Taylor Swift’s ascent to maturity has been slow and deliberate. In every song she has made she sweetly croons about love, heartbreak and awkward situations, creating lyrics that consistently and accurately relate to every teenager’s experiences with love in some way or another. In her new album, Red, Swift sticks with familiar ground. Her songs don’t branch away from heartbreak and star-crossed love, but her sound has turned darker, if that’s possible for a woman whose vocal range always sounds like she is lying blissfully in a field of flowers. Swift sings one of her slower songs of the album, All Too Well, “And you call me up again / just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest.”
Paralleling her evolution from country to pop, Swift has transformed from a lovestruck girl to a pickier woman. Breakup and risky relationships replace crushes as Swift adds to the long list of lovers she has trailing behind her. “22,” a possible response to “Fifteen” from her second album, even has her using a sassy Ke$sha-esque voice. Her growing maturity shows as Swift occasionally slips a marriage proposal in her lyrics. “I’d like hang out with you my whole life,” she sings in “Stay, Stay, Stay.”
Duets and collaborations also add more flavors into the mix. “The Last Time” has Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol responding to Taylor Swift’s lines in a breakup tune that surprisingly, despite all the dreariness, works. However, die-hard fans shouldn’t fear too much of a difference from the old Swift. Songs such as “I Almost Do,” “All Too Well,” and “Starlight” still echo her previous albums enough that it takes the listener a while to solidify the fact that yes, these are new songs. The biggest similarity happens in “The Lucky One,” which sounds eerily like the Fearless Platinum Edition track “Untouchable” and may cause a few double takes. Still, although the music sounds as it usually does, the lyrics are above par enough to make fans fearful of Swift reading their diaries.
At the age of 22, Swift has not lost her insight into the teenage mind, which means she will continue to be the pop icon she is today. The stories in her lyrics are not as straight forward, she adds complexity, and because of this they become more relatable as she sings, “I’ve loved in shades of wrong / we learn to live with the pain / mosaic broken hearts / but this love is brave and wild.” No radical change came from Red but Swift has continued her slow transformation into a mature, well-respected singer.
