Let me tell you a story. I walked out of the Leicester Square McDonalds, to a beautiful, sunny afternoon. Tourists and buskers everywhere. I’ve been a lot of places in this world. Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, whatever, yeah, and since I was 8, I’ve walked around these monolithic metropolises, yearning for a hand to hold, a neck to nuzzle, a Lover. However, this day, in a Soho I grew up around, my hand was twitching for a hypothetical other. It was holding another hand. Yeah. She was right there, holding her nuggets and my veggie burger in the other hand. We sat, watching people and life walk by. Then, she tore a strip from the takeaway bag, tied it round my finger, smiled up at me and said, ”I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with Paper Rings”, quoting track 8 from my favourite album ever written, which is a bit of a spoiler for what is to come.
Lover is the pinnacle of all things 2019, of all things 2010s, by the artist (and woman) of the decade. Taylor Swift captures pop, timelessly, delivering a one-two punch of nostalgia and fresh youthful hope, sprinkled with just a smidge of smitten for her Lover, Joe Alwyn, her London Boy, as she says. What is she punching, you ask? The patriarchy, but more on that later.
(Fanart of the song “The Man”)
This album is a personal and professional milestone for the 30-year-old, and for the industry at large. It’s squeaky clean, diversely soundscaped and cohesively designed, delivering lush nostalgia and groovy grit in the same package, shown especially well on Beautiful Ghosts and Paper Rings respectively. Sparse arrangements in It’s Nice To Have A Friend and The Archer put her up against Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, and her credited creative input in the production process of all 13 tracks make this album a model of pop done right. She’s listed as producer on all of it, and wrote it all herself, with the help of the sorcerer of sonic sweetness, Jack Antonoff, and the ever-talented engineering of Laura Sisk
This video of the story of how the title track on the album was written reeks of a seamless working relationship honed over three albums, showing a songwriter who wants to be bored and do boring adult stuff with the man she loves.
(Taylor Swift and lover, Joe Alwyn)
The album as a consolidated work is a story told from raw, real life honesty like only Taylor Swift could. She did it first with 1989 (the logo to which is tattooed on my arm), and this album ushers in the new decade by making a statement.
She is a poet in every sense of the word, evoking vivid, personal imagery at every turn, while a majority of her peers get away with well-pandered vagueness.
“the whole school is rolling fake dice; you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes” in Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince perfectly summarises her attitude to life now. Disillusioned
She then, casually slips in a beautiful story of love and loss thereof in ‘Cornelia Street’, listing everything from creaks in the floor, to the exact way she slips her address into conversation at a bar.
She reveals that the first line of Lover was intended to be “We could leave the Christmas lights up til April”, but changed it to January to drive the sense of everyday domesticity she desires, and obviously it does exactly that
She tells the patriarchy to go fuck itself in the wonderland of ‘You Need To Calm Down’, taking a strong political position, and as if that wasn’t enough, she takes on her critics head on in ‘The Man’, in the spirit of Beyonce’s ‘If I were a boy’, listing a bunch of shit men get away with that she doesn’t. The guardian’s This Week in Patriarchy couldn’t do a better job of this focussed listing of inequality of reaction.
But it’s in the tender moments that this album shines for the guiding light in my life it has become. She deals with her mum’s illness with the Dixie Chicks, in ‘Soon You’ll Get Better’, vulnerable as ever. This song is lyrically and musically perfect, and is a pillow-hugging tear jerker made with the ichor of Swift’s almost quivering vocal, adding the smoothest butter with the timeless sweetness of the country group’s harmonies.
“Lover is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated, enjoying a bit of the freedom she won for her cohort”, says Rolling Stone’s Nick Catucci, condescendingly describing a woman who speaks truth to power as ‘liberated’, but toxic masculinity aside, he has a point. She’s grown to this. She foreshadowed it in 1989 but was still not ready. She fought off her demons in Reputation, and can now be the warrior goddess supreme of pop that she has been working to be since she was twelve.
Lover is a concept album posturing as a mainstream pop album and delivers on both ends.
Look, honestly, this album is a masterpiece and the queen of pop has clearly put her heart and soul into it, with every guitar string scar on her hand showing a relentless pursuit to perfect and further her craft. I’ve been laughed at so many times for listening to the ‘Breakup Song girl’ who ‘Plays the Victim’, and this is precisely why she needs to be so literal about overt criticism directed at her, due to her tragic error of being a woman. You let men like the 1975’s Matty Healy moan sensually into a mic about cracking open his girlfriend’s skull and call him a genius. Men in pop and hip hop have found a million ways to write about women and she’s written breakup songs since she was 15 and has 360 million reasons(estimated) to keep at it. We, as a society, refuse to listen to women. We refused to listen to them when we burned them as witches, we refuse to listen to them now when they talk about widespread sexual harassment and I’m not here for it and neither is Taylor Swift. We’ve listened to men for millennia, about everything all the goddamn time. It’s time to listen to women, this one especially.
