Listening to Speak Now when you realize she already found the “country” idiom confining is interesting

Pretty sure Taylor Swift was still a virgin when she wrote Speak Now (the song, at least), because in all that “you wish it was me, you wish it was me (don’t you)” line there’s awareness she’s being a bad girl and that’s part of her appeal, but not that she’s offering to replace the lovely bride-to-be as the girl the guy fucks

God listening to Speak Now, it’s obvious in retrospect where Red came from as the breakthrough moment but still, God

Working on a take on the new Tayswift album and listening to her older stuff for connections and I’m just struck by how subtly charming in Speak Now she throws shade on the “lovely bride-to-be” for uninviting from her wedding the girl who is currently planning to steal her fianceé at her wedding

(it’s okay that she does this, as she’s aware she is not the kind of girl who should do the thing - rudely barging in on a white-veil occasion – that she is right now doing)

(or you can read the whole narrative as a daydream if that’s what it takes to maintain your image of her)

I really want to like Speak Now, but

Okay when I did a Taylor Swift-themed pinball tournament, this album was Bride of Pinbot, because “an album called ‘Speak Now’ about becoming a woman”, obviously. Which is true as far as it goes but more importantly clever; if without that pressure I were to describe it, it’s very much a breakup album as composed by a 19-year-old. And is impressive as such, I’d say its imagined audience is maybe 15-year-olds and Swift’s always been very good at putting songs together in a way that draw on her specific personal experience, play to her specific audience, but still manage to be fairly universal.

“Speak Now”, the song itself, is a girl romance-of-love daydream the same as all the boy romance-of-violence daydreams, where you save them from some crazy threat and they realize you had that in you all the time just keeping it in reserve and finally realize and fall to their knees in indebted awe, and is very well-done as such.

(“Better than Revenge” is a girl romance-of-(social)-violence daydream same way.)

“Innocent” is, like “The Best Day” before it, Swift showing off that she’s brilliant enough to reverse engineer pop culture tropes to speak to the experience of adult vulnerability just as well as actual grown-up Nashville songwriters can. (In part because so many of them draw on a longing for a childhood, um, innocence she still had direct access to?)

For all of the competence, aaaaaaaaaaahhh teenagers, I get it but the me it resonates with is a me I’m not comfortable copping to anymore (without, say, the use/mention distinction I’m invoking here); as far as breakup albums go at least Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous foregrounds your own personal failings in that “take ownership before they can wield it against you” way of manipulativeness that plays to my self-image of mature mastery.