Taylor Swift - Fearless [2009]

Fearless is not a big revolutionary step forward all at once, because I don't really believe Taylor Swift has those. They're more incremental steps and evolutions of sound that were always inevitable. Case in point, Fearless has her first two big crossover singles with “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me”. While “Our Song” did get picked up on mainstream radio stations, there was still a distinct sense that she was still a country artist first and foremost; it's here that she becomes a pop star, even though it would take until Red for her to finally shake off the last of the country roots in her sound.

Since this is her first pop crossover, let's examine that most sacred of all pop artifacts: the big singles. “You Belong With Me” is the one that I prefer less, so let's start with that. Swift retains the great production from the last album on this one that leads the choruses to hit with a huge and thrilling impact, but the big difference is that she's finally crafted a hook that is worthy of it. Considering that she would later hone so well her world-conquering confidence in songs like “Blank Space”, it's interesting that “You Belong With Me” expresses the opposite of that; 2008 is possibly the last time in her career that she could get away with positioning herself as an underdog, much less that the song's spark would come from that scrappy resolve - fighting, and succeeding, in attempting to win its subject (and, simultaneously, the audience) over.

“Love Story” has all the strengths of “You Belong With Me”, but replaces its nice-girl lyrical mugging for a more wistful and enchanting chorus, and it's the first song, at least I feel, where it's easy to get caught up in Swiftworld – the unique and undeniable gravitas she exudes. Although I wasn't so taken at the time it came out (I was a bitter teenager), certainly a lot of people were taken in by its Romeo & Juliet-referencing chorus. I saw a lot of people snarking and running around trying to remind everyone that, no, Romeo & Juliet wasn't really a true-love story, but can you blame them for feeling like they need to? For the length of the song, Taylor Swift really makes everyone believe it.

The rest of the album is a bit of a thornier proposition; it's generally strong throughout the first half (“Fifteen” was worthy of being a single, even though it feels more like her past than her future, and “Breathe” is an incredibly mature and graceful ballad that most certainly feels like what she would go on to do), but the problem comes after the eighth track, when it fades into a bunch of blah. Generally listenable blah, but at 53 minutes Fearless has a feeling of fatigue and “when-will-this-be-over” that never plagued the 40-minute debut.

But in a sense it's unfair to judge a pop album by its filler cruft; the point is the singles, and even though Taylor Swift would eventually ascend to the point where she delivered great albums that just happened to have songs on them that dominated the world, at this point it's more than enough that she's delivered two likable singles and secured her commercial success against being just a flash-in-the-pan. This is where she became someone who would stick around and become important.