Taylor Swift Is Angry, Darn ItBy JON CARAMANICA
Published: October 20, 2010
FOR pure star-on-star revenge, “Dear John,” from the new Taylor Swift album, “Speak Now,” will be tough to beat. Six and a half minutes long and flagrantly provocative, it’s a deeply uncomfortable song, its protagonist anguished and violated. “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” she asks. “The girl in the dress/Cried the whole way home.”
John Mayer has brought this out in Ms. Swift, awakening her pain, her ire and her creativity. Rather than write a song in her familiar country-pop mode, she’s written an electric blues, its pealing guitar licks a hilarious and pointed reminder of Mr. Mayer, who’s a master of the style. It’s warfare on the level of Jay-Z versus Nas, Oasis versus Blur, Carly Simon versus whomever. (It might explain why, according to Ms. Swift’s Twitter feed, she and her family were recently debating who “You’re So Vain” was about.)
Of course, this being the coy, evasive Ms. Swift, the name John Mayer is never uttered on this song, just as she didn’t say it during a lengthy interview in Nashville last month, just as she will likely never fully confess that the John of the title is Mr. Mayer, with whom she has performed and who tabloids reported she was involved with earlier this year. Still, whatever he did — or whatever Ms. Swift would like to suggest that he did — must have been brutal:
You’ll add my name to the long list of traitors
Who don’t understand
And I’ll look back and regret how I ignored when they said
“Run as fast as you can!”
“I feel like in my music I can be a rebel,” Ms. Swift said at a quiet restaurant not far from her new Nashville apartment. “I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life. I couldn’t put the sentence together the way I could put the song together.” In interviews she’s like her songs, almost revealing. Her communication about communication is as strong as ever.
Ms. Swift, while wide-eyed and easily awestruck, is prim and difficult to ruffle. She is still sometimes treated with kid gloves, as if she were a child star, but Ms. Swift is an adult now; she’ll turn 21 in December. Still, if this is what this preternaturally wise teen star turned 21st-century multimedia celebrity is developing into, bring it on. She is her own TMZ, “Fatal Attraction” by way of Hannah Montana.
“Dear John” is by far the most scorching track on “Speak Now” (Big Machine), which is out on Monday, though plenty of the rest of the album stings. It’s the most savage of her career, and also the most musically diverse. And it’s excellent too, possibly her best.
“Speak Now” is also a bravura work of nontransparent transparency. “I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do,” she said.
The album touches on many of the major public events in Ms. Swift’s life the last two years — her conflict with Kanye West at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, the sprouting criticisms of her live singing voice, a romantic relationship with the actor Taylor Lautner, rumored dalliances with Mr. Mayer and others — without naming names, relying on fans, critics and tabloids to fill in the blanks.
The great accomplishment of this album, though, is that Ms. Swift is at her most musically adventurous when she’s most incensed. She may not be outgrowing the ethos of tit for tat — righting wrongs is Ms. Swift’s raison d’être — but as an artist, she’s finding new ways to fight back.
This may not have been an inevitability, but it was definitely a necessity. So much has happened in the two years since the release of “Fearless,” Ms. Swift’s second album, that running in place wasn’t an option. Her musical life, which she has advertised as autobiographical since her first single, “Tim McGraw,” four years ago, depends on her version of truth telling. But now that so much of her life unfolds in the public eye, she can’t merely trust that listeners will take her word for things. Hers isn’t the only narrative.
On her first album, “Taylor Swift,” and, to a degree, on “Fearless,” she had little more to do than share her adolescent imagination. Even her darker songs were about poking the hole in the ideal more than any actual trauma. But experience is gaining on her. “This whole apparent growing up that happens,” she called it, with comic dismissal.
In these new songs relationships are no longer fantasies, or neutered; they’re lived-in places, where bodies share space.
