'1989' | Every Single Album: Taylor Swift

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The Home Depot Dream Baths built here. Hello and welcome to every single album Taylor Swift. I'm Nora Princioti. I'm a staff writer at the Ringer. I'm joined by Nathan Hubbard and we are here today to talk about 1989, which to me is Taylor Swift arguably at her biggest her most world domination phase everywhere, doing everything, bringing more and more people into the fold all over the place. Ness so Nathan, can you contextualize for me because I think it's really important just how big this album was at the time it was released.

I don't know that I'm in the best place to make that judgment, but my experience.

I was trying to be very polite about it, but maybe a little bit. My God. I just. I think that's probably for me to ask you. But what I will tell you is that my experience with it is to prove your point. It's very current because, yes, that album, as she's moving to New York on her own and. And hanging out with all her girlfriends. I was in college when this came out. Like, it feels very much like growing up and becoming independent and just being so excited about all of that. So it feels very topical to the time in my life when it came out, and I think the time in a lot of her fans lives when it came out, because you could just go dance to this album. You could just put it on and have a great time.

Shake it off. Shake it off.

Yes. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this Album and Fearless are kind of these, like, supernova album moments for her. And those are two records where they are for groups, they are for singing together and being together, too. And the tour is such a big deal for this album, right? Because she calls it the 1989 World Tour. She's taking over the freaking universe.

And everybody's coming with her. Everybody's coming up on stage. Mary J. Blige is there. Natalie Mains is there. She's got Alanis. She's got Justin Timberlake. She's got Avril Lavine. Like, the group is in its best moments, at least, so wide open. And her universe has just blown wide open. And we know what comes after that is that it actually kind of implodes, too, a little bit. Because she was just everywhere. She was everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. She was in Diet Coke ads, she was partnering with kids. She was partnering with American Express. She was, in hindsight, perhaps, overexposed. Well, but she was absolutely everywhere. It even feels a little bit silly to just quantify it with the metrics. But it debuts at number one. It's at the top of the billboard 200 for 11 weeks. It sells over a million copies in the first week. The label didn't think it would. She did think it would. She was proven right in that Shake it Off blank space and bad blood are all number ones. The tour grosses 181.5 million. It's just, just, just massive. And yet I don't even feel like those numbers really, really get the whole thing, because it was just.

And why did I get that wrong?

And there's some rough edges of that everybody's included thing going on. We will get to that. But at its best, that was the joy of 1989 and still is. I mean, it's hard for me on certain days. This is my favorite Taylor album. I think on most days it's not, but it is the one that I go back to probably most often because the songs are just incredibly listenable and fun.

1989 is her birth year, so she's basically telling people, I am being reborn here as a pop star. And she sets the scene with welcome to New York, which is not a song I particularly like, but she still says, which is important. It's a new soundtrack. It's a new soundtrack.

I can dance to this beat Forevermore, which is super clever and comes back around, but she's just telling you right off the bat, it's like it almost hearkens to Born in the usa. It's identifying a new starting off point.

And also worked on one of my favorite songs on this album, I know Places. But yes, was also on welcome to New York.

Right.

As someone who moved around a bunch as a kid and kind of found myself in New York and felt like I did my most important growing up there, I absolutely get the impulse to want to do this song. Probably the most New York thing about it is that it's just sort of vexing and frustrating and everybody likes to complain about it. So maybe in that way she was really successful in it. But it is a scene setter at.

Well, when you say it doesn't sound like any. Anything else, it also didn't sound like the music that was otherwise dominating the charts in 2014. So I think that's where some of the desire to pin it on the 80s, plus the title comes from. I mean, there's. There's a couple things, like they almost sampled a fine Young Cannibals song on I wish you would. Some of the sort of propulsive baseline. Yeah, like, I know what those references are, too, so. So I get it. But I do think that the 80s thing, it comes largely from the desire to initially place this album within a context.

When in reality, maybe what she was going for was something completely con. Like contextless.

