FEATURE:
All You Had to Do Was Stay
Taylor Swift’s 1989 at Ten
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RATHER than feature and discuss…
IN THIS PHOTO: Taylor Swift attends the 49th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on 6th April, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Polk/ACMA2014/Getty Images for ACM
the Taylor’s Version release of 2023, I want to feature the original 1989. Released on 27th October, 2014, it is a few weeks or so until the tenth anniversary. One of the biggest albums of the 2010s, did those listening to Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album release it would be seen as one of the most important and best albums of the decade?! That the then-twenty-four-year-old would go on to be this modern icon. Enjoy huge tours and grow to be the biggest artist of the modern age. There are signs of that promise through 1989. A creative jump from 2012’s Red, 1989 was perhaps the highest-rated and acclaimed album of Swift’s career to that date. Since then, she has won huge reviews for albums such as folklore (2020) and Midnights (2022). I am not sure how Taylor Swift will mark the tenth anniversary of 1989 later this month. Following a dispute over the ownership of her back catalogue, she re-recorded her first six studio albums that were previously released by Big Machine. Swift then owned the masters and substituted Big Machine’s. One cannot deny that 1989, in both forms, is a supreme work! One of the producers on the album, Swift included synthesisers, programmed drums and electronic backing vocals. It was a departure from her previous work. Talking about complex and broken relationships, the subject matter was deeper and perhaps richer than her albums before. Ones that relied more on acoustic arrangements. I am going to get to some features around 1989. Most of the reviews you will see for 1989 are for the Taylor’s Version edition. I have found a few reviews for the 2014 original. An album that was number one in many countries, including the U.K. and U.S. I guess many have reappraised and reframed 1989 after Swift re-recorded it in 2023.
In October 2014, The New York Times provided their take on an exciting new album from Taylor Swift. One that said goodbye to her Country beginnings. Whilst she has not completely abandoned it, 1989 did seem like a step more into 1980s Pop influences. I kind of think of artists like Madonna who can bring in Country elements on albums like Music (2000), but also conquer Electronica and a range of influences on Ray of Light (1998). Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) being more Disco-inspired. Swift is an innovative artist who does not rest and is fascinated by different sonic and production possibilities. Framing her lyrics in different ways to maximise their impact and relevance:
“Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, “1989,” which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which “1989” has almost nothing in common with. Modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she’s not immune.
Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn’t do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period — the mid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid. That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.
That Ms. Swift wants to be left out of those debates was clear in the video for this album’s first single, the spry “Shake It Off,” in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.
See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.
In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse.
It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.
But it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. In Nashville, she’d learned all the rules, all the back roads. Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. That’s “1989,” which opens with “Welcome to New York,” a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: “Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.” (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow.”)
Ms. Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now”; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight.
On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.
The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. But there’s barely any loucheness in Ms. Swift’s voice. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. Martin and his fellow Swede Shellback. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what’s notable here is their restraint. (Mr. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Swift’s old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced “This Love,” a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country.
There are a few songs in which production dominates: the two songs written and produced with Jack Antonoff (of fun and Bleachers). “Out of the Woods” and “I Wish You Would,” which burst with erupting drums, moody synths and sizzling guitars; and “Bad Blood,” which has booming drums reminiscent of the Billy Squier ones often sampled in hip-hop.
But these are outliers. Ms. Swift has always been melody first, and if she wanted to give herself over to a producer and sound of the moment, she could have gone several different, more obvious routes, or even stayed in country, which is as hip-hop inflected as pop is these days. (For the record, there are a few sort-of-modern phrases sprinkled through the lyrics — “this sick beat,” " mad love” and the chorus of “Shake It Off,” where she squeaks “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” — though they are mostly there to underscore just how out of place Ms. Swift sounds singing them.)
But by making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars — aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach — even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who’s waging, and winning, a new war, one she’d never admit to fighting”.
