By Juliet Kozlow

Maybe I’m showing my age a little if I say that I’ve grown up with Taylor Swift, but it’s an accurate statement. Through my youth, country was what my parents played because they assumed that hearing about having a good time was better than hearing about heartbreak. That train of thought lasted for about a decade before my mom finally snapped and put in a mix CD consisting mostly of The Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails.

Consequently, I’ve gone through the phases of loving and hating and eventually respecting Taylor Swift. While Taylor Swift’s subject matter is generally fairly vanilla, it at least seems to be laced with some sort of spice on her latest release, “1989.” Although many fans speculate that these latest pop-synth tracks are mostly based on romantic relationships, I pick up on something else.
Swift has realized that her all American image works for and against her- she can safely release albums with a few key singles that pine about boys, take the heat as a female songwriter that appears to write only about her romantic relationship, and then put tracks that analyze the current generation’s interactions with one another in hidden gems like New Romance. Beef track Bad Blood nails for when someone’s bitter about being screwed over.

Welcome To New York is exciting and full of bounce with absolutely no nod towards her country roots. For many high school seniors trying to get comfortable with the idea of spending four years somewhere new, this song will probably headline all of their move-in playlists come next semester. It’s about new experiences and new chances and risks to take and it’s everything that moving to a new school seems to be about.

Blank Space is full of sass and seems to be Swift recognizing how she tends to be used by celebrity boys to clean up their images- but she’ll have fun with it anyways and see where it leads. It’s questionably one of my favorite songs from the artist, from the pen click during the chorus to the fluid bridge. Style shows some influence from Taylor’s alternative friend Lorde in the verses before transitioning back into a generic but enjoyable pop chorus.

Out Of The Woods, linked with Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, Steel Train, and fun., is addictive. Shake It Off, as the lead single, is just as vivacious and entertaining mixed in with the rest of the album as it was in a music video. It’s the song everyone adds to their summer playlist, even though it was released months beforehand, because it’s just that enjoyable.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg[/youtube]

Piste 5, I Wish You Would, and Wildest Dreams seem to go hand in hand- reminiscing over an intense relationship and missing the feeling of companionship. It continues Swift’s confessional style of songwriting, where she bears all her thoughts and feelings on one particular subject before moving smoothly into the next.

How You Get the Girl seems to nod towards her country roots towards the start before blending into pure, fun pop. I Know Places seems to be related to how it feels to be in a relationship under a magnifying glass from the media and how celebrities can disappear for a little while to be with loved ones. Clean, though simple, is absolutely beautiful. The metaphor of calling getting out of something negative like being sober is incredible because that’s often how life works- even when something is bad for us, we might love it so much that it’s hard to let go of.

Wonderland is when the second half of the album picks up from a slight lull. Repetition works in Swift’s favor here and makes the song an earworm with a bridge that builds up for the final choruses. You R In Love is melancholic, hopeful, and sweet and might be the scientific cure for cold hearted humans. New Romance is an analytical song about the way that this generation views, processes, and reacts to different circumstances between social interactions and relationships with friends and significant others.

What’s interesting is on the deluxe version of the album, Swift has included examples of her songwriting process. The three tracks, with a segment of Swift playing an early draft of the song and then talking about how it came to be, shows three separate ways that her songs come together, full of her being open to outside influence but still mostly sticking to what her original idea was.

Do I think Swift is the perfect pop artist? No, but I think she’s a smart pop artist. She’s pulled away from her country roots at the right time to experiment with a very popular, accessible sound that she dabbled with in previous releases. There’s a handful of tracks that have the potential to crossover onto alternative charts while still dominating the pop and top 40. In a blind taste test (sans Shake It Off, of course), I’d bet that a few strictly alternative fans would find their heads bumping along to the album and they’d be pleasantly surprised to discover that what they’d just listen to was Taylor Swift. Or they’d implode. Either way, “1989” is a solid release from Swift in a new genre and if this is indicative of the next step in her career, we’re going to be blown away in a few years.