“I remember when we broke up. The first time.” Taylor Swift is a serial dater and nowhere is it more apparent than on her records. She’s made an entire career out of songs about her former relationships, to the point where one can’t help but wonder, why do guys still date her? Her newest album, Red, focuses on one specific relationship while hinting about some former ones. She’s dated a Jonas brother, John Mayer, and is currently dating a Kennedy and that’s just a short list of the public relationships she has written about, but this album is mostly about Jake Gyllenhaal, supposedly.
Over the course of her career, Swift has become America’s sweetheart, but at 22 she seems to have developed a bit of an identity crisis. Half of the album is filled with songs geared towards her dedicated teen girl fan base and the other half is a confusing mix of adult songs and acoustic numbers that don’t seem to know what age they are. She channels artists like U2, Coldplay, Colbie Caillat and Katy Perry and it all leads to an album that, while good, is lacking. From the first song till the last, the album never gets a chance to gain any traction, in fact the theme goes something like: UPBEAT SONG, slow/acoustic number, UPBEAT SONG, slow/acoustic number, rinse and repeat. In between songs “22” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a brooding song called “I Almost Do” and it breaks up the momentum from a cheesy, age themed pop song to a song about not wanting to call some guy who she “bets is thinking about her.” There’s no manual for putting together a good pop album, but it shouldn’t be all over the place like it is here.
The whole “I’m going to write a song about how so-and-so dumped me” has become an old hat for Swift and she continues to do it a lot on this album, but mixed in is the odd love song. Each of Swift’s albums seem to be alternating in themes, between falling in love and breaking up. This is definitely the break up album. If there is one thing that has been apparent through Swift’s career it is that she can write a great pop song and in fact, has gotten better at it as she’s gotten older. The first single and big hit thus far, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is one of her most simple and yet one of the best songs she’s released as a major single, save for “The Story of Us”. The lyrics are relatable (check the first box off on “How to write a song like Taylor Swift”): the line “you go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me,” is an inevitable and prophetic line on any college campus, thus making it that much more relatable. On top of that the break down in the bridge where it sounds like she is on her cell phone with a friend is such a typical conversation, even guys have probably had it. Mix it with an upbeat, catchy hook and you’ve got yourself a hit song. It’s more of a dance song than anything she’s released before, but that’s what happens when you employ producer Max Martin, who is responsible for hits by Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry and countless others. One of the negatives for most of the pop songs on here is that they all start to sound like other artists songs, but they’re just different enough that you can’t quite place your finger on it.
The song “22”, which she apparently wrote for herself and her friends, borders on such a fine line between parody that it’s almost hard to take seriously. It’s the perfect Avril Lavigne outtake actually, with a giggly/yelping repeated line “I don’t know about you but I’m feeling 22”. One should hope so, she is in fact 22 after all, so congrats for feeling like your age! The down side is while it sounds like an Avril song, it sounds like Avril Lavigne circa 1998 run through an ‘NSYNC filter with a heavy dose of silliness. She tries to make fun of hipster girls and pokes fun at herself, which is fine and all. It’s clearly not a song for a guy, it’s an anthem for the college girl crowd, while sounding like it’s geared towards a 13 year old. Identity crisis.
The more sad songs, like “All Too Well”, which is about Donnie Darko himself and how he gave her back her stuff when they broke up (via a phone call) but kept her scarf because it “smells like innocence”… Right. That sounds super creepy and awkward doesn’t it? Plus at this point there’s hardly an innocent thing about her, she rips through guys like Lindsey Lohan rips through lines of coke.
There are two songs on here that work more than the others and it’s probably because they are songs that she co-wrote with far more established and better songwriters. The first song “Treacherous” she co-wrote with musician/songwriter/producer Dan Wilson (Semisonic) who co-wrote/produced one of Adele’s biggest songs, “Someone Like You”. A writer like Dan Wilson is what Swift needed, specifically someone to say “no” to her more ludicrous ideas. Because of that “All Too Well” is a cute song that grows into quite a beautiful one. The song deals with her falling for someone that is out of her usual comfort zone, hence their relationship is treacherous. Will the song be a big hit? Probably not, but it’s one of the best songs on the whole album because while it’s her usual fare, it’s restrained with beautiful vocals that builds to a larger song while keeping those beautiful and longing vocals in check. Keeping Swift reigned in is hard, she has a tendency to jump to big songs quickly and the transitions don’t quite work, but here it does. Wilson steers the song in the right direction and it’s a quirky song that’s deserving of praise.
The second song is “The Last Time” featuring Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol. In fact, this song sounds like it belongs on a Snow Patrol album and not a Taylor Swift album. Lightbody is the first voice we hear in his quiet baritone and then he and Swift share the chorus and swap off verses from there. If there is one thing she’s gotten good at is singing with other people (witness John Mayer’s “Half of My Heart”) and their voices blend well together here. The song slowly builds and becomes a big sweeping beautiful orchestral song in the vein of “Set Fire to the Third Bar” from Snow Patrol’s Eyes Open. On these two songs she has to step up because the people she’s working with are pretty well respected, there is no slouching with them. She also works with Ed Sheeran though it’s to a lesser effect than the other two songwriters, Sheeran doesn’t carry the clout that Wilson or Lightbody do and his songs fall mostly flat. Swift is known to have issues singing live, she’s an artist in need of auto-tune as are most country musicians (whether they need it or not, talk to any engineer in Nashville and they’ll quietly nod their head) and on a lot of these songs she’s going to have to either sing in a more appropriate key or use auto-tune live. This is an album that begs to be performed live (as are most of her albums) but this is probably her biggest and loudest album yet, to the point where she sounds like she’s yelling on some tracks.
The final verdict? It’s a good album. Swift is shedding the country pop princess banner and embracing the pop princess crown. It’s a largely good album that has moments of greatness but falls short of perfection. Due to the nature of the songs she walks a fine line between being a bitch and being a sincerely broken hearted girl and she bounces back and forth between both sides and doesn’t seem to know where she wants to go. She jumps from relationship to relationship and each one inspires a new song, out of the twenty that she said she passed in, sixteen are presented on this version of the album, but it’s inevitable that there will be a “Deluxe Version” with the missing four songs. Thanks to its length Redsuffers from the standard “great first half and mixed second half” that most albums suffer from, essentially after the pop hit, smack in the middle of the album. The second half songs are like the skits that come after SNL’s “Weekend Update”, decent here and there but it’s okay to stop and go back to the other songs. If you like Taylor Swift, you’ll like this album, it’s a good step in the right direction of growing up, but she keeps one foot firmly in what made her famous in the first place, innocent, cutesy songs. Something new and something used.