Well, they also created. And we're going to get to our categories, the biggest song on this album, and I've got a blank space, Nathan. But I've got a blank space, baby and I'll write your name and I will write the song Blank Space into it, because it is the biggest song that Taylor has ever had. It spent so much seven weeks at number one. Shake it off did four. And the best thing about this song is that Taylor takes every sexist caricature she'd ever been made into, and she spins it into her own delight, and it is just the best. And I absolutely love this song. I love this music video. Blank Space is totally timeless, and I.

Oh, heck yeah. Like, I listen to the song with my friends. I listen to the song when I grocery shop. I listen to, oh, it is just a mood as. As the kids say.

It's incredible. It has nearly 3 billion views on YouTube. It won a bunch of awards. She wears 21 different outfits. And that's what I'm talking about. Right. When she's taking something where all of. All of the media has just been horrible to her and painting her as this crazy serial dater. And she turns it into not just a great song, but she turns it into a really fun experience for herself. She's got like gorgeous model man to do the video with her there some like, mansion in the Hamptons.

She's riding a horse. There's Doberman's. There's a deer of some kind. She gets to take the. You could critique her golf swing. She gets to take the golf club to a vintage car. She gets to stab the blood filled cake and just tear down this house. And it just is awesome. It is just pure awesomeness.

But the first one and Shake it off too.

Right. But she's still making fun of herself.

Because what she's also doing on Shake it off, because there's, there's the cheerleader section, there's the ballerina section, there's the sort of modern dance thing, but then there's also the sort of hip hop dance thing. She is basically saying, haha, I'm not that cool. I'm not a cool rapper.

By almost putting on the affect of a rapper on this song, 100%. So she's simultaneously acknowledging her own power and her own cool, but she's still saying, yeah, okay, I, I'm Taylor Swift, but I can still be a little bit of a dork. That's really fun. And Shake It Off. I do think though, the thing about Blank Space, like Shake it off is sort of ridiculous and very general.

Blank Space has the same lol, whatever quality to it, but it is about something very real that happened to her, which was the portrayal that she was just collecting men and then discarding them because she couldn't hang on. And that's what's so exciting about it to me. Do you play Shake It Off Less than Blank Space. Shake it off to me is a very good, very bad song.

Oh, it ruled. It totally ruled.

I was in college.

And the. So I think Max Martin has said something like Shake it off is like a perfect pop song, which I think is very funny because it's, it's, it's not. In some ways it's really empty calories. But I love the idea that these two song crafting geniuses came together and put out this ridiculous empty calories song that was a massive hit but still really doesn't do that much. And we're just so, so, so proud of it. Like sometimes simple is the way to go. And I think they, I think they recognized that to great effect here.

I think it's Head and Shoulders above. Because I also think. Now this is anecdotal. I think a lot of guys came into the picture with blank space in terms of people who were interested in listening to her. Like, I think that song appeals to men in a way that a lot of Taylor Swift songs don't. At least on On Their Face.

I didn't say the best song. I said the biggest song, Nathan Hubbard, don't you?

Yeah. I mean, look, I don't think that writing a song about another female pop star, that's a negative song, an angry song, is anti feminist or bad. I think this song is not very good, which makes it less effective. It is about. Yeah, well, so it's allegedly about Katy Perry stealing backup dancers from her Red tour and they're ensuing feud.

I do think that it might have helped this whole situation if the song was a little better.

So take a look what you've done. But it did come off as slightly incongruent with the whole sisterhood, I love my girlfriend's vibe. And Taylor had maybe started to get criticized a little bit for phoniness. A lot more of that comes later. But there was something where she was telling her fans that she was like them and she was their friend. I mean, I remember she would say on the tour, she'd be like, hey, I'm Taylor. And she would talk about all her friends and say that her requirements for friendship were to like her and to want to spend time with her, which everyone in that audience qualified for.

But then at the same time, she was presenting standards of friendship in her own life that were unattainable to those people because pretty much all of her friends were famous and many of them were unbelievably beautiful, skinny, largely white models.

I'm calling you old.

Thank you very much. But I don't. This is important. So I. I don't want to close the circle on this until we say that she's acknowledged this, that she has some regrets here because before she turned. Tell me what, she did a piece.

