Pre Midnights, 1989 was my favourite Taylor Swift album. The razor tight hooks, the emotionally charged songwriting, the gleaming production, it still holds up as the most magnetic and catchy album Taylor Swift has ever made. Without question this remains true with 1989 (Taylor’s Version), but it’s also a bit of an outlier among the rerecordings released thus far. Country albums like Fearless and Speak Now were vastly improved by more burnished, expensive sounding instrumentation that added to the organic, windswept vibe. 1989 clearly required a different kind of attention in order to perfect.
The differences in the production show themselves as early as the opener ‘Welcome To New York’. Swift’s voice sounds considerably quieter and more frail, and the huge synth lead is also scaled back. The song might sound more measured and expansive, but at the expense of the magnetism that made 1989 work so well for me when it first came out.
Time has certainly played its part too. 1989 was an album that felt birthed out of a hunger on the part of Swift to prove that she could be the all purpose pop star that we know today. The fact that she’s now reached that goal places these songs in an interesting context. The bad songs have gotten significantly worse when framed in contrast to how much better she would become, and the great songs have gotten better and picked up a cathartic edge when placed in the context of her entire career.
No amount of additional polish can make the drudging annoyance of ‘Bad Blood’ remotely redeemable, and the same can be said of the still cringe-worthy rap bridge on ‘Shake It Off’, but neither of these songs are representative of a majority of the album which is much more intimate and striking. ‘Style’ is the early high point with how the enormous hook erupts off the simmering bass and twinkling synths, ‘I Wish You Would’ remains a highly underrated slice of post-breakup yearning, and ‘Clean’ is a highly accomplished closer that proves that Taylor Swift should seriously cut an EP with Imogen Heap at some point.
But by far the biggest sell of these rerecordings for me has always been the new songs, and while there might only be five of them this time around, they are the best selection of new songs we have got thus far. They can be split cleanly into two categories: the softer, hazier synth pop tracks that tap into more complicated emotions, and the swing for the fences love songs with broad stroke lyrics and radio friendly hooks.
The songs in the former category are both respectably decent (the contemplative ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’ and the tongue in cheek ‘“Slut!”’), but Swift strikes gold when she goes for broke, restraint be damned. ‘Say Don’t Go’ is the most exuberant of the five songs as Swift makes a desperate swing to save a dying relationship, ‘Suburban Legends’ is a larger than life love story with heavy emotional consequences by the end, and ‘Is It Over Now’ is a complicated breakup song asking the question of the precise moment when everything fell apart and became unsalvageable.
All of this speaks to Swift’s versatility as a writer and ability to translate the personal into the universal with extraordinary ease. Midnights still has a stronghold at the top of my personal list of favourite Taylor Swift albums, but 1989 (Taylor’s Version) has consolidated that album’s position at number two.
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