“I’ll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep,” she tells an ex on “Last Kiss.” Other beds are in play too. “She’s not a saint/And she’s not what you think,” she spits out on “Better Than Revenge,” seething over losing someone to a predatory woman. “She’s an actress/But she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”
It’s jarring to hear Ms. Swift talk like that, just like it’s jarring to hear the overwhelming distress of “Dear John,” or “Mean,” a response to a vicious critic. “You have pointed out my flaws again/As if I don’t already see them,” she sings, over a bluegrass-influenced acoustic track unlike anything else she’s yet recorded. Like “Dear John” it takes real-world emotional pain and transforms it into clever art, her choice to go more or less unplugged a slap in the face of doubters.
“Speak Now” also heralds the full arrival of her longtime collaborator Nathan Chapman as a first-rate producer, and not just of the pop-country that’s made Ms. Swift one of the most important new musicians of the decade. He sounds equally comfortable with the blues of “Dear John,” the rootsy sound of “Mean,” the pop-punk of “The Story of Us” and “Better Than Revenge,” and the bruised, anthemic arena-rock of “Haunted.”
That range is likely to be Ms. Swift’s new normal, or the jumping-off point for even more experimentation. The Nashville establishment needs Ms. Swift — a multiplatinum superstar who was the first solo female country singer to win an Album of the Year Grammy, one of four she won earlier this year — far more than she needs it, which means there’s no obstacle to her music becoming country in gesture only.
Certainly there’s no country precedent for a song like “Innocent,” her loving, moody scolding of Mr. West, which had its debut at the MTV Video Music Awards in September.
The incident with Mr. West last year was the first time Ms. Swift’s air of invincibility had been punctured. In a moment she went from grateful and glowing to tough and callused.
In the last year especially, she’s become fair game for the tabloids, which have linked her with Mr. Mayer and Cory Monteith of “Glee” in addition to her exes Mr. Lautner and Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers. (Us Weekly is creating a stand-alone issue devoted solely to her, an acknowledgment of her drawing power on the newsstand, and maybe also an act of collaborative savvy on the part of Ms. Swift.)
And after some spotty televised live performances, like her duet with Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards, she’s become fair game for critics too. “I’m always going to care,” she said of the backlash. “There’s never going to be a time where I’m going to be nonchalant or casual.” She still takes vocal lessons, and in an incident documented on the blog of the industry pundit Bob Lefsetz, she personally called him after he’d written negative things.
“One of those fears that I never really let myself think is, ‘Is that good because I’m 18?’ ”
Silence, though, is Ms. Swift’s real weapon. In conversation she picks up threads that suit her mood, letting others go. (On whether she’s a feminist: “I have never really thought about that.”) In concert she stands for long periods gazing doe eyed at the crowd as it cheers her, her quiet a signal to remain loud. Even her virtual presence has down moments. Her Twitter feed was notably silent in the days after the 2009 VMAs. “Sometimes you just don’t know what to say, so you don’t say anything,” she said.
While she’s articulate in song, she admits to struggling with feelings in her day-to-day life. “I can say them at a business meeting,” she said of being direct with words. “But for me, saying them to a person that I really care about in whatever sense, whatever capacity, is a little tougher, because it doesn’t have a first verse, second verse and bridge.”
Ms. Swift still believes in the value of the last word; she’s a far better monologuist than dialoguist. And yet her new adversaries aren’t the anonymous crushes of her high school years, probably thrilled just to be alluded to in song, even with darts. They’re celebrities who want to tell their own stories, and undoubtedly will.
At the 2010 Video Music Awards last month Mr. West was able to steal the narrative back from Ms. Swift. Midway through the show she performed “Innocent,” but he closed the show with “Runaway,” which celebrated his boorishness by poking fun at it. His wit trumped her sobriety, a rare loss.
And that’s probably just the beginning. Maybe Mr. Lautner or Mr. Jonas will someday spill the beans about his time with Ms. Swift on “The Howard Stern Show” or in a GQ cover story. After all, their stories don’t only belong to her, and she can only police her own boundaries.
And certainly something loud can be expected of the logorrheic Mr. Mayer, who is probably already working on his cover version of “Dear John,” or maybe even an answer song.
Asked about the possibility, Ms. Swift appeared concerned. “What do I do now?” she said, her brow furrowing for just a second. “I haven’t thought about this.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/arts/music/24swift.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