So she did a piece in L where she listed 30 things I learned before I turned 30. And one thing she said was that she had needed to learn to rectify scars from her past. And the example she gave was, quote, never being popular as a kid was always an insecurity for me. Even as an adult, I still have recurring flashbacks of sitting at lunch tables alone or hiding in a bathroom stall or trying to make a new friend and being laughed at. And then this is the important part, she Sundays, in my 20s, I found myself surrounded by girls who wanted to be my friend. So I shouted it from the rooftops, posted pictures, and celebrated my newfound acceptance into a sisterhood without realizing that other people might still feel the way I did when I felt so alone. It's important to address our long standing issues before we turn into the living embodiment of them.

I largely did not, though I don't know that I'm the first person who would have necessarily. And I can see how a lot of people could have. I think the overarching message of enjoying female friendships was a number one for me. Yeah. But I will say in hindsight, you know, look, the company of women has always been incredibly, incredibly important to me for my entire life. And I'm a football reporter, I work with a lot of guys and that can be isolating and it can be lonely and I love a lot of those dudes. But sometimes I miss my girls when I'm on the road or whatever, and usually in every football stadium, because this tour was going through pretty much every single one of them. You walk into the press box and you'll be walking through a hallway and they'll have big glossy photos of cool things that have happened in that stadium. And there's almost always A photo from Taylor Swift, and it's almost always from the 1989 tour. And sometimes it feels really awesome to just walk past those and be like, oh, there's my friend Taylor. Like, I kind of got a little bit of girl power here with me. But there's a subtext to how often those are the photos that we see of her. That's a little bit darker to me, because, sadly and ironically, the sadness that comes from feeling like you're being asked to meet impossible, unattainable standards, that I think it was fair to say she was putting out to other people. Right. She was feeling that, too. Like, she's described having some really real struggles with body image, with disordered eating. Most notably, she's talked about that in the Miss Americana doc, and this is the timeframe that they're pulling clips from. When she's talking about starving herself, when she sees a paparazzi photo where she thinks she looks, like, puffy or something, it is always from right around this tour, this album. So that's not to say that she made exclusively good decisions during this period, but there is a context that builds women up, and then when they get too high, basically just wants to tear them down. Yeah, I think she was victim to that. I think she played into it in certain instances, but it wasn't all going outward. A lot of it was coming in at the same time. So sometimes when I walk past those photos now, it's. It's a little bit bittersweet because it's like, oh, yeah, that's my friend Taylor, who I don't actually know, but also, she's got this giant, sparkly smile on her face, and maybe she didn't totally feel that way all the time.

Lovers? I did. Oh, my gosh, I did. I heard Starbucks Lovers immediately.

Yeah. It's like when you hear a word so many times, it starts to feel like it doesn't have its meaning anymore. Maybe. But that carefree ethos is so important to 1989, which is a good segue into our track five, which is all you had to do was stay. And the thing that I think is so cool about this is that the track fives have always been these, like, you know, deeply caring, wounded, tortured songs.

This one isn't. Easy. And yes, it's. It's, you know, I wish you'd stayed in some ways. But she has the line in the song, people like me are gone forever.

When you say goodbye.

And that's so important to express on, on this one because you're. You're right. You're actually making me think about it a little bit differently in terms of that being a through line with so many of her songs about people who have wronged her. But I do hear more carefree independence on this track five than on a lot of other track fives. Like, it doesn't seem as painful for her, which I think is very fitting.

I think so. But save that because I have a question for you on that front later. But we'll. We'll get to it later.

Let me remind you, this was what you want. Well, she did this song with Max Martin and Shellbuck, who are my most important collaborators for this album. And we've talked about them, we talked about them on Red. But Max Martin is the co executive producer with Taylor on this. And I just think that partnership really flourishes on this album. And it's just this joy of having these two incredibly smart makers of music just clearly seem so excited by the prospect of doing this whole thing together.

