Taylor Swift - 1989 [2014]

1989 is fucking amazing. Let's just get that out of the way. It's Taylor Swift's best album by far, and the best pop album since The Fame Monster. If you want to be even more fun and say that The Fame Monster isn't an album, then it's the best pop album since FutureSex/LoveSounds. It's the kind of album that makes you want to go back and reevaluate her back catalog in order to write a series of reviews that position 1989 as the pinnacle of Taylor Swift, toward which they were all progressing. Every single song is a winner. It's paced magnificently. It cuts all of the fat that caused her last three albums to suffer. It's my favorite album of 2014 and damn high up on my list of favorite albums, period.

I could just leave it there – all these reviews were just an excuse to gush about 1989 and I've done that. But let's dig deeper into that, because not everyone agrees with it (some people, somehow, think Red is better than this). The second strand running through my Taylor Swift Review Project has been Swift's ascension as a cultural figure and fixture of the radio. The only place to start with that discussion has to be “Blank Space”. It wasn't the first song from this album released to the radio, but “Shake It Off” felt like a false start and a dead end as soon as it came out (I'd put it as the worst song on the album, personally). It's tough to call right now, but “Blank Space”, right now, as I write this, just feels like it will become her definitive anthem – Taylor Swift's own “Bad Romance”, her “Hey Ya!”, her “SexyBack”. It's as perfectly unique and unmistakably Swift as those previous anthems were unmistakably their artists – it plays to her particular strengths by seamlessly weaving together a complex lyrical conceit into an incredible melody that never feels like it's struggling to contain the turns of phrase necessary to set it up. A song like this only comes across every once in a few years.

But – and I'm going to sound like a bit of a curmudgeon saying this – it's not my favorite song on the album, not by a long shot. I can sure acknowledge its importance in the pop canon, even as my own feelings diverge from it. “Blank Space” is merely one of many incredible songs on 1989. So let's talk about the others, shall we?

First scene – curtains come up, lights come on. “Welcome to New York” is a table-setter. It doesn't have much to recommend it beyond its nice guitar riff and the general air that it could only work as an album opener, because it feels very airy (appropriately enough for a song partially about air travel). Fortunately, it is an album opener, and it does very well for itself. Any other place and it would have suffered. Moving on... okay, it's “Blank Space” again. We just got done talking about this thing. But this is not the same “Blank Space” you hear on the radio – not the “Blank Space” that's been cut from its context and placed in a world of lesser songs to tower over them. This is “Blank Space” at home, among equals and, occasionally, betters. In this new context it's the place where the album really starts - “Welcome to New York” was a held breath and the chorus of “Blank Space” is the release. It feels like a soft reset for Taylor Swift - there's a sense of craft and care over the experience of listening to the album that there wasn't in previous years, where she would just write a bunch of great songs dump them on a CD in a haphazard order. This momentum continues into “Style”, the peak of the three-song run at the beginning of 1989. It's incredible – sassy, catchy, unique. An absolute triumph. Everybody should like this song. It's not even my favorite on the album.

“Out of the Woods” is the first real deviation from the “upbeat-pop” mode of the album, and it's a wonder. It has the heaviest, most pounding drums of any Swift song, and the barely-contained explosive paranoia of the song all climaxes with the whirlwhind chorus – breathless, run-on sentences accompanied by the oppressive synth arpeggios create one of the only songs in her oeuvre that could be described as “atmospheric”. After emerging from the woods we hit sunlight - “All You Had to Do Was Stay” was my first pick for favorite of the album, the best upbeat-pop song yet. The verses seem perfectly explicable: they're like a coiled spring leading up to hit you with percussive force when the chorus comes. But then, when that chorus actually does hit... it absolutely overachieves. In a good way! The way the song gets punctuated with a falsetto “STAY!” is maybe the cleverest production touch on the album. All in all, it's been just an unbelievable run of songs so far.

“Shake It Off” mucks that up a bit. I mean, I like “Shake It Off”. But I only like it. The rapped bridge is embarrassing. It doesn't quite feel like it fits on the album. That's about it, though – the descending “shake, shake, shake” lines that kick of the chorus are wonderful and a kind of melodic trick I wouldn't have expected from Taylor Swift. But it's hard to avoid skipping this one considering how great everything that surrounds it is and how much it pales in comparison. “I Wish You Would”, meanwhile, comes up right after it, and even though I liked that one a lot when I first listened to this album, upon repeated lessons it comes across as too similar to “How You Get the Girl”, but there's some canny track placement, because of course “I Wish You Would” comes first on the tracklisting so it doesn't seem to be an inferior version of anything yet. Plus, it leads off perfectly into the next track.

