It’s an interesting choice for Taylor Swift to release a Carly Rae Jepsen album the same year as Carly Rae herself. “I Think He Knows” fits just as well on Dedication (Carly Rae’s album from earlier this year, which I wrote a review of but scrapped due to it not being long enough), as it does on Lover. The saxophone on “False God” also would feel at home on that album. The Grammy’s will have a tough time picking the Carly Rae album of the year.
My catty remarks aside, I’m very positive on Lover. I wrote on May 2 in a review of “ME!” I was not optimistic about Lover going in. That initial single was so disastrous I wasn’t sure if Taylor would release another good album “until the 2030s,” although it gets even worse on the album version with the removal of “hey kids, spelling is fun.” But that article proved to be whatever the opposite of prophetic is because, as with Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars, this album is a hit. “ME!” did not prove to be particularly demonstrative of the album as a whole. Lover feels like the 1989 follow up that we’ve been waiting for. Reputation infamously “killed” old Taylor, but Lover proves that the upbeat, lovestruck, slightly surface Taylor we love can rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
Which isn’t to say this is just another Taylor Swift album. It’s not a return to Speak Now and Fearless, it’s an evolution from 2014’s 1989. Steeped in synths and pad-based rhythm sections, it most blatantly follows up that Pet Shop Boys tribute album on the songs “London Boy” and “Cruel Summer,” but the guitar riff on “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” the acoustic ballad with the Dixie Chicks that is “Soon You’ll Get Better,” and the “Holy Ground”-esque rhythm and beat on “Paper Rings” demonstrate that she’s synthesizing what she did on Speak Now and RED with her new sound.
Rolling Stone has published several articles on Lover, the only one of which I read being by one of my preferred writers from them Rob Scheffield, and I think he exaggerates the album when he describes it by saying “It’s her career-capping masterpiece: She touches every place she’s ever visited along her musical journey, and makes them all sound new.” She doesn’t have any of the grand ballads that made Speak Now a masterpiece (although I think there is a lyric that references “If This Was A Movie” on this album), nor is there any of the country influence that was displayed on the self titled album — not even on the Dixie Chicks collaboration — but there is a certain amount of that lyrically. The album is deeply referencing her previous works in ways that long time fans will recognize but still make sense to the casual listener. She builds on all the themes she’s written about before, but now with the maturity of a nearly 30 year old.
If you want a detailed analysis of each song, there’s no shortage of those, and I’m sure there will be 100 more by the time this is published, but here’s a few thoughts about individual tracks. “Miss Americana” requires some close listening. At first glance, as Teen Vogue writer Claire Dodson observed, can seem like lyrically like it’s a superficial teenage romance, but further analysis finds it’s more of a deconstruction of the tropes than a return to them, particularly with that repeating line “you play stupid games you get stupid prizes.” “The Man” is a less powerful feminist anthem than a lot of the Swifties are making it out to be, but nevertheless it’s a stronger social message than we’ve seen from Taylor before. “False God” is another standout track in terms of Taylor playing with heavier themes — although I doubt she’s speaking literally of The Almighty, it seems more a meditation of the cult of love in the greater context of the album.
I’m writing this in the midst of my third listening, and there’s nothing on this album that will match the power of lyrics like “our song is slamming screen doors, sneaking out late tapping on your window” or the memetic capabilities of “She wears short skirts I wear tee shirts.” There is nothing on this album to compete with the unabashed brilliance of “Long Live” or “New Romantics,” but it’s an album of upper-middle tier Taylor Swift songs and is the comeback from Reputation that Taylor desperately needs in 2019.
Lover is out now everywhere.
Elizabeth von Teig is a musician and author living in Brighton, Massachusetts. Her expertise is classic rock, folk punk, and the blues.
“Hello Sunshine” is pretty much exactly what I was expecting from the announcement Springsteen made April 25th, when we all first heard about it. It was billed as a callback to his solo work (meaning Tom Joad and Devils and Dust, Nebraska is so removed and had such a different writing process it sits in its own category,) and it certainly is. The snare drum brushes, the plodding guitar, the way instruments are consistently added at predictable intervals in the song — if they lyrics weren’t so generic, I’d say this is what you’d get if you played a robot those two albums and asked it to create a song replicating them. The only particularly novel thing about this song is the use of strings in a role that would traditionally be filled by Roy Bittan on organ (no word on who is on this album yet), which harkens back to The Rising, the 2002 album he released in between his solo records.
Just before starting to write this, I wondered “what will we think of Taylor Swift in 30 years?” The rock stars of yore did some horrible stuff, but we don’t really confront their fans about it the way we confront fans of contemporary pop acts about their choice in music (note: I’m not old enough to know if people ever confronted Jerry Lee’s fans about that 13 year old he married in the 50s). Time has a way of absolving artists of the details of their careers. Only time will tell if Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande will have redeemed legacies like Chuck Berry or have permanent stains on them like Ike Turner.