It's really wonderful. She does widen the circle a lot on this. And this is where Jack Antonoff comes into the picture too. I give the nod to Max, certainly, but we should give Jack his flowers as well. He does out of the Woods. I wish you would. You are in love on this one. And I know you've got some love for out of the woods, which I don't as much.

Well, I mostly hate the intro because it sounds like the intro to Hooked on A Feeling to me and I just. Those drums. I think for some people those drums just sound big and awesome to me. Again, they sound like Tarzan.

Guide these lives we see. Looking at it now, it all seems so simple.

Yeah, something like that. Or like, I don't know, maybe the Lion King or something. And then there's also. I just think he does too much on this song. There's an acoustic version of this song, or maybe she does it. The piano.

Yeah, the performance at the Grammy Museum that I think is stunning because I think there are incredible lyrics on the song. I think the bridge is incredible. It's cinematic, I think. Move the furniture so we could dance, baby like we stood a chance Two paper airplanes flying Is like just chills to. Move the furniture so we could dance, baby like we stood a chance Two paper airplanes flying but he does too much with the production. There's like a weird arpeggio thing happening in the background of the second part of the verse that. That feels like nails on a chalkboard to me, and I can't get over it. I believe that the bridge of this song that is so incredibly strong grows up into the bridge of Cruel Summer, which is where it really flourishes. But what do you like about this song?

Wait, what do you mean publicly? What songs had you heard before this one?

What?

Nathan. Yeah. You've been holding out on us.

So what did you. In that context, what it. Like, when you heard the actual album and when you heard more, like when you got out of the woods, what were you thinking? Were you thinking, like, holy crap, she was right.

Was she cool?

I can't believe you held out on us.

I think I would have melted and, like, not to. Like, I covered Tom Brady for years and was in the room with him all the time and kind of didn't give a shit. Like, that's too strong. But it just didn't feel like it was fine. It was normal. I think I would melt if I was in a room with her.

That's very cool. I Cannot believe you waited this long to tell that story. And now I have to segue us. But we should go back to Harry because we're going to get to most purposeful Easter egg. And I'll do mine first. It is the title of Style.

Right.

Yeah. And this was the first time that she was writing to track in that way. She talked about it on the voice memo for I Wish youh Would Too, which is the song that at least originally had sampled the snare from she Drives Me Crazy.

Yeah. 2am in your car Windows down past my street the memory. It does seem like she was really excited not only to work in that way, but to tell people that she was working in that way and share that.

It just seems like she was so excited about making songs with these people. And I really, really, really love that. I do want to ask you this question. So Style, to me, this song just rules, Girl, it is so sort of propulsive in the undercurrent of what you're hearing in the baseline. Like, it just sounds great. And I've got to say, I don't, you know, I don't know what the status of. Of her feelings about Harry are at this point. But if we take out of the Woods Style and I Know places.

Would you. You will take Taylor out of the equation if you were to enter into a relationship that you know is not going to work, but you are going to have music written about you, and those are gonna be the songs. Would you say yes or no?

I'd say yes in a fucking heartbeat.

And he seems cool.

Well, I really don't know. Do you think so?

I'll just be honest. I think it sounds very exciting and fun. But did I. And that part of a big part of that to me is I know Places. Which do I take from your earlier comment that you're not a fan?

You have a shirt that says, no, it's Becky. You just want to bring that up.

Probably the. The peak for Tay lurking.

Is the acknowledgment and a sartorial choice.

That's absolutely true. I. I let you circle back on the Easter egg. I need you to let me circle back so I can help you fall in love with I Know Places, which is one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs. It is absolutely in my top ten. Wow. It is probably in my top five. What I listen. I listen to this song all, all, all the time. It is one of my most listened. And I'll tell you why. The actual song is playing hard to get with. You see the vulture circling dark clouds Love's a fragile little flame it could burn because you get all of those minor chords in the verse and it is just not giving you what you want. And then all of a sudden, she goes to the C major on the chorus and it is like, holy, Serotonin Rush, Batman. And that not giving you what you want until that moment and then taking it away again because she goes back to the verse and you're like, holy. I'm so thirsty for this. All of a Sudden. And doing that over and over again is exactly what that song is about. And she does it in the music. And then the other bullet point in this is just the scream on We Run and We Run so good. I love that song so much. Have I convinced you?

