By Eleanor Grant

Few artists do nostalgia quite as well as Taylor Swift, and her latest project, a re-recording of her 2008 album Fearless, has proved just that. It might be odd to think that fans, new and old, are so excited about listening to an album that is over thirteen years old and even stranger that they are looking forward to the re-release of her 2012 album RED in November, but with Swift, looking back and reflecting on the past is often the best recipe for success. While the re-recordings of her first seven albums are ultimately a response to the ongoing legal battle with her previous record label over the rights to her masters, they also provide an opportunity for Swift to do the thing she is very best at: the art of reinvention.

Swift, like the snake symbol she embodied in her 2017 dance-pop album reputation, has shed her musical skin at least nine times over. Her 2005 self-titled debut was a product of her Nashville roots, oozing with southern charm and tales of teenage romance, with the occasional nod to some of country music’s biggest acts (the lead single Tim McGraw being the most obvious). Fearless followed shortly after with bigger, more powerful songs about the beginnings and, more famously, endings of relationships. At nineteen she wrote Speak Now, an album, above all else, about growing up. Hindsight is a major theme, with Swift lamenting on past mistakes in her remorseful Back to December, and mistreatment in the scathing and personal Dear John. The album not only marked a crossroad in Swift’s life, but also that of her fans. Though we had not experienced her meteoric rise to celebrity, or the increasing media scrutiny she found herself faced with, we could relate to her mistakes, and her honesty in admitting them because so many of them were our own.

Up until this point, Swift was known and acknowledged as a country artist but everything changed with the release of RED, her first pop album. It was in this album that Swift wrote about lasting, adult heartbreak, and the pain of wanting someone, even though you know it can only end badly. She captures the mess of young adulthood in a few words – happy, free, confused and lonely – and encourages the listener to embrace loss, rather than turn it into a lesson like Speak Now might have done. The beauty of RED, and perhaps the reason for its commercial success, is in Swift’s ability to write with the kind of breath-taking honesty that sounds insincere from others. We are allowed access to some of Swift’s most intimate memories of her relationship, and are reminded of our own in the opening State of Grace, (‘We are alone, just you and me/Up in your room and our slates are clean’), while the 5-minute epic All Too Well is a crushing journey down memory lane, where Swift doesn’t react, only reminisce, (‘Maybe we got lost in translation/Maybe I asked for too much/But maybe this thing was a masterpiece 'til you tore it all up’). In true Swiftian style, she always gets the last word, and reminds her lover, in the way that all of us might wish to, that these memories are shared, (‘Wind in my hair, you were there, you remember it all/Down the stairs, you were there, you remember it all’). RED was distinctly grown-up, a far cry from her previous songs about Romeos, fairy-tales and white horses. Swift was learning, as we all do, that relationships are rarely so neatly tied up are they are in the movies.

Still, there was pressure on her to turn the wheel once again and with 1989, she did just that, making the, often career-ending shift from country to pure 80’s inspired synth pop. What’s more, she made it look easy. Moving her base from Nashville to New York, Swift took her listeners into the heart of the city, filled with ‘loud heartbeats under coats’ and a love that never quite settles. Swift grapples with her image more so than ever before in 1989, and plays on the public’s perception of her as a serial dater in Blank Space and Shake It Off. Though fans don’t share her struggle with the scrutiny celebrity brings, we do contemplate the way others see us, and Swift’s observations about her own faults resonate. The sound is upbeat, but the lyrics are increasingly anxious. ‘Are we out of the woods yet? Are we in the clear yet?’ she asks in Out of The Woods, while in I Know Places, she and her lover are foxes on the run from hunters. Her private relationships had simultaneously never been more public, and the pressure on Swift to write so personally, to find things that would keep listeners interested, was immense.

If 1989 is a self-conscious album, then her follow up reputation is even more so. Following her year-long disappearance from the limelight, Swift re-emerged to play the part of the villain the media had long been portraying her as. The heavy house and dance influences on the album allow Swift to tap into the darker emotions none of her previous albums had allowed her to, jealousy, obsession and lust to name but a few. In reputation, Swift takes a bat and swings it at every last hornet’s nest, warning her enemies that she might forgive, but she won’t forget, (‘And I bury hatchets/But I keep maps of where I put ‘em’). Reinvention had never been more literal for Swift than when she announced herself, or rather ‘the old Taylor’, dead on lead single Look What You Made Me Do. Never before had she strayed so far from the limits she thought were constraining her artistically. ‘Be new to us, be young to us’, she rattles off in documentary Miss Americana, ‘but only in the way we want, and reinvent yourself, but only in a way that we find to be comforting but also a challenge to you’. reputation certainly achieved this. It remains her most contentious album, but it is undeniably her boldest. It is the work of someone who is tired of being told what she is, and is using her voice to tell us just that. It is ultimately left to the listener to decide the final verdict on Swift’s version of events, and her lyrics speak for themselves. ‘There will be no further explanation’ as the album’s prologue states, ‘there will just be reputation’.

With her 2019 album Lover, Swift wielded her pen in a way she hadn’t before, to write on all things political. Politics being famously off-limits for country artists, a PR-trained Swift had long avoided speaking on the subject. However, for an album called Lover, she ironically spends a lot of time addressing hate and bigotry. She touches on LGBTQ+ rights, misogyny and the increasingly polarised political landscape in America. All of this she does in a way that is heartfelt and concerned. There is an urgency to her lyrics in Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, (‘American stories/Burning before me’) while You Need to Calm Down is Swift’s response to bigots and internet trolls everywhere, (‘Control your urges to scream about all the people you hate/'Cause shade never made anybody less gay’). Post-reputation, Swift had never been more self-aware, and The Man touches on her own experiences with misogyny and the double-standard in the music industry, (‘I'm so sick of running as fast as I can/Wondering if I'd get there quicker/If I was a man’). The question of why she, like so many other female artists, feels such pressure to reinvent like clockwork, remains a powerful one. Yet Swift’s remark that women in the entertainment industry are often ‘discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35’ sadly, is explanation enough.

Since 2006, Swift has been nothing but consistent, releasing an album every two years, and though fans in recent years have come to expect the unexpected, nobody could have predicted how she would use her time in quarantine. The release of Folklore, and its sister record Evermore less than six months later took everyone by surprise, and none more so than Swift herself. ‘In the past,’ she tweeted ‘I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning.’ These albums are Swift at her very best, intimate, vulnerable and nostalgic, but instead of the confessional first-person narrative we have come to expect, she finds voice in an ensemble of characters, each one struggling in isolation. There’s the teenage trio caught in a love triangle, a reckless socialite who becomes the talk of the town, a soldier reeling in the aftermath of war and a pair of estranged lovers who can’t quite understand how everything went so terribly wrong. It’s recognisably Swift, particularly her references to the Romantics (borrowing the invisible string imagery from Jane Eyre and making mention of William Wordsworth in the lakes), but it’s something entirely different to her back catalogue. In these characters, she has found a medium to tell the stories it seems she’s always wanted to, without losing a part of herself to them. It’s Swift in her element, and if these efforts are anything to go by, it seems she’s not finished changing her colours just yet.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.