Before getting to a couple of reviews, I want to come to a feature from Stereogum. They offer up different angles and perspectives on 1989. I think this was the first Taylor Swift album I discovered and heard. Ahead of its tenth anniversary, you can feel its influence today. Maybe Swift re-recording it recently has compelled a new wave of Pop artists. Distinct nods to 1989 on the current scene. Even if some would argue it is not her very best album, it is definitely one of her most important:
“Every one of her albums sounds like a lesser artist’s greatest-hits album; 1989 makes her five for five. Swift’s albums aren’t singles-plus-filler; they’re singles-plus-potential-singles, and the songs that never dominated the radio are just the ones she never got around to releasing as singles. Swift’s voice is an instrument capable of both colossal uplift and soft empathy; she’s kept the lost-little-kid openness that made her so appealing in the first place. 1989 gleams and shimmers the way all her past albums have gleamed and shimmered; they’re just playing around with a new set of stylistic toys. But she’s using those toys to deceptive ends. On first listen, 1989 sounds like the resistance-is-futile robo-pop hydrogen bomb that Katy Perry’s Prism tried and failed to be. And it is that. But it’s also a concept album, a ’70s singer-songwriter-style song cycle about the beginning and end of a relationship. On her last album, Swift was lyrically bragging about how many James Taylor albums she owned. This time around, she’s not showing those records off, lyrically or musically, but she’s quietly emulating them.
Most of the songs on 1989 seem to concern Harry Styles, the most visible member of One Direction, who Swift dated a while back. She never names him, or even alludes to his name, though clues are there if you want to mine for them. (She makes constant reference to a car crash; she’s probably really alluding to a serious snowmobile crash that she and Styles apparently once got into.) But the specifics don’t matter as much as the subtle but genuine arc that the LP traces. It starts with excitement and play and intrigue, and it blossoms into something deeper around the time “Out Of The Woods” kicks in. But things turn bad quickly, and most of the album is Swift dealing with a breakup. She gets fire-eyed pissed on “Bad Blood,” cajoles on “I Wish You Would,” provides an exact roadmap for how to rekindle things on “How You Get The Girl.” By the time closing track “Clean” kicks in, she’s convinced herself that she’s OK with the whole thing, that she’s ready to move on.
The trick with this whole concept-album thing is that all the songs stand on their own; they don’t depend on the album’s narrative (which, to be honest, I could just be making up anyway). First single “Shake It Off” (probably my least favorite Swift song ever, at least if we’re not including the “Santa Baby” cover from the Target-exclusive Christmas EP she released a few years ago) is Swift’s stab at “Mickey” or “Hollaback Girl” or “London Bridge” or Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” — the chanty brat-out that recasts Swift as a mall-pop auteur while at the same time cheerily snarling at haters and making self-deprecating jokes about Swift’s own dancing ability. (Seriously, “Shake It Off” is doing too much.) Heard in the context of the album, though, it’s her early attempt to act like the relationship never really mattered that much to her, before a sadder reality kicks in. “Style” is the song for the inevitable Target ad campaign, if that’s what you want it to be, but it’s also a horny plea for a fling to become something bigger. “Bad Blood” could be the Katy Perry ethering that wags are already calling it, but the lyrics could just as well be directed at an ex. “I Know Places,” coming so close to the end of the album, isn’t just a whispered crush song; it’s Swift’s attempt to blame the relationship’s end, retroactively, on the paparazzi who wouldn’t stop hounding the couple. And then there’s the album-opening “Welcome To New York,” a tired thinkpiece subject even before the city of New York named Swift its Global Welcome Ambassador.
