99. Taylor Swift, "Red"

 


Taylor Swift releases so many albums that this was like EIGHT albums ago, and it's from 2012!  She has another one coming out in a month!  Taylor Swift was put on this Earth to make everyone who's even moderately lazy feel like a huge loser.  Or maybe that's just me.

Taylor Swift is so motivated that she RE-RECORDED this album and released a new version last year, so she could sell her own version instead of the masters that had been sold to an evil holding company.  (This review will be about the original version, since that's the one on the list).  

So as most everybody knows, this is the album where Swift left country behind and starting branching out into more pop and electronica-influenced stuff.  There are still some songs with pedal steel and gently strummed acoustics and the other indicia of country music but this is certainly not a Country Music Album.  There are some good songs ("22," "Starlight," "Stay Stay Stay"), some great songs ("State of Grace," "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"), and one truly momentously great song, "All Too Well," a song with a melody so perfect it's the kind of thing you stumble on as a songwriter once in a lifetime, maybe twice.  (Pitchfork called it "maybe her own 'Tangled Up In Blue,'" and I'm not sure I can disagree with that.)

And while she gets some help (a lot from Liz Rose, who co-wrote "All Too Well"), she is the primary songwriter on the album, really a monumental achievement for a 22-year-old.  She started working with some different producers on this album, and you can tell; there is a lot of new ground being covered here.  Some of the stuff is a little too overproduced for me; a song like "22," which could have been a sweet little song about growing up, gets the full Max Martin pop bomb treatment, and it feels like a lot.  (In the more recent Taylor's version, it's still a big pop sound, but toned down a little, thankfully.)

And then there's stuff like "I Knew You Were Trouble," which starts like a pop banger and then transforms into a dubstep-lite synth jam.  It's got great bones as a song and Martin gives it his usual sheen.  There's also a duet with Ed Sheeran that, unsurprisingly, is not one of the album's high points.

I'd heard "We Are Never Getting Back Together" and "All Too Well," but the rest of this album was new to me and it was such a pleasant surprise.  

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Can I take the re-recorded "Taylor's version" from last year?  If so, yeah, give me that one.

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