So I've listened to that. This is sort of funny. I've listened to that. I know places, voice memo an unbelievable number of times. Because it comes. Because it comes right after New Romantics on the deluxe version.

So because I listened to New Romantics so much, it just goes into it. I've done that so many times. It gets on my Spotify wrapped playlist.

I think a lot of the fan base, I really do think that this does have something to do with the time in your life when you heard it.

Because if I'd been a little younger when this came out, I probably would have been longing for some of the more diaristic elements of it. Okay, that do I mean, despite, despite the Easter eggs, despite calling a song style, a lot of them do disappear here. But you're absolutely right that that is how I hear this album. I mean, Blank Space style, Wildest Dreams, I Know Places, New Romantics are all songs I listen to an awful lot and have really stuck with me and my experience listening to this album. Now more starts from A Place of those are some of my favorite Taylor Swift songs. And then I'll go back and I'll go this thing, top to bottom is a fun listen. I almost discount some of the other songs because I'll go relative to those ones, they're filler. But then I'll go back and go, oh no, these aren't filler. These are really good songs.

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John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette, wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, we still have to cut at least something.

I'm gonna go first because I bet I. I think we might be on the same thing. I'm cutting Bad Blood. What? Wow. Yeah, of course. This song is not good. I know we just talked about how most things on this album are great. This song is not good. The lyrics are terrible.

The Kendrick Lamar version is good, but the fact that Kendrick Lamar could only make this song like meh. Okay. Speaks to the fact that it's a mess still.

So I. I don't. That's my other one to cut. I do think that it has a nice combination of some of the stuff that does sound very 80s derivative and some more modern sounds in the production. Like, it has that, like, going. Which is kind of funny to me, but. No, that's. That's my other one that I can part.

No, I'm not dying on it, but I'll have a spirited debate on the hill for it.

I walk the avenue till my legs feel like stone I heard the voices of friends Vanished and gone Small talk He drives coffee at midnight the light reflects the chain.

The Springsteen reference is fine to me because, again, she's trying to hearken to the 80s at least a little bit, at least notionally.

And that brings us to the album title, 1989. Totally works for me. Less because of the 80s thing, more because of the Rebirth idea.

All right, if we're both satisfied with that, can I give you some Taylor tidbits from the depths of the Internet?

Are we ready to receive them? I really only have one that I like a lot from this, But a week before this album came out, there was a glitch on itunes, Canada, and.

Yeah, eight seconds of static. But this track that's just labeled Track 3 is accidentally released, and the fans almost immediately sent it to number one, which put it above Shake it off and welcome to New York. But it was not a song. It was. It was just an accident.

My peak Taylor moment for this is. And actually, I love that we're talking about this right now after talking about the idea of her, like, Rebirth as an artist, because it is the tour mashup of Wildest Dreams and Enchanted, which is like eight minutes long. It's so, so, so good because it combines the idealized excitement of meeting someone and having a crush that you get from Enchanted with the ability to look back comfortably on a relationship, even though it's over on Wildest Dreams. And I love putting those two things together. But really, what's most important about this tour version is that she acts out her Rebirth because she does the Lizzie McGuire movie move.

Pulling off the skirt of the. Oh, don't act like you don't know. She pulls off the skirt from the ball gown and then struts down the Runway in the sparkly cat, right? Because she starts and she's doing Enchanted. She's at the piano, and she's wearing, like, 900 pounds of tulle, right? And then all of a sudden, she's like Miss Modern Pop Star, and it's very, very. When you wild dream, I am alive. That's my peak Taylor.

It.

It should probably just give it to them if they asked.

