Rolling Stone: Why 'Lover' Is The Ultimate Taylor Swift Album

[RAMROD 96,167]

Why is Lover so much more than just another great Taylor Swift album? Because it’s the one where she’s trying to make all the great Taylor Swift albums, at the same time. She’s closing down her twenties, which she spent making five of the decade’s best albums — Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation and now this one — all released before she reached the age when Leonard Cohen made his debut. (Here’s betting Taylor keeps writing great songs into her 80s, just as L.C. did.) So overdramatic. So true. It’s her career-capping masterpiece: She touches every place she’s ever visited along her musical journey, and makes them all sound new. So overdramatic. So true. She’s had you for 13 summers, honey, but now she wants them all, and she wants to make you fall in love with this magnetic force of an album.

It’s the first time since Red she’s attempted to gather together all the Taylors and sit them down for a summit. But Red was seven years ago, and there are a lot more new Taylors in the mix. 

In Prince terms, if Speak Now was her 1999 and Red was her Purple Rain and Reputation was her Parade, this is her Sign o’ the Times, the one where she shows she can do all her best tricks on one album. Her goopy guitar ballads, her new wave electro-pop, her Southern accent, her English accent, her brilliant ideas, her terrible ones, every corner of her borrowed and blue heart — it’s all here. Practically every song is saturated in her personal mythology, packed with tiny musical and lyrical details for only hardcore fans to notice — love the way she adds a lost glove to go with the lost scarf from “All Too Well.”

For a songwriter who tends to fall in and out of love on a roller-coaster rhythm, Lover is an album about being in love, which is both scarier and harder to write songs about. “The Archer,” “Lover,” “Cornelia Street,” “Cruel Summer” — these are the kind of disruptively, devouringly hyper-emotional ballads Taylor used to write about her fleeting crushes, but it’s a totally different song when it’s about trying to hold on to a real human being (and trying to stay one).

Great songwriters always tend to get introspective when they’re facing 30, whether it’s David Bowie on Low, Joni Mitchell on Hejira, or Al Green on The Belle Album. When I was a little boy, I’d look at Carole King’s wise eyes on the cover of Tapestry and ponder all the adult pain she sang about — but Carole was only 29, the age Taylor is now.

She still zooms into emotional extremes, like in the hilarious way she begins “Lover” by boasting about how she’s wild and carefree enough to leave her Christmas lights up until January, which is (if my math is correct) a week. It’s just like she ended her last album singing about cleaning up the morning after her New Year’s Eve party, which means she didn’t spend New Year’s Day nursing her hangover with an eight-hour Love After Lockup binge like a normal person. Like Reputation, Lover has plenty of acerbic “therein lies the issue” moments, but she dials down the Therein Factor a couple notches to make room for a whole avalanche of emotion. When she takes that vow of eternal devotion in “Lover” — with every guitar-string scar on her hand — the soulmate she’s really embracing is her chaotic self, and it’s an overpowering moment from an overpowering album. All the Taylors, all the time.

 

Full article at Source:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/taylor-swift-lover-album-rob-sheffield-875724/

 

Splendid.

[PeachJug 2,927]

Norman ****ing Rockwell better get this kinda praise 

 

yay for Taylor tho, deserves it 

[Saint Gaga 1,466]

Miss Americana & Heartbreak Prince,Ha impact

[ryhanna 3,507]

It is actually a fantastic album

[Gagaism 8,600]

Miss Americana, I’m obsessed with you girl 

[LeJudas 6,490]

Speak Now sweetie I'm so sorry 

[BBhomemaker 5,611]

18 minutes ago, RAMROD said:

She’s had you for 13 summers, honey, but now she wants them all, and she wants to make you fall in love with this magnetic force of an album. 

Which one of you wrote that?  sis ..

[LeJudas 6,490]

3 minutes ago, BBhomemaker said:

Which one of you wrote that?  sis ..

Idk but they call monsters delusional? How dare they 

[BBhomemaker 5,611]

Just now, LeJudas said:

Idk but they call monsters delusional? How dare they 

F 

[LeJudas 6,490]

1 minute ago, BBhomemaker said:

F 

F

[Wild 1,296]

I really feel like this album is being overhyped. It’s definitely a solid pop album and one of the the best released this year. However, it isn’t that great. Some of the song writing is quite clunky/cliche and sonically some songs really aren’t palatable. I definitely prefer Reputation or 1989 over Lover. I really don’t get why everyone is labeling it as a masterpiece. 

[rumours 45,521]

There were only 2-3 songs on the album that I would voluntarily listen to again. I don’t understand all the praise it’s getting at all. 

[Mitchey 839]

[SchwineLove 1,366]

59 minutes ago, Wild said:

I really feel like this album is being overhyped. It’s definitely a solid pop album and one of the the best released this year. However, it isn’t that great. Some of the song writing is quite clunky/cliche and sonically some songs really aren’t palatable. I definitely prefer Reputation or 1989 over Lover. I really don’t get why everyone is labeling it as a masterpiece. 

not reputation, but Red and 1989 easily trump Lover

[KatieJudasGaga4 67,907]

22 minutes ago, rumours said:

There were only 2-3 songs on the album that I would voluntarily listen to again. I don’t understand all the praise it’s getting at all. 

Which songs?