THE PITCH
I fear the time has come for your Swiftification…
The album I’ve elected (after much deliberation) is Taylor Swift’s Fearless (originally 2008, re-recorded in 2021). I'd recommend you listen to both versions of the album, but the 2021 ‘Taylor's Version’ should be your main daily listen so you're not giving Scooter Braun the streaming dollars. (I’ll let your research for the week explain the re-recording thing rather than hashing it out here…)
On to the pitch… This is the album which made Taylor Swift famous and which made us fall in love with her music. She tells gorgeously crafted coming of age stories over catchy and tuneful country pop. Highlights include the singles Love Story and You Belong With Me, but Fearless also has really great deep cuts – Tell Me Why and Hey Stephen, and of course my personal favourite Taylor song possibly ever The Other Side of the Door (one of her best bridges!). Nostalgia is definitely a factor to how beloved this album is, but the music’s quality and Taylor’s skill as a storyteller is definitely apparent even this early in her career. To hear the songs with her stronger vocals on the 2021 re-recording is a treat – especially on songs like Fifteen which really benefit from the added maturity. To understand Taylor, you have to understand Fearless.
(My only caveat is that I think with the exception of Mr Perfectly Fine, the ‘From the Vault’ songs added for the 2021 re-recording are actively bad and should have stayed in the drafts, but I’ll let you make up your own mind.)
Livia Nicholson
MY RESPONSE
I’ve been waiting for Taylor Swift from the beginning of the year, dreading it a little, if I’m honest because I don’t want to hate something that is so beloved to my daughters. From my first listen of Fearless, I get while it feels nostalgic for you girls: I remember you playing this, singing along, as soon as any of you were interested in music. I remember nine- or ten-year-old Els and her best friend Alisha acting out Love Story in just the same way as they’d acted out the apple scene in sync with Disney’s Snow White aged five or six. Such a lot of this is perfect, relatable teen girl fodder, full of those deep feelings that seem like everything when you’re going through them or wishing you were, all packaged up in clever sticky lyrics that catch and churn around in your head. There are images that come round and round again, lovers who ‘shine’, so much rain. The songs that work best tell succinct stories with specific details that make them memorable: short skirts/t-shirts, high heels/sneakers in You Belong with Me; throwing pebbles/crying on the staircase in Love Story; ‘All those other girls, well, they’re beautiful/But would they write a song for you?’ in Hey Stephen. The songs that work less well lyrically do so because they’re not specific enough, Change, for example, and Untouchable. Sometimes it feels like TS is just not trying hard enough.
I like the way TS’s conversational singing style makes it easy to follow the stories she’s telling and I think she captures emotions pretty flawlessly. In Fearless, the lines ‘It’s the first kiss, it’s flawless, really something/It’s fearless/Oh yeah’ are gorgeous. I think she does something interesting in The Way I Loved You, contrasting the sweet, gentle sound of the ‘perfectly fine’ man with the big, thrashing sound of the ‘screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain’ man. Generally though, I find her voice bland and the music is bland too. Occasionally there’s something that you notice in the music, the humming at the beginning of Hey Stephen, the pianos and strings on You’re Not Sorry, is that a banjo I buried in Tell Me Why? – but it’s not enough and it gets drowned out quickly.
I listened to both versions, as you instructed, but the nuance was lost on me. Perhaps the original sounded a little rawer which suited the songs better, but I wonder if that was just because I was expecting to sound that way. Since you gave me both versions on actual physical CDs, I got to compare sleeve notes too and I thought the images on the original were hilariously on the nose!
I’ve tried each week to listen to something else by the artist and with TS I thought I’d listen to Folklore, one of the two albums that she worked on with Aaron Dessner from The National, because Sleep Well Beast has been one of the highlights of my listening this year. I have to say, I wish you’d given me Folklore to listen to instead of Fearless. I still don’t love Taylor’s voice, but there’s so much more to the music and there are stories here I’ll come back to. I understand that now I need to listen to the companion piece, Evermore… Oh my! Am I going to end up a Swiftie?
WHAT ELSE I’VE LISTENED TO THIS WEEK
Mekons Horror
Elvis Costello My Aim is True
The Wombats A Guide to Love, Loss and Desperation
Yo La Tengo I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
Violent Femmes Violent Femmes
The Cure The Head on the Door
Paul Weller Stanley Road
Dire Straits Making Movies
Mekons The Curse of the Mekons
The National Sleep Well Beast
The Jam Setting Sons
Taylor Swift Folklore
I SAID WE SHOULD GIVE YOU FOLKLORE!!!