Since Swift dropped “Welcome To New York,” self-righteous New Yorkers have been clogging up my Twitter timeline making jokes about it. Swift is now a jet-set oligarch using the city as a cultural signifier without thinking about what that means. I’ve seen people link the song, in vague ways, to rising police brutality and apartment rents. If you think as Taylor Swift as a brand, a song like “Welcome To New York” another indicator, like another DIY space shutting down or another corporate chain opening a flagship store in Williamsburg, that New York is not what it once was. But if you think of Taylor Swift as a human being (which is what she is), then “Welcome To New York” is a song about moving to New York. And as someone who once moved to New York, I find the song weirdly, terribly moving. Swift moved to the city in April. She’s 24. I moved there when I was 25 and at least as clueless about it as Swift seems to be. The song is a little thin and underwritten, sure; “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats” should not be the second line on your blockbuster pop album. But its Human League bleep-riff does something to me, and so does the wide-open wonderment in Swift’s voice. I felt a bit of that same feeling when I moved to New York.
The crucial distinction is that the other feeling in there — the whole oh shit, I’ve eaten Ramen every night for months and I’m still falling into deep debt thing — isn’t there. It makes sense. Swift is richer than God, and the Russian landlord who won’t fix your ceiling leak is not a part of her New York experience. She is singing about what she knows. (There’s empathy in there too: “You can want who you want / Boys and boys and girls and girls.” There’s nothing radical about that sentiment, but she’s spent her life in exurban Pennsylvania and then Nashville, and she’s amped about the idea that people can be who they are in her new hometown. It’s sweet.) Really, it’s smart for the city to snatch up her endorsement now, before the year-two ugh, fuck this place feeling sets in and she can’t convincingly feign enthusiasm for the word “bodega.” And in the album’s larger story, “Welcome To New York” isn’t about a boy, but it is about a sense of possibility, of that idea that you can do whatever you want. It creates a context for a time in your life when, say, falling in love with the guy from One Direction might start to look like a good idea.
That whole relationship-based album structure allows Taylor to do some new things with her persona, finding new wrinkles for a character that’s been established for years. She’s grown-up now, and she’s not singing about high school crushes anymore. She never sings directly about sex, but she at least alludes to the idea that she could be fucking in ways that she’s never been comfortable doing before. And she also plays around with her tabloid image as someone who’s desperate to keep a relationship together but who just can’t do it. On “Blank Space,” for example, she has fun with the idea that she’s really secretly a maneater, someone who absorbs lives completely but temporarily. “I can make guys good for a weekend,” she cackles. Or “I’m dying to see how this one ends.” She knows it’s ending. She doesn’t care.
The album’s structure, though, is less interesting than the building materials she’s using this time around. After all, there have been many, many relationship-centric concept albums with more to say about the ways people fall in love than 1989. But it’ll be a while before we hear a collection of polished steel hooks that gleam quite like this. Now that Taylor is no longer making cosmetic attempts to sound country, even a little bit, she’s openly announcing herself as a polyglot for the first time ever. And it’s fascinating to see her absorbing a new set of influences and using them as raw material. 1989 is named after the year of Swift’s birth, but she also intends it as an homage to late-’80s pop music.
She’s mentioned Madonna and Annie Lennox as inspirations, but there’s more 1989 going on on 1989. “Clean” is a Richard Marx power ballad sung more sweetly than Marx could ever manage. “I Wish You Would” has more of that classic Edge guitar tone than anything on U2’s own new Songs Of Innocence. “How You Get The Girl” has a Debbie Gibson sparkle to it. Pop music in 1989: disco and new wave and Prince’s Minneapolis sound had all been fully integrated, Latin freestyle had helped lay a foundation for the NKOTB-style teen-pop that would follow, craggy rockers like Don Henley and Tom Petty were playing around with keyboards and getting a whole lot richer by doing it, and acid house and rap were just starting to make mainstream-pop inroads. There was a pop mainstream in 1989, but it was in a messy and interesting place. If there’s a pop mainstream in 2014, that mainstream belongs entirely to one person, and that person is Taylor Swift. She’s the whole of it. And she’s in a messy and interesting place, too.
