When I first listened to 1989, I was greatly underwhelmed. I was on a pop high after discovering E•MO•TION (Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album) and Dedicated (Carly Rae Jepsen’s fourth studio album) and was looking for another pop album to obsessively listen to. 1989 is decidedly not as good as those albums, so I moved on and never really looked back. Even after listening to the rest of Taylor Swift’s discography, 1989 remains as one of my least favorite albums of hers. Yes, it is the Taylor Swift album, the album that propelled her stratospheric rise to stardom, but it also feels like her album that doesn’t have an identity of its own, an awkward transition between her country roots and Billboard Top 100 pop. This isn’t to say 1989 is a bad album, far from it. It’s a remarkably consistent album (at least if we pretend “Bad Blood” doesn’t exist) and has an all time great in “New Romantics”, but it doesn’t stand up against the slow, therapeutic ballads of Folklore, the pure emotional catharsis of Red, or the authentic self expressive portrait of Speak Now, at least in my mind.
Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Through all of the calamitous, radical changes in my life, knowing that the same album that underwhelmed me two years ago still underwhelms me now is oddly comforting. There’s a sort of serenity and calmness running through the album, depicting a more mature Taylor Swift. Where the original album art shows a postcard with an obscured Swift on it wearing a shirt with seagulls, the new one shows her happy, outside, hair blowing in the wind, seagulls flying above her. Taylor Swift has found peace within herself, finally content with her lifetime of achievement (including, apparently, going for the world record of carbon emissions), and this energy runs through the album for better or worse.
On one hand, the resentment that shines through in the originals is missing – the new mixes are fine, but when Swift says lines like “Why’d you have to go and lock me out when I let you in?” in the original, she truly, genuinely means it. On the other hand, it’s this calmness that allows her to pull the ballsy move of making a song called “Slut!” a mild, placid love song – a strange dichotomy, but it makes lines like “And if they call me a slut/You know it might be worth it for once” feel like the most romantic thing an artist whose entire oeuvre is filled with sappy love songs has ever said . 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is a bold reimagining of her iconic album, trading in the kinetic energy of the original for something more meditative – time will tell whether this move holds up in the future, but for now, it’s a move from an industry juggernaut that seems to be paying off commercially and critically.