Scala sees a throughline between this album and its successors, with “Dear John” as a precursor to “All Too Well” and “Mean” as prescient to “Blank Space,” a song that parodies how she’s been portrayed in the media. So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”
I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together. But, to Scala, “the most boring way to think about Taylor Swift is in terms of her biography.”Īt a recent stop of her Eras Tour in Minneapolis, Swift seemed to agree, playing “Dear John” live for the first time in 11 years after delivering this introduction: Women are labeled ‘catty’ when confronting bad behavior, like in ‘Dear John.’”Ī common pastime among Swift fans is to unearth the identities of her songs’ subjects. “Insults are everywhere in music, and men don’t get the same flak for it,” Hirsch says, in reference to “Dear John” and “Mean.” “There’s this idea that women especially are supposed to take the high road, turn the other cheek and all of that, and men can get away with the low road, and they certainly do in music.
“Mean,” a takedown of a rock critic, becomes a banjo-led treatise on antagonism of any kind the blues-y “Dear John” centers on a young woman’s tumultuous relationship with an older man. The Taylor’s Version albums, instigated by music manager Scooter Braun’s sale of her early catalog, represent Swift’s effort to control her own songs and how they’re used - a fitting ethos for “Speak Now,” a record built exclusively of her own voice.Ĭoming a year after Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, “Speak Now” is the moment in Swift’s career where she began to use her celebrity as a mirror to her interior life. “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” released Friday, is the third release of the six albums Swift plans to re-record. The album served as a close document of her nascent fame and future career ambitions, and now, 13 years on, it’s back.
Swift proved her detractors wrong on “Speak Now,” an album that arrived just before her pivot from country’s youngest hope to pop’s freshest voice.
Her 2006 self-titled debut and 2008’s “Fearless” had inspired both acclaim and criticism for her bold bridges and keen lyricism - these are masterful country-pop songs, critics argued, but surely a teen idol wasn’t responsible for them. LOS ANGELES (AP) - In 2010, newly anointed as a Grammy winner, Taylor Swift released “Speak Now,” her third studio album and her first without a single songwriting collaboration.
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