But even as she pulls in all these things from outside, she is still doing Taylor Swift things with them. Consider, for example, “Wildest Dreams,” which has Swift adapting Lana Del Rey’s phrasings so baldly that it has to be intentional. If “Wildest Dreams” is Swift’s Lana Del Rey song, though, it’s still a Lana Del Rey song that Lana Del Rey would never record. She would never rewrite Madonna’s “Live To Tell” as a 2017 prom theme, and that’s what Swift does here. Del Rey might not ever write a song this obviously, crushingly catchy, either”.
I am going to move to some reviews for 1989. Upon its release in 2014, Rob Sheffield sat down with the album and provided his thoughts for Rolling Stone. Such a truly fascinating and compelling artist, you can really see how far Taylor Swift has come in the past decade. In 2014, she was this artist on the edge of something truly wonderful. I think 1989 was the start of this transformation and realisation. Revolution and revelation from the biggest artist of her generation:
“When Taylor Swift decides to do something, the girl really knows how to overdo it. So on her fifth album, when she indulges her crush on Eighties synth-pop, she goes full blast, spending most of the album trying to turn herself into the Pet Shop Boys. 1989 is a drastic departure – only a couple of tracks feature her trademark tear-stained guitar. But she’s still Taylor Swift, which means she’s dreaming bigger and oversharing louder than anyone else in the game. And she still has way too many feelings for the kind of dudes who probably can’t even spell “feelings.”
Swift has already written enough great songs for two or three careers. Red, from 2012, was her Purple Rain, a sprawling I-am-the-cosmos epic with disco banjos and piano ballads and dubstep drops. But as every Eighties pop star knew, you don’t follow one epic with another – instead, you surprise everybody with a quick-change experiment. So rather than trying to duplicate the wide reach of Red, she focuses on one aspect of her sound for a whole album – a very Prince thing to do.
Max Martin produced seven of these 13 songs, and his beats provide the Saturday-night-whatever soundtrack as Swift sings about the single life in the big old city she always dreamed about. In “Welcome to New York,” she finds herself in a place where “you can want who you want/Boys and boys, and girls and girls.” She hits cruise mode on the floor in “Blank Space” (“I can make the bad guys good for the weekend”) and the hilariously titled “Style,” where she swoons, “You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye.”
The best moments come toward the end, when Swift shakes up the concept. “How You Get the Girl” mixes up the best of her old and new tricks, as she strums an acoustic guitar aggressively over Martin’s expert disco surge. “This Love” brings back her most simpatico producer, Nathan Chapman, for the kind of tune that they were just starting to call a “power ballad” in 1989. (The precise equivalent would be Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You.”) On the killer finale, “Clean,” English singer Imogen Heap adds ethereal backup sighs to Swift’s electro melancholy (“You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore”).
If there’s nothing as grandiose as “All Too Well” or “Dear John” or “Enchanted,” that’s because there wasn’t meant to be. 1989 sets the record for fewest adjectives (and lowest romantic body count) on a Swift album. Most of the songs hover above the three-minute mark, which is a challenge for Tay – she’s always been a songwriter who can spend five minutes singing about a freaking scarf and still make every line hit like a haymaker. But if you’re into math, note that the three best songs here – “How You Get the Girl,” “This Love,” “Clean” – are the three that crash past four minutes. This is still an artist who likes to let it rip. Deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic, 1989 sounds exactly like Taylor Swift, even when it sounds like nothing she’s ever tried before. And yes, she takes it to extremes. Are you surprised? This is Taylor Swift, remember? Extremes are where she starts out”.
