April 26, 2021, marked two years since the release of ‘Me!’, the lead single from Taylor Swift’s seventh album Lover. Another three singles followed, including ‘You Need To Calm Down’, the music video to which featured a plethora of celebrity appearances, including Ryan Reynolds, Ellen DeGeneres and RuPaul among others. So how did an album that broke a swathe of records and garnered almost universal praise from critics and fans alike end up being a forgotten Swift album?
On the surface, Lover was destined for monumental success. The album contains eighteen tracks, covering every angle of love. The album’s third track, ‘Lover’, is a direct homage to that special person we all seek to find. ‘Soon You’ll Get Better’ is a reminder of the love between parents and children, a song created specifically to address Swift’s parents’ battles with cancer.
The harsher side of love that Swift has built her music empire on is still featured on Lover – ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’ is Swift’s ever-so-familiar reminder that as beautiful as love can be, if and when it all goes wrong, the pain can be immeasurable.
Unfortunately, the convention amongst most Swifties is that the wrong singles and promotional tracks were chosen to demonstrate the album to the public, something that Swift has been guilty of before (who would hide New Romantics on a deluxe version of 1989!?). 'Me!' features Brendon Urie of Panic at the Disco!, a collaboration that made some Swift fans tilt their head in surprise.
On paper, the pop/country mix of Swift’s music and the pop-rock style of Panic at the Disco! doesn’t really work – either Swift would have had to move closer towards Urie’s style of music or Urie would have had to lend his voice to a pop single, which is ultimately the path that was chosen. The result was a rock contribution on a bubble-gum-pop single.
‘Me!’ broke streaming singles at the time of release but is less favourably remembered by Swift fans today, most of whom see it as too cheesy and too incoherent to go down as a truly great Swift single. Although it is a story of love, it’s no ‘Love Story’.
Lover followed reputation, a dark and fierce album where Swift left nothing to the imagination regarding her opinions on media coverage of high-profile spats with other celebrities, in particular her feud with Katy Perry. In an effort to leave that aspect of her life behind her, Swift told Rolling Stone magazine that she wanted to “return to the fundamental song-writing pillars that I usually build my house on” with Lover.
Yet Lover was not a conventional return to the Taylor Swift we’ve become accustomed to, and it paid the price for daring to be different. Yes, Lover deals with love, a synonymous Swift trope. But the kind of love Swift described on Lover was entirely different from anything we had been treated to before.
No longer was Swift penning song after song, album after album, about boys that had broken her young heart. Swift was no longer “that bitch” who took her lovesick frustrations on her guitar and microphone. To the general public, this was not Taylor Swift at all. Swift had never dared be upbeat, even positive, about love before.
Fans initially embraced Lover because it was finally nice to see Swift happy. The majority of the fans’ access to Swift comes through her music, so it was easy at the time to imagine that Swift might go her entire life without finding happiness through love. The album’s first track, ‘I Forgot That You Existed’, is a noticeable shift away from anything Swift had released before – a refreshingly upbeat, almost sassy, and finger-snappy tune that set the scene for the rest of the album.
But even that might have been too much for Swifties – we have become used to a world of easter eggs and hidden messages within Swift’s work to the point of obsession – and while the teasing of Lover before its release was full of the usual hidden messages and symbols, the tracks themselves are, for better or worse, plain and straightforward. ‘The Man’, the fourth track of the album, is perhaps the clearest indication of the less-than-subtle approach Swift took with Lover.
The tragic irony of Lover is that it is a wonderful anthology of tracks. As eighteen individual songs, Lover is a fantastic collection of songs. But together, their message is lost. It almost feels like the tracks could be distributed across previous albums, finding better homes on Red or 1989 instead of being forced together on a new project.
Love as a theme is clear. But Lover feels like an exhausting attempt to cover every single facet of love all at once. The general public could almost certainly no longer relate to Swift with her new attitude to love and indeed, the world. Upbeat Taylor Swift? No such person ever existed. Positive Taylor Swift? Almost unrecognisable.
Perhaps one day Lover will receive the attention it deserves. But while we are currently being catapulted back to the late-2000s as Swift re-records her back catalogue, it doesn’t seem like that attention will come any time soon.
Words: Jack Walker
17th May 2021
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