The unprecedented weirdness of Taylor Swift
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Taylor Swift is weird. If you think she’s the greatest pop singer to ever exist, that means she’s weird. If you think she’s too boring to be this preposterously famous, that also means she’s weird. Does the intimacy of her world-beating songcraft make you feel as if she has been singing about your life this entire time? Weird. Or maybe you feel profoundly alienated by her fandom-fluffed aura of total infallibility. Yeah, because it’s weird. She’s clearly some kind of genius, and she’s obviously a brighter brand of superstar than most who came before, but it’s Swift’s weirdness that accommodates all perspectives. It might be her most essential trait, even though her music feels so normal. And that’s weird, too.
Yes, we’re talking about Taylor Swift, composer of the least ambiguous, most widely circulated pop music recorded in this century — a deep catalogue of vivid love songs that remain legible, neat and expertly designed to be fully understood by English speakers everywhere. But can we ever really hope to understand the songwriter? Has anyone in human history rolled out of bed in the morning more famous than her? Better question: Has anyone this revered cared this much about what many millions of strangers are thinking about them on an hourly basis without losing their focus, let alone their mind? These aren’t sycophantic puff-piece rhetoricals. Whenever you encounter a Taylor Swift song, you’re listening to a people-pleaser serenade a dangerously overpopulated planet, and somehow, she still wants more. There’s something unprecedentedly freaky and single-minded about that. Forbes says Swift is worth about $740 million, yet, to our knowledge, she has not used it to buy a pet monkey, or a massive pile of drugs, or a spacecraft, or a secret island off New Zealand. She just keeps making music.
Or remaking it. On Friday, Swift released “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her spirited 2010 album, and the third in a series of painstaking redos after her master recordings were reportedly sold without her consent. So to reassert some legal and financial control over her work, Swift is entrenched in the mind-bending process of re-creating her first six albums, song for song, nearly note for note — with a few shelved songs from each album’s corresponding era affixed to the end. Something feels different about this one, though. Back in 2021, when Swift delivered “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” in a proud one-two punch, it felt like a bold self-empowerment statement, even though it also sounded a lot like homework. Now, halfway through her remake campaign — not to mention more than halfway through the American leg of a summer tour that triggered a historic meltdown at Ticketmaster — Swift’s studio reenactments are quietly starting to resemble something like metaphysics. Dominating the present and owning the future are no longer enough for her.
For someone doing the strenuous work of transforming the deadlocked past into a malleable thing, Swift has been delicate. Listen closely to her original tracks against her revisions, and you can learn a lot about how music’s power resides in its finest subtleties, about how the most minuscule difference in timbre or timing can alter a note’s mood or meaning. Listen more broadly, and you might experience weird little jolts of time travel whenever Swift delivers her tightly wound teenage phrases in her unhurried adult voice. It’s her singing that ultimately makes this new version of “Speak Now” feel slightly softer, slightly richer, a little more spacious, totally fastidious, but never rigid. It’s a replica that breathes.
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And while you’re playing quantum leapfrog, try to remember that “Speak Now” originally landed roughly nine months after Swift’s “Fearless” had won the Grammy for album of the year, the music industry’s most coveted and history-making prize. Swift was 20 years old then, simultaneously stepping into her superstardom and her adulthood. “Speak Now” was an album about walking right up to the precipice of both — something you could hear in the way she eagerly phrased her lyrics ahead of the beat, alert and alive. Flash-forward, and her voice tends to sink and settle into those same words, suggesting that time might be irreversible after all. It’s acute during “Back to December,” a hallmark hit about a shoulda-been love in which the singer’s grown-up voice billows across a refrain where it once detonated. She isn’t living in this moment anymore; she’s remembering it.
And, yes, that means Swift is remembering a song about how it felt to remember something, and, no, that isn’t the most severe scrambling of temporality in this bunch. The new version of “Never Grow Up” finds today’s Taylor reinhabiting her 20-year-old psyche as she sings to both her past and future selves. It’s a lullaby about the preservation of innocence, and hearing the titular refrain roll back around in 2023 induces a sort of nostalgic claustrophobia. Even more sci-fi: “Timeless,” the most magnetic of the unreleased addendums included here, a midtempo ballad in which a teenager daydreams about falling in love in 1958, and 1944, and all the way back in the 1500s. “You still would’ve been mine,” Swift sings from an undisclosed coordinate in the space-time continuum. “We would have been timeless.”
Swift obviously loves to sing about fated love, then, now and then-now. Time is her secondary lyrical theme. But those positions might swap once she has finished reincarnating all six of these albums. Until then, we have at least three worthwhile ideas to chew on. First off, fans, critics and other digital opinion-havers have welcomed these remade albums with rapturous vociferation, praising Swift for improving on perfection, which actually disproves the notion of perfection, so everyone please just chill out a little, okay? Second, these aren’t really then-and-now albums. Swift is giving us two versions of the past: an original yesterday, and a re-created one that’s just technically less old. Having two separate versions of reality to remember can feel destabilizing, or exciting, or scary, or fun, or, ideally, all of the above, so let’s have at it.
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As for the third thing, it comes back to Swift’s conjoined notions of memorialized time and romantic destiny, and if you’re really listening to Swift as she reanimates all of these star-crossed songs about preordained love, you should eventually feel your brain doing somersaults inside your skull. According to the metaphysics of Taylor Swift, the past is entirely changeable. It’s the future that’s fixed. Weird!
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Source: The Washington Post