I will end with a review from The Guardian. Even if some critics were a bit mixed and unsure in 2014, a lot has changed since then. Considering the re-recorded version of 1989 and Taylor Swift’s other albums. The fact that 1989 has influenced so many other artists and albums since 2014. I really love 1989. It is an album with no filler in my opinion:
“At 24 years old, Taylor Swift inhabits something of a unique position within the teen pop firmament. It’s not merely the fact of her immense popularity, although the sheer devotion of her fans can sometimes knock you back a bit: earlier this week, when Swift released a track consisting of eight seconds of static to iTunes – alas, the result of a technical malfunction, rather than a radical new power-electronics direction influenced by Right to Kill-era Whitehouse and Genocide Organ – her fans in Canada bought it in such quantities that it went to No 1. It’s more that Swift’s music attracts the kind of serious critical attention afforded almost none of her peers. You don’t get many learned articles in the New Yorker about the songcraft of Swift’s mortal enemy Katy Perry. No acclaimed noveliest has felt impelled to take to the pages of Salon to defend the fact that he doesn’t like Jessie J, which Rick Moody did after expressing a dislike of Swift.
On one level, that is irrelevant. What do the vast majority of Taylor Swift fans – the tweenage Instagrammers to whom Swift, according to her ghastly record company biography, represents a “loyal friend, fierce protector of hearts and one of the world’s greatest ambassadors for the power of just being yourself” – care whether their tastes have been anointed by the New Yorker? But on another, it’s intriguing: what is it about Swift’s music that causes it to be singled out in this way?
At first glance, her fifth album doesn’t offer any obvious answers. 1989 has been widely boosted as being Swift’s first pure pop album, the record on which she finally divests herself of the last remaining musical vestiges of her roots as a teenage Nashville star. But that isn’t saying much, given that you’d have needed an electron microscope to detect any last remaining vestiges of those roots in its predecessor, Red. Much has been made of Swift as a self-contained singer-songwriter, but this time around the credits look pretty much the same as the credits for every big pop album: representatives from Scandanavian hit factories (Max Martin, Shellback); a moonlighting member of a mainstream indie-rock band (Fun’s Jack Antonoff); an EDM producer chancing their arm in the world of pop (Ali Payami); the omnipresent Greg Kurstin, of Lily Allen, Lana del Rey, Ellie Goulding and Kylie Minogue fame.
Given the cast list, you would expect 1989 to be an extremely polished product, which it undoubtedly is. Even its least interesting tracks sound like hits, which is what one pays Max Martin for: at its best, 1989 deals in undeniable melodies and huge, perfectly turned choruses and nagging hooks. Its sound is a lovingly done reboot of the kind of late 80s MTV pop-rock exemplified by Jane Wiedlin’s Rush Hour. It’s bold enough in its homage to take on one vintage sound thus far avoided by 80s revivalists – the booming, stadium-filling snare sound that all artists were legally obliged to use for the latter half of the decade makes a reappearance on I Wish You Would – but not so slavish as to preclude everything else: I Know Places is powered by drum’n’bass-influenced breakbeats; single Shake It Off pitches a My Sharona-ish beat against blaring hip-hop synths; the alternately pulsing and drifting electronics of Style and Clean mark 1989 out as an album made in the wake of Random Access Memories and Cliff Martinez’s 2011 soundtrack to Drive.
But the really striking thing about 1989 is how completely Taylor Swift dominates the album: Martin, Kurstin et al make umpteen highly polished pop records every year, but they’re seldom as clever or as sharp or as perfectly attuned as this, which suggests those qualities were brought to the project by the woman whose name is on the cover. As a songwriter, Swift has a keen grasp both of her audience and of pop history. She avoids the usual hollow platitudes about self-empowerment and meaningless aspirational guff about the VIP area in the club in favour of Springsteenesque narratives of escape and the kind of doomed romantic fatalism in which 60s girl groups dealt: the protagonists of I Know Places don’t end the song being pulled lifeless from a mangled car wreck, as they would have done had the Shangri-Las been in charge of proceedings, but they sound like they might, quite soon.
