Lover, cont.
She’s always does densely referential stuff but this is another fucking level entirely, within four bars she’ll reference five of her own different songs, separately in phrasing, meter, vocal affect, beat, and instrumental sound, and ALL THE CROSS-REFERENCES ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE AND ADD DEPTH, it’s fucking insane, she’ll have reference chains that bounce across 5 albums and a decade as if she was planning it all along, and then while you’re absorbing that you’ll get to another track and learn you were being set up for an entirely different reference chain the whole time
A bit ago I was like “why is she riffing off Katy Perry 2012” but that’s a definite decision. On one hand Lover “sounds” like 1989 or Reputation in the same way that Red progressed from the country sounds of Fearless or Speak Now, but on the other there is nothing on the album that would be out of place when Red first came out in 2012
Like her duet guests are the Dixie Chicks and the lead of Panic! At the Disco, there are points where she’s referencing Rilo Kiley, CHVRCHES, Annie and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She uses one of her “I’ll rip off and caricature a rival singer’s style to count coup on her” slots on Lily fucking Allen
After Reputation added “getting drunk” to the Tayswift universe, this album’s vice theme seems to be “gambling”.
It is the most political album she’s ever done yes but of course the endorsing Democrats and You Need To Calm Down videos were a headfake, it’s more “country” in subject matter and style than anything since Red, it directly references Jesus for I believe the only time apart from the 2007 Christmas album
There’s a lot of color imagery with red, blue, and purple (the album’s color scheme, but pastel so it also kinda looks like the trans flag), she is offering herself as the one capable of reuniting the American tribe. There’s an entirely viable reading of the album, from I Forgot That You Existed (if you take that “one magical night” as Election Day) through to Daylight (as the promise of the coming civic peace) as “well gosh, we’ve been going overboard into Too Much Politics and it’s been crap, time to put that behind us”. Though along the way, at several points, if you want to, you can read her as speaking directly to red OR blue tribe and validating them.
We just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace and control our urges to scream about all the people we hate. Time to be what we love.
I love the Tswift fandom because their ravings always confirm what musicians have known since the 90s: that Max Martin is a fuckin genius
Max Martin is the genius, but he’s not involved with this latest album, right?
He did some stuff on 1989; if you were really trying to attribute Lover to some mercenary mastermind male producer it would be Jack Antonoff, who’s co-written with her for a while
She came up through a Nashville system that didn’t have the rockist expectation that performers only perform things they alone wrote, but where performers (and not, say, labels) had more of a curatorial role in recruiting and employing songwriters than in pop; a lot of her early stuff was co-written with Liz Rose
That said, a lot of that is that she’s more of a lyricist than arranger, and this is a very lyrical album (1989 was lyrically thin, it’d be fair to credit Martin with more of that), and the arrangement was clearly done by someone intimately versed in the Taylor Swift catalog