40
The Observer
25.08.19Critics
Pop
Critics
‘Playfulness, tunefulness and wit
in equal measure’: Taylor Swift.
Photograph by Valheria RochaA Swift
return to
past glories
After the hard edges of 2017’s
Reputation, Taylor Swift’s latest album
revisits the catchy pop and romantic
concerns that made her name. But
where does she go from here?
Artist of the week
Taylor Swift
Lover
(Republic)Kitty
Empireand emotional intelligence, Swift
is rather over-partial to obvious
juxtapositions – her lyrics often
hinge sharply on roses and thorns,
sunshine and rain. Daylight , the
18th and fi nal track on this long
album, fi nds Swift waking from
“20 years of sleep”.
But her binaries aren’t always
absolute. You get the feeling that if
the “old Taylor” was “dead” at the
start of the Reputation era, she was
only ever in suspended animation, in
a kind of R&B-adjacent fever dream.
Lover returns to business as usual,
the dramatic pop of 1989 via the
confessionals of Red. Swift is back
in her happy place, writing fi nger-
snapping pop songs about falling in
and out of love, abetted by a variety
of producers, two of whom now
ping -pong regularly between her
and Lorde: Jack Antonoff , producer
of Lorde’s 2017 album Melodrama
and lots of Swift’s last two albums ;
and Joel Little , the midwife to
Lorde’s early work. Trailers such
as ME! – a duet with Panic! at the
Disco ’s Brendon Urie that verges
on a cheerleader chant – and You
Need to Calm Down , a fabulously
pitched takedown of haters, bigotsand internet trolls, have exuded
playfulness, tunefulness and wit in
equal measure.
An album so long is bound to be
a mixed bag. Strong opener I Forgot
That You Existed is a breezy kiss-off
to an old fl ame or, perhaps the whole
Kimye era: “Lived in the shade you
were throwing till all of my sunshine
was gone,” Swift recounts.
By track 11, though, Swift is
hymning her current fl ame , the
British actor Joe Alwyn , who “took
her back to Highgate” to “meet
all of his best mates” on a cringe-
inducing song called London Boy.
This sort of thing might pass on
one side of the Atlantic but, on the
other side, it is redolent of Guy
Ritchie-era Madonna in her tweeds
drinking bitter. (In Swift’s partial
defence, the song expresses a desire
to see Hackney, “not just Louis V on
Bond Street”.)
For every reasonable assumption
of a return to form, however, there’s
the suspicion that Lover might be
at least a partial retrenchment until
Swift decides what to do next. If it
sounds as if we’ve been here before,
it’s because we have. Many of Lover’s
songs are recognisable in structureTaylor Swift is more of a lover than
a fi ghter. The singer-songwriter
doesn’t say it out loud on her
seventh album – the successor to
201 7’s Reputation , an aggressive
record in which she came out
swinging – but it’s hard to escape the
conclusion on a record that Swift
is calling “a love letter to love”. “I’m
in my feelings more than Drake, so,
yeah,” she winks at one point.
Reputation’s murky mood board
went big on snakes, bling and shade
thrown and received, the aftermath
of a highly public feud with Kanye
West and Kim Kardashian West.
By contrast, Lover is a kitsch-
leaning festival of humour, pastels,
butterfl ies and the desire not to be
defi ned by negatives. It is, in large
parts, a hoot.
For a songwriter of such control