She also has a neat line in twisting cliches until they sound original. Shake It Off takes as its subject that great latterday pop bugbear, the haters, but avoids the usual line – the rather brittle insistence that their presence has somehow contributed to the artist’s inner strength – in favour of suggesting you just ignore them. If you were the kind of person wont to describe pop songs as “meta”, you could apply the term to How You Get the Girl, a knowing checklist of the kind of love-song platitudes that Swift’s peers might easily punt out with a straight face. If Wildest Dreams bears a hint of Lana del Ray, there’s something hugely cheering about the way Swift turns the persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend on its head. Ramping up the melodrama by way of Be My Babyish drums, Wildest Dreams paints the man as the victim, doomed to spend the rest of his life haunted by what he’s carelessly lost.
“The drought was the very worst,” she sings at the outset of Clean. It’s not just that this is a pretty striking line with which to open a pop song, it’s that you can’t imagine any of Taylor Swift’s competitors coming up with anything remotely like it. Whether that’s because they couldn’t be bothered – you’d have to be hard of hearing to miss the distinct, depressing air of will-this-do? that currently runs through pop music – or because they just couldn’t is debatable. Either way, on 1989 the reasons she’s afforded the kind of respect denied to her peers are abundantly obvious”.
On 27th October, it will be ten years since Taylor Swift released her incredible fifth studio album. Look at album ranking features such as this by Rough Trade, where they put 1989 first (“This album stamped a moment in time so perfectly and found me at the height of my teenage years where it felt like there was nothing but freedom and future ahead. I like to think that Taylor was feeling the same. Her graduation into pop music was immediate, armed with the powerhouse lead single Shake it Off engineered by pop legends Max Martin and Shellback, one of 3 number one singles that helped secure Album of The Year at the Grammys. The authenticity of the 1980s production combined with Taylor’s masterful one-note melodies and sense of rhythm creates a sound that is familiar and fresh at the same time, like it is literally at the edge of one decade and leaping into the next. These songs are crafted without leaving anything on the cutting room floor, like every detail belongs exactly where it is. It’s impossible to pick a favourite song because they’re all just so good”). Maybe reacting to Taylor’s Version, NME ranked it number one this year (“1989’ is a masterclass in how to make a timeless pop record. Here Taylor sacked off her country roots and embraced full-blown pop. Working with a who’s who of trendy producers and writers (Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, Ali Payami alongside indie darling Imogen Heap), she crafted a collection of glossy belters, that flit from fluffy dance-pop (‘Shake It Off’) and sophisticated electronic-tinged bops (‘Blank Space’, ‘Style’), to glorious indietronica (‘Out of the Woods’, ‘Clean’).
Stuffed with ‘80s influence, it also saw a step up in Swift’s song writing, with her sharp, pithy lyrics feeling refined and sleek, hook-laden melodies dominating the entire record. It won a mantelpiece of awards – including the Grammy for Album of the Year – but perhaps even more impressive is the fact it’s already left a massive impact, less than a decade after it was first released. And with the release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ we have the chance to dive back into this world, the sparkling sonics sounding better than ever. From the cinematic instrumentals of ‘Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)’, to from phenomenal “From the Vault” tune ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’ (which includes brilliantly Swiftian eye-rolls: “Now that we don’t talk/I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/or that I’d like to be on a mega yacht”), it’s a welcome trip down memory lane. The songs are as fresh as they were when first released in 2014 with the choruses still getting embedded in your head. In short: ‘1989’ is Taylor Swift’s masterpiece”). GQ and Cosmopolitan had different takes on the album and where it should fit in the ‘best of’ Taylor Swift. As you can see, there are people who think 1989 is the best Taylor Swift album. If they prefer Taylor’s Version, they still nod to the original and how it is this magnificent work. Pop that is near-perfect. Ten years after its release, and it still feels so fresh and relevant. The title referencing the year Taylor Swift was born, it could have been an album that was stuck in 2014 or would go out of fashion or sound dated. As it is, this incredible album from a global superstar will endure and inspire…
FOR years to come.