“Bad Blood” forms a kind of mini-suite with “I Wish You Would”, at least to me, because the last sentence of that track flows seamlessly and immediately into the first sentence of this one. “Bad Blood” is the slowest-tempoed song we've gotten yet, but it's hard to call it a ballad as such – it's loud, big, and dramatic, carried entirely by the overbearing tone of Taylor's voice, but of course at this point she's subtle and precise enough a singer to carry the emotional affect of a song like this. No, the first ballad comes immediately afterward: “Wildest Dreams”. Look, I know I have effusively praised every song on this album to high heaven at this point, but “Wildest Dreams” is just a stunner – one of the three songs that constantly fights for the title of my favorite 1989 track. The dynamics of this song as it starts moving, drawing back, and hammering you with the breathless chorus are absolutely immaculate. I've heard it compared to Lana Del Rey, and I suppose I can see it, but I kind of get the feeling that Lana could never get her mouth around the “You see me in hindsight / tangled up with you all night” bridge without having to significantly slow down – Taylor's melodic sense is far too malleable and sprightly to sit comfortably alongside Lana's endless grey dirges.

We get a more catchy number right afterwards, just to remind us we're still in a land where ear candy matters. “How You Get the Girl” might be the song so far that reaches the hardest to attempt to get stuck in your head, but much of its success is only because it's willing to reach that far. By which I mean that of course it's catchy because Swift can't not write a great chorus. This one is particularly clever – a series of trochees (stressed syllables followed by unstressed syllables) that give it a nice rubberbanding effect. With that we're in for the final stretch of three songs, starting with another ballad! I can't help but wonder if situating two slower, more romantic songs as close together as “Wildest Dreams” and “This Love” are isn't a bad idea, but I think it mostly works because of the ebullience of the song between them. Plus, “This Love” is still totally distinct from “Wildest Dreams”. It's softer, more sympathetic, more relaxed. A lot of its weight is carried by the little variations Swift brings to counterpoint the chorus, especially the backing vocals.

Back in 2010, when the first Hunger Games movie came out, Swift released a song for it called “Eyes Open”. I don't think it's one of her best songs or anything, but at the time it was the first Taylor Swift song I liked, a suggestion that she could move on to really good things. I mention this because “I Know Places”, the next song, reminds me of nothing so much as The Hunger Games – it's dark and dramatic, following a tale of two lovers who are relentlessly pursued by an oppressive and powerful force. Yes, it's about the paparazzi following Swift and all her boyfriends, but she makes me believe it's something more important than that, and so I always just think of the Hunger Games, probably because that connection already exists. I probably get that impression from her incredible singing on the chorus – it's almost certainly her single best vocal performance ever.

And then... “Clean”. This is my favorite song on the album, honestly. I love “All You Had to Do Was Stay” and “Wildest Dreams”, but this is just so unique for Taylor Swift! That's mostly down to Imogen Heap, who co-writes and does backing vocals for the song, and with the plinking percussion seems to have influenced it sonically as well. She's the real MVP of the song, and her voice provides a perfect, tasteful counterpoint to Swift's lead vocals. That, and the fact that it's, atmospherically, so pure and refreshed-sounding (appropriately enough for the title and lyrics) makes it the perfect closer.

“Mitch,” you may ask, “why did you just break down every single song in excruciating detail?” Well, because they're all worth it, as far as I'm concerned. And it's the first Taylor Swift album I can say that about – every single song on 1989 is distinctly great, and they flow together near-flawlessly so that the album passes by in a flash. There's a sense of care and craft here that there isn't on any of her other albums. You really can't ask for more than that – not just from a pop album, but from an album in general.

Taylor Swift is a special artist – in this age of dwindling album sales, her popularity and commercial success only continues to grow. Not even Beyonce could do that for five albums in a row. She's crossed over from being a Disney Channel-associated teen pop star to a legitimate contender for most popular musician in the world (not unique to her, but still impressive). She's racked up so many hits that her cultural gravity seems inescapable, as if anything she does is assured for success. And this is what I mean when I say, as I have several times, that this is her imperial phase. She's critic-proof. I mean, 1989 got good reviews – very good reviews for a pop album, even. But the criticism has absolutely no effect on the fact that this is her biggest album yet, and probably her biggest album ever. What we will remember in 2025 and 2035 is not that 1989 got 4/5 stars in Rolling Stone, a B from Entertainment Weekly, and an A- from Robert Christgau. What we'll remember is that, in late 2014 and early 2015, 1989 was the biggest and most important album in the world. And there's a damn good reason for that.