Lover
Taylor Swift reminds me of Laura Palmer: all amped up subjectivity in a world that sees you as an object to possess and destroy, that wants to kill you so it can worship your corpse. This album is her Fire walk with Me - after a window into her world of massive social power, abject structural powerlessness, the pain of self regard, despair, identity uncertainty, and dream of escape, an encounter with the real causes her to take responsibility for herself as an agent in the world and ultimately refuse to be possessed by the spirit of negativity that has characterized her experiences. The whole record feels like an escape, but not from (as she is always on about) but to.
On a second listen, @kontextmaschine is right about the culture war stuff… the project of this album is to depict a woman becoming comfortable with herself, being able to be a partner and settle down, and healing sickness which is literal (her mom’s cancer), mental, celeb-cultural, and within America. It envisions getting the guy, knowing yourself, embracing the haters, and bringing the tribes together as the same act which, like I said, is sigil magic, which the ending of the album attempts to heal the world as she knows it. The model for this is her now 3 year successful relationship, which she tries to pull the other aspects in line with. It also reminds me of the end of this season of Legion, where the world is part of someone’s mental landscape, and that person must heal to fix the world.
The lyricism of the later tracks on the album seem different than her usual output. There has been a structure to her songs - the verses are the “it’s like this” of it all, and this can be exuberant, jokey (she likes a good absurd undermining of common phrases and puns), or impressionistic, the chorus dreams and desire, and all the movement (the heavy lifting) is in the bridge, the resolution of the is/aughtta be dialectic. The most common such movement is escape from. I haven’t dug deep enough to support this, but it seems there has been a grammatical passivity and subjectivity in her lyrics, an avoidance sounding like an actor in the world. This happened, I felt like this, my action is reaction, why can’t my dream appear, why not run. The end of this album is more assertive grammatically and doesn’t relegate a happy ending to a nonthreatening dream state. It says “I am going to have this.”
The album is really about fear of death and what to worship, and the answer is to give yourself over to synthesis: of identity, with a lover, with the world. Ignore things that push apart, or at least tell them to shut up. Find yourself through the religious ecstasy of union, and make of everything one body (which, yeah, isolated body parts are as common in her work as that of Paul, but the religion being in your lips, the alter in my hips is pretty much amazing the way it draws together community, worship, committed love, being a stage performer, and oral sex). There is a dark night of the soul fractility, nicely shown in the last 4 tracks which are “Afterglow” (not as an end for once), a song about accepting herself, a song about love as friendship, and “Daylight.”
This album is the sequel to 1989 and Reputation is just a thing that happened that this album addresses as subject matter and isn’t really in dialogue with ( at least not any more than a songwriter with pronounced ticks can avoid). At the moment, I still like 1989 better, but the song craft on this one is still emerging to me. It’s kind of a country album, with many references (I see Ryan Adams and Rilo Kiley as the strongest referents, and a real persistence of marching band instrumentation) and it needs to sink in a bit.
Yeah I think you’re right on the country referents. In an album where she folds all her old stuff back in, she seems to be taking the Ryan Adams version of 1989 on an equal plane as her own. And while she’d obviously at least heard Jenny Lewis by the time she did The Lucky One, Lover (the song) is produced to sound like Take-Offs and Landings. Honestly she was getting a bit alt- to her country already in Red, or at least Laurel Canyon – You said you never met one girl/Who had as many James Taylor records as you/But I do – which made sense for the “LA” theming