And it shows how well she understood both what her fans wanted and how they would react to something like that, whether or not she could trust them in that way. And that's a good segue into our Tom Hiddleston award for showing the work here, because she won a battle in understanding what her music was going to do and how appealing it was going to be to people. Because my choice for this is that she told us that she was mad at her label. And maybe it was hard to read into at the time, but she was Billboard's Women of the year in 2014. And let me share with you a couple things she said in that interview. She said one, everyone in and out of the music business kept telling me that my opinion and my viewpoint was naive and overly Optimistic, even my own label. And. And here what she's talking about is betting that this album could do a million sales in the first week. Yes, but then this is her again. But then when we got those first day numbers in, all of a sudden I didn't look so naive anymore. She also says, when I knew the album had hit its stride, I went to Scott Borchetta and said, I have to be honest with you, I did not make a country album. I did not make any semblance of a country album. And of course, he went into a state of semi panic and went through all the stages of grief. The pleading, the denial. Can you give me three country songs? Can we put a fiddle on? Sh it off. And all of my answers were a very firm no, because it felt disingenuous to try to exploit two genres when your album falls into one. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She says a lot of people are smarter than marketing professionals give them credit for. And then, and this is the last one she's asked about advice for women wanting to get into songwriting. And she says, you're going to have thousands of decisions to make that will shape the public's perception of you. Let those decisions be your decisions. Don't let them be some man in a suit's decisions.

I believe in you. Like, lucky you have your mother's spirit.

There is truly the proverbial lot to unpack here. Okay, so we know Taylor's re recording her stuff. We've heard Love Story, Taylor's version. And then all of a sudden, here is Wildest Dreams, Taylor's version, or at least a little snippet of it appearing in the trailer for Spirit Untamed, which is a Dreamworks animated movie about, I think, magical horses. And then, yes, as producer Kya so astutely pointed out, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. There's. There's a lot going on in this song, right. Because it's hard to tell from the little snippet that we got what is actually the new version of the song versus.

Yeah. So it was. I'll just say that the way that I think of Wildest Dreams, it's kind of like a. I think it's a pretty hot song. It's kind of a sexy time song.

It was a little bit weird for it to be in a My Little Pony esque kids movie for me. Although now that I know that Jake Gyllenhaal is in the movie, kind of a power move, right? Because that song is about, like looking back on a past relationship from this very secure point of view, which is part of what's cool about it, I will say, because those background vocals, as you pointed out, are so much closer to the forefront. They seemed. And we don't really know. Right. Because we haven't heard the actual version of the song. And it might just be that there was so much stomping going on that it did a little bit of this. But the original version of that song, one of the reasons that I think it is kind of a sexy song is that her vocal is very airy and breathy, and there's a lot of, like, this sort of trembling lift in it. Yeah, I did not hear that much of that on the new one, because it is. It gets sort of thrown into the river of the background vocals in a way that I think the original one doesn't. It's. It was more distinctly different from the original than Love Story. Taylor's version was from original Love Story.

She just finds ways to, like, never go away in. It's such a power move. God, I love her. But it is important that she, like, sends this sort of shot across the bow. Right. For 1989, because if she is doing this in part as a leverage play while she's rerecording her masters, saying that she is done, or at least partway through this album, which was as huge as it was and late in her discography, especially in terms of the albums that she doesn't own and is re recording, like, that's a big signal, right? That's.

Yep.

This is also the album that, you know, that has just come out when she takes her music off of Spotify because of its free platform. She'd written an op ed in the Wall Street Journal where she said music is art and art should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free. And my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. It's a year before she writes the Apple Music Letter, but she is planting her flag in fighting for her rights as an artist and artists rights in general. And so my banner over all of this is that she told us. She told us where this was all going to go. And she told us right then and there, no doubt.

On that note, are you ready to fight? You ready to throw down?

Well, it's time to do the belatedly best song from this album. And my choice is New Romantics, which is a great, great, great song that you don't like very much. And I want to know why.

But it's also the last single.

I've always taken the fact that this ended up as a single and maybe this isn't right. And you would actually be in a better position to explain this than I would. But I always took that as they didn't even put this freaking thing on the album. And then people loved it. Well, let's give it a little something. Let's at least make it a single. Like, I don't feel like this song was given a fair Runway, but I will defend it to the death. I'll tell you what I like about it is one, the irony in the first two lines. We're all bored. We're all so tired of everything. Like, Taylor Swift just ever felt that for a second in her entire life? And you can just hear it and it's wonderful. And then the other thing is, this is the best recorded sigh of her discography. It's poker. He can't see it in my face but I'm about to play my ace.

