If there's a singular, most important turning point in Taylor Swift's career, it's “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. It's tough to talk about something that just happened three years ago and try to explain it as a historical phenomenon, so others may have had completely different experiences, but for me, the release of that song is definitely when I started noticing people becoming interested in Taylor Swift who were previously totally outside her demographic. It was the first time she stepped up and looked like she could compete with artists like Kanye West, Lady Gaga or Beyonce in terms of far-reaching appeal. The difference between “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, a catchy pop song about a failed relationship, and all her previous catchy pop songs about failed relationships is that this one was imbued with humor and a layer of ironic removal that makes it more palatable to people who would normally dismiss that kind of thing. There's an overriding sense in the song that Taylor Swift knows how silly it could come off and decides to play it up and mug for the audience, and that's something she'd never shown before; “Mean” was a funny song in its way, but it didn't go out of its way to puncture the self-importance of the performer.
Of course, it coincided with the last step in a sonic shift that had been taking place over her whole career; none of the elements of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” are remotely country-ish. There's no country accent or drawl, and the guitar riff is chopped up and edited so as to be unmistakably synthetic and constructed. The chorus is an undeniably pop thing – and the rest of Red follows suit. This is what working with Max Martin will do to you. It seems kind of silly that Swift said in the lead-up to 1989 that it was her “first pop album”, because Red is by all reasonable measures a pop album.
More importantly, it's the kind of pop album that makes people stand at attention because they can see something important is going on here. It only took four albums of increasingly staggering and improbable success and record-breaking before people took Taylor Swift seriously and started putting her on year-end lists. Does Red justify that?
For the most part, absolutely. I mean, in terms of crossover pop spectacle it well outshone any of her previous output – racking up three or four huge chart-toppers where previous albums had only mustered one or two each. In terms of being a good album, it's not so titanic a leap, but it's still better than anything she'd released before. There are basically two ways to make a better product – either make your highlights even better or your lowlights more bearable. Speak Now took the latter approach for the most part, delivering some solid album cuts for the first time, but Red does the former, delivering some amazing best-of-the-year caliber pop songs. I mean, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was already probably the best song of her career, but then she goes and matches it with “Red”, “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22” and hot damn no wonder people really started liking her with this album.
And then there are the album cuts, which remain solid even at their worst. The pacing of Red is a bit odd – for the first ten or so songs it alternates ballads with the big pop hits, which has the end effect of being very listenable while at the same time ending up with far too many ballads. And, I mean, I've never been into Swift for her ballads. Someone like me who is as fascinated and delighted by the mechanisms of pop hype and spectacle? No, I'm here for stuff like “22”. That said, for someone who is predisposed to like singer-songwriter ballads, there's a lot to offer here; for one thing, Swift has finally ironed out all the kinks in her lyricism and is capable of spinning layered tales out of carefully-chosen details and imagery. Just listen to the chorus of “I Almost Do” and how it winds through a long, complex train of thought before ending with the rhetorical gut-punch of the song's title. She's finally mastered that aspect of her songwriting and it rewards us with some really deep stories and relatable emotions. And, hey, if you still really don't like the ballads, there's still “Starlight”, which is every inch worthy of being a single but was somehow never selected for that honor. It's a delight – something we album-listeners can have to ourselves and treasure how not-overplayed it is.
Waaay back in my review of Taylor Swift's first album I mentioned that she was in the middle of her “imperial phase”, the part of her career where she can pull off anything and the rest of the radio bends to her whims. I don't know where it will end – and it will, because the nature of the imperial phase is to end – but I know where it began, and that was with the Red era. Finally, with this album, we can look at Taylor Swift's career and say “she has arrived”. And yet the best is still to come.
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