now, and the acoustic “State Of Grace” remains her greatest vocal tour de force), where Taylor finds the maximum distance between the songs sentiments and her own singularity, “You understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars and why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words” she sings in what amounts to her saddest line ever.
1989 opens with the eager “Welcome To New York”, the one song everybody hates though I love it. Considered proforma electro pop by those in the know, I think it is an enthusiastic arms open wide introduction to the Big City (no wonder they named her the head of the New York welcoming committee). It is much much better than the atrocious “Empire State Of Mind” -really, why are we all singing the praises of Jay-Z in a New York anthem?
New York anthems. Let me help:
Manhattan
New York New York (from “On The Town”)
New York New York (Sinatra song)
New York State Of Mind
After that, pick and choose but include “Welcome To New York” miles ahead of Hova.
But if you wanna say “Welcome to New York” could be better, alright it could be better, but nothing can compete with the next three songs, “Blank Space”, “Style” and “Out Of The Woods”. Of the three only “Out Of The Woods” has to be electronic pop, only “Out Of The Woods” could not be simply rearranged for acoustic guitar. Both “Blank Space” and “Styles’ (Shellback and Max Martin co-wrote those two with our hero) don’t need the fizzed out mid-80s synth pop to signify. The three are the soul of 1989. As the album goes deeper inwards, Taylor can’t get the hues of the song perfect the way she does on these three songs. Those songs sound like her dancing, they sound like the relationship she is writing about: a joyful misstep, a bright and dark mistake: but if there is any emotional compromise it isn’t in the music: “Blank Space” sneers at her reputation , “Style” describes what it really is like inside the relation and “Out Of The Woods” expresses how it feels.
All three of these songs are very stylized and sleek modern pop, but what that proves is that like many a media person before her, she expresses her deepest feeling best within the confines of a studio manipulated sound. We know Taylor can sing by now but she tweaks and manipulates her voice, remember, she has sung with T-Pain. “”I Wish You Would” starts like Joni Mitchell with doctored acoustic guitars and then swerves away, “All You Had To Do Is Stay” splices in an operatic up an octave “stay” at the end of each line of the chorus give it a derailed feel. She gets closer to the reality of her feelings by using the studio to play with the sounds. She lets the studio signify.
Two songs later she sings her great pop triumph: “Shake It off” and there are two more triumphs, “Clean” and “You Are In Love’ before the end of the album.
Six songs, “Blank Space”, “Style”, “Out Of The Woods”, Shake It Off”, “Clean” and “You Are In Love” carry 1989 but nothing else is remotely bad, both “All You Had To Do Is Stay” and “I Wish You Would” are sweet earnest and honest and the sort of mid-album sureness of hand Katy “Bad Blood” Perry didn’t manage with Prism. “How You Get The Girl” is a rules for girls thing-y. “New Romantics” an in-joke. All of it is hook driven melodic electro pop but don’t let the form confuse you, this is what Taylor does and the little girls will love it all. It follows a romance storyline on one hand, and an On The Town on the other, tangles em up and leaves em stranded. When it misses, “Wildest Dream” and “I Know Places”, it isn’t a disaster, there is no long girlie shrugs as occurs on Speak Now and Fearless: it is on an even keel. And while nothing here beats “State Of Grace”, let alone “Our Song”, there is nothing as bathetic as “Back To December” or self-serving as “Dear John”.
Seven of thirteen songs are produced by Max Martin· Shellback, two produced with Tedder, two with Antonoff and one with indie Queen Imogen Heap –it comes together though as purely a Taylor Swift production, as the latest in her two year cycle of album making, of living her life, and sharing her life, and studying the intersections between who she really is and who she thinks she might well be. Any reading of that Rolling Stone interview this summer will find a woman living a life so out of everyday experience it is hard to remain centered and people misread her: she uses social media to ground herself much better than Lady Gaga ever did, and she speaks to her audience of teenage to 20 something girls and women very directly and clearly, over the heads of PR handouts and even pop sales (and even me). Two days ago Billboard predicted 1989 will sell over a million copies in its first week.
She deserves it.
With all the clamor around her, the songs are the story, it is ALL CONTENT. The interviews, the reviews, the cover stories, the talk shows, all of it is background noise. The only thing that matters is the music and the music is excellent. Is 1989 more than a masterpiece? It is hard to figure out what will last and the album has a hole where the love story should live: it is about an absence and it is about the why of the absence, and, like the search for god, you can’t prove a negative. It appears to be another story of love lost and the growth that occurs, how it isn’t always a love story. It is always back to that ride in a car where the guy admits to being unfaithful and the girl says “been there done that”. And that is a hard thing to write an album that will last based solely upon. Taylor is prevaricating, or if that suggests telling a half truth I don’t quite mean that, she is studying her heart in comparison to other peoples hearts and working through its universality, through how it reflects in all our hearts.
Taylor suffers a little from Mamet’s “too big for your britches” –nobody can find anything to whinge about so they complain that she brags about her houses. Since there is no real stain, and you try being that rich and that popular and the worst thing they can find to complain about is that you are a serial monogamist and brag about your houses, gwan just try it, The woman is, indeed, an exemplary role model and more importantly…
I go back to the songwriter. She is a great great great songwriter, all producers and musicians really add to her songs are arrangements, she does the songwriting herself. There is no way of denying “Out Of The Woods”, it is one of the great dance tracks and it is a unique paradigm, the break neck verses to the hard swinging spooked out chorus, the operatic “All You Had To Do is Stay”, the deep blue “This Love” and the rinky dinky “Clean”. First and foremost these are great songs.
Will the songs last forever? Maybe a couple will, maybe not, but will they get you through to Jingle Ball? Undoubtedly. The media, the Bob Lefsetz of the world, believe that because they remember an album from 1971, the album is remembered. It isn’t. Pop is ephemeral by definition, it is disposable and it should be, it comes and goes and if it sticks that has much to do with what we imbue it with as with the other qualities it has. Complaining that pop music doesn’t last is like complaining that you can no longer taste an ice cream you enjoyed an hour ago.
1989 is a tragedy disguised as a comedy, it is about what happens when the one thing that matters most to you ceases to be a reality and how you qualify the loss by lowering your expectations. You compromise, you throw yourself at your work, your home, your friends, you shake it up and you shake it off, and you even compromise with the guy and become buddies with benefits and then in the end, the pain isn’t gone, it is just dulled. What I am trying to say is: it is a major theme for a major album. In a shallow pop moment, it has real depth and beauty.
Grade: A