Like we'll drop it in. It's poker. You can't see it in my face but I'm about to play my ace. It's so, so, so good. And my girl is just fresh out of to give and living her life. And this song, to me feels more like that and actually feels more like that. Just sort of freedom, excitement, I want to go have fun. Feeling of being like, you know, 21 or 24 or whatever. Right. Than even blank Space, because it's just purely joyful.

We know that she's going to become infinitely more fascinating even after 1989, although in maybe less purely wonderful or at least more complicated ways. So I'm curious to hear what your next album appetizer is from this one, because the next album is Reputation.

So it's gonna be forever. What's gonna go down in things? You can tell me when it's over if the how is worth the pain. Ugh.

I hated that in the moment, by the way.

It wasn't necessarily that. I get why people liked how his cover sounded. What I hated about it was that here was this dude who, to my knowledge, did not ask permission to do this. And I know she gets a check too, like, whatever, but he took her work and just made all of it his own. And Pitchfork reviewed his version and wouldn't review hers. And there was so much just grossness associated with how seriously his version of her work was treated. And I didn't love that she was so excited about it in the moment. It kind of bummed me out, because here she is fighting for artists to have ownership of their work and. And be. And identifying with that so strongly, and this dude was just kind of like, I'm gonna redo your album and get a whole bunch of credit for it. And she celebrated that, and it kind of made me, like, just a little annoyed and more annoyed.

I love. I love Taylor Swift covers. I just.

Yeah, well. And it was also just how much credit he got for doing it.

All of a sudden, oh, wow. This is serious music because Ryan Adams covered it. But.

Yeah, well, so I hear what you're saying, and I agree that it is tough to figure out what the through line to reputation is from here, but.

Well, so I'll call. I don't want to use bad blood for it. Although I think that would be a lot of people's choice just because we're gonna get to this. But I don't want to identify the dark grading qualities of Reputation as defining that album because I feel like they don't, or at least they shouldn't. The one that I think is. Is sits more comfortably with me. She talks about sex. I said, no one has to know what we do. His hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room. What? So like wildest dreams to me or just that sigh Some of the content of I know places too, where. Yeah, she's acknowledging, his hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room. Like, that was pretty new for Taylor Swift.

Yeah.

Reputation only bought this dress, so. Dot, dot, dot h. Speaking of lyrics, what is your single best one from 1989? So Starbucks lovers.

So. But I must admit, just because you're clean don't mean you. I love that song.

Well, I just wanna say on Clean, she used that song, at least on one occasion in the tour, to kind of signify the experience of going through the sexual assault trial. And I always liked that song. But when I heard her, I think it's in the. In the tour video. When I heard her do that, it hit me so much more like that song has taken on kind of a second life to me. Post her identifying that connection with it. And I Think it's really powerful. Yeah.

My favorite lyric has a completely different tone, which is because we're young and we're reckless, we'll take this way too far.

I also will say this is not the single best lyric, but the single most used in Instagram captions lyric is darling, I'm a nightmare, dress like a daydream.

I'm so in the bag for blank space. It rules. But don't. Didn't. You're trying to knock me off the scent because it's time to give this album a grade. And I actually think we're gonna be closer on this than I thought, because I will tell you exactly what I have written down in my notes next to final album great, which is fuck you, Nathan. It's an A.

I thought you were gonna say that. There's a lot of filler on this album.

As feminist to all the young women out there. There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. But if you just focus on the work and you don't let those people sidetrack you. Someday when you get where you're going, you'll look around and you will know that it was you and the people who love you who put you there.

We'll get to all of that. That's to come when we talk about reputation, which is what we're going to do next. But until then, I'm going to go dance. This has been every single album. Taylor Swift for Nathan Hubbard. I'm Nora Princioti. Join us again on Thursday for our next episode where we'll move on to reputation. Sam.