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Watch the way she pivots from past to present tense in that shattering bridge, making the pain of the memory immediate - that perfect sleight of hand. Swift was always popular music’s most gifted memoirist but here she breaks the fourth wall it’s a song about memory, but more than that, it’s a song that interrogates the ritual of remembering. Plaid shirt days and nights spent dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light turn to scorched-earth agony. “All Too Well,” the album’s best offering and her finest work as a songwriter, is a portrait of lazy autumn afternoons in bucolic upstate towns it starts as a love song, spangled with heart-scratching details, and then you sit back and watch as it curdles in her mind’s eye. No, the beating heart of Red are the songs Top 40 never touched. Songs like these are a forever summer, and on them Swift sounds more youthful than she did when she was an actual teenager. “I Knew You Were Trouble” sounds like the biggest song in the world being played underwater, that breathless dubstep-lite bounce a middle-finger to country-radio programmers, and it’s impossible, too, to resist the millennial pink fizz of “22” and its neutered naughtiness, like the soundtrack to shoplifting from a suburban Claire’s.
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The greatest moments on Red aren’t the obvious ones. Certainly “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is an unimpeachable smash, and it too is a case study in hyperbole, from that extra “ever” in the title (in the title!) to the high drama of Swift groaning, “This is exhausting.” Red marked the first time that Swift teamed up with the Swedish writer and producer Max Martin, and her work with Martin and acolyte Shellback made the hooks catchier than they’d ever been before. There is a lyric on the opening song, “State of Grace,” where she sings, “This is the golden age of something good and right and real.” What a statement - the unabashed grandiosity of it. It captures the experience of being young and coming into your own emotional power, the way that opens you up to both elation and anguish, and how volatile it can feel to swing from one extreme to the other. And while there are cases to be made for all of her records - the precocious perceptiveness of her debut and the sonic cohesion of Fearless and the singular authorship of Speak Now and the razorlike clarity of 1989 - in this house we stan Red. That’s why she’s my favorite pop star: Nobody feels things more fiercely.Īnd that’s why her Red is her best album, because it’s the album where she most effectively lays bare her emotional life in all its messy complexity. Say what you will about Swift but she’s never half-assed expressing her feelings, or feeling them. That’s an intense thing to say, but Taylor Swift is pretty intense, right? She always has been - even in the beginning, when she was accusing a flattering beau of lying to her face in the opening lyrics of “Tim McGraw.” And now, all these years later, she’s still out for blood on the clattering “Look What You Made Me Do,” her most menacing song yet - and this is an artist, remember, who once characterized herself as a “nightmare dressed like a daydream.” Yet those of us who love her do so not despite this quality but because of it this relentless pursuit of the highest and most deeply felt emotions, desire and rage and joy and disillusionment and regret and abandonment and wild irrational love. Not when listening to it is like boarding a time machine to a moment when I was on the cusp of adulthood and everything felt broken and this album whispered in my ear, Same. Now, a few years later, it would be easy to hide behind a veil of disaffected impartiality, or to temper my enthusiasm, but this is the truth: As good as Red is - and it’s really good - I don’t have a mite of critical detachment to evaluate it on its merits.