Taylor Swift is Our Best American Songwriter
Here's my very surface level analysis as I process "Red" pre-Adele's "30"
Taylor Swift is the best American songwriter of the millennial generation.
I’ve been saying this all weekend with the rerecord and rerelease of Red. And I really don’t have a well thought-out argument - yet. But she’ll be around for a bit so I have a while to really fine-tune this.
OK, so, I was not a Taylor Swift listener until the New Wave inspired 1989 – I listened to Red after that, when it was considered old news. When the album first came out, I never even thought to stream Red. I only knew it from the singles that were in people’s feeds or at the bar.
Back then in - what, 2012 or 2013? - I feel like there was all this hype about our generation’s “voice,” things people said about folks like Sophia Amoruso, Lena Dunham, Mark Zuckerburg.
Of course now Sophia’s #Girlboss is a joke rather than a rallying cry. We watch “Girls” with a different lens and it’s cringe for a whole new slew of reasons. (OK but I still love that scene of Marnie singing Kanye at the corporate party.) Mark is, well, Mark. We’re still waiting to see where that one goes.
The re-release of Red has proved Taylor Swift’s staying power. It is, simply, a phenomenal album for the American jukebox. Even in 2021.
“State of Grace” opens the race with the shot of a staring gun, followed by the quick pace of “Red”. There’s the beautiful, perfect heartbreak of “All Too Well”. (I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO START WRITING ABOUT THAT 10 MINUTE VERSION.) The pop of “22” and “Never Getting Back Together” are familiar, clearly what Swift had to produce to cross over from country to Top 40 radio.
And really, who can argue with the raw teenage heartbreak of “The Moment I Knew”? It’s an old story that hits hard, and it’s as effective an addition to the American pop songbook as, say, Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”.
And it was like slow motion
Standing there in my party dress
In red lipstick
With no one to impress
And they're all laughing
As I'm looking around the room
But there was one thing missing
And that was the moment I knew
This feels like a story that could be told in a moment in time before we all were glued to our phones and discovering and navigating love through a screen. It’s a very (elder) millennial thing - the last teenagers to grow up without interactions across an iPhone, the last young people to have our heart broken in a public place without an Instagram feed (Mark! Again! Dammit!) to scroll through and distract us or give the impression that we’re just so nonchalant about the whole thing. We were all in that room once and our hands had nothing to hold.
Anyway, I found myself listening to that song in a dark cycling room at the gym to just be somewhere quiet for a goddamn minute and really take in this whole album. (I burned a lot of calories that day.)
Rerecorded as a woman looking back, I hear in Red nostalgia, confidence, even tenderness for the person she was nearly 10 years ago, which fits nicely into this era of continuing to learn and reposition how we interact with the world. And of course the whole project, as an IP rights fuck you, feels current and empowering.
[Googles “1989 Taylor’s Version release date”]
It’s easy to be distracted by the tweets of who a song is about or the radio-pop friendly singles. But, go one scratch deeper, there’s strong narratives throughout and really beautiful words. The Boomers had Paul Simon. Gen X had Bruce Springsteen. We, the millennials, have Taylor Swift. She was trouble when she walked in.
OK so anyway how much longer until Adele?