'Fearless' | Every Single Album: Taylor Swift

Hello and welcome to every single album Taylor Swift. I'm Nora Prinziotti, staff writer at the Ringer. I am joined by my partner in all things Taylor, Nathan Hubbard. Last episode we talked about Taylor's debut album, Taylor Swift. This episode we're going to be talking about Fearless Moon Man.

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All right, Nathan, I'm going to let you finish. Time to talk about Fearless. Which means it's time to talk about the 2009 VMAs. The night when Kanye runs up on stage while Taylor is accepting the best female Music video award for her you belong with me video proclaims that Beyonce should have won for single ladies. A lot happened after that moment, but what I want to know is how we got there. Nearly a year after the release of the album Fearless in the first place.

Nathan, are you sitting down?

I know you are because I can see you here. I am about to blow your mind.

People didn't know what to make of it because Taylor had captured in a bottle one of the most powerful yet most misunderstood forces that exist in this universe, which is teenage girl energy.

Fearless is an album about being a teenage girl. And it made it simultaneously a rocket ship for her and impossible to understand because it is an imperfect album. There are songs that are not her strongest work. It's a little bit too sonically consistent in some places. It's not shooting for the moon in terms of complexity, but it is perfect in one way and in one incredibly important way, which is that that album captures the experience of being a teenage girl to a T. And it made it something that sure, if you are some of those music critics, maybe you don't know how to talk about it and maybe you don't quite understand why this person has gotten to that place so quickly. And part of it is because of her own hard work. But another Part of it is because teenage girls have always been one of the drivers of what's huge in pop culture, but that's also always been a group of people. And I count myself in this. You have the experience of knowing what you love and loving it so fervently, but also feeling like people don't take it seriously enough, or they don't think that it's valid, or they don't think that it's complex or sophisticated and somehow it's lesser than what whatever else anybody else is doing. And you can kind of make a valid argument about that. If you look at the other albums that got nominated at the Grammys for album of the year, she was up against some huge heavy hitters.

Yes, the Dave Matthews Band is big.

Absolutely not. And Taylor wins. And for a lot of people it's hard to process and the VMAs are. Are before this point. But I think it's important because it all kind of gets captured in this stew of reaction to Fearless, where to a lot of people that didn't make sense because those albums were something that Fearless is not. But we know what Fearless is and it's important to understand. And I'm hoping that you're going to explain this. That's not just because she's talking about cheerleaders and the bleachers and boys in fairy tales. It's also because, sonically, while still being a country album, Fearless is a really perfect album to appeal to those pop fans, largely young women.

This and that you, like emailed to me in the middle of the night once. And I barely understood it, but was just so happy to receive it.

You're talking about, like, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Teenage girls.

So I was 14 when this album came out, and my experience with it was something that helped me imagine and understand experiences that I was so desperate to have and understand, but just was not having. Like, I did not. I was not ready to be dating and having boyfriends and having that kind of drama. And listening to this album was like my priority primer, kind of. I started understanding some of the nuances and some of the, like, okay, this is how. This is how this goes down. Right? And that was through listening to Fearless. And that, I think, is the interesting part that wraps back around to the VMAs and also to how that moment was received. I mean, it was the. The night that spawned a thousand think pieces and blog posts and probably way more than a thousand, actually, because Taylor was in an interesting moment for her because those songs were still reflective of the experience that I was having. Right. Like, I remember sitting on. Sitting on the school bus and just listening to some slightly older girls talk about, like, first experiences with boys and just having headphones in, like one headphone in, so I could kind of hear the Conversation, but also was listening to music. And I was like, do they just understand these songs better than I do? That's so unfair. I can't wait until I can get to that point. Now, was Taylor really living a similar experience to that in 2008? No, she wasn't. I mean, it was the VMAs were 2009, she rolled up to that event in a horse drawn princess carriage. Some people didn't quite understand how she'd gotten there, but she was living a very public fairy tale. And it was fair to question whether or not she was still authentically the nerd and not the cheerleader. And what seals it for me is that the songs carry it. You believe it because the songs are good and you hear the songs. But that, I think, is what made that moment such a rich text. And it's not about Kanye. Right, because it's even fair to ask if Kanye had a point, don't you think?

President of the United States called Kanye Jackass, by the way, is what that comment was.

I think you're right that that influenced how people processed her going forward after that moment and maybe helped her hang on to that outsider, underdog Persona. But we have to remember that the actual person standing on that stage is different from the person people saw when they were looking at her on tv.

We know now this was a deeply wounding experience for Taylor, one that she has carried really up into the present.

We don't know if that wound is closed, so I don't want to undersell how important and how genuinely scarring it seems like this was for her. I was standing on stage and I was really excited because I had just won the award. And then I was really excited because.

We're clearly itching to get to some of these categories. We have 12 of them. They're going to help us break down this and every album. So let's start with the biggest song off Fearless, which in my book is yous Belong With Me.

Because that's what led to all of this. Right? It. So it. It was. It got to number two on the Hot 100, which was her highest charting song to date at that point. But we wouldn't have just had this conversation that we hadn't had without that song. So you can quantify how big it gets by chart position. A Million other ways. But I think it just created one of the most well known moments in Taylor Swift history. So I think it's gotta be the choice. What say you?

Held her very first Foxborough stadium in like a million years.

I think it inevitably does. But I also think that Love Story is an easier rerecord because it's less personal. And that's not to say that she's not up to some pretty extreme challenges in some of these. But you Belong with me is one of the songs when in the rerecording she is going to have to navigate how much she's changed and how much people have a different understanding of her. And there will have to be some, I imagine, remove from that dichotomy between the nerd and the cheerleader and which one is she? Because I don't think that at this point she really even has to to choose. I mean, obviously the, the point of the view of the song is what it is, but I think she'll be able to kind of embody characters in that. But Love Story is I think a really smart choice to tackle first because we already know who the characters are and they're not her. So it doesn't have some of those trip wires. But it's a really good point. But I don't think that. I don't think that doing Love Story first invalidates you Belong With Me being the biggest song from this album.

It's not. There are moments on 15 that are so perfect, and yet I don't listen to the whole song very much.

It's actually not, because the parts where you get it, you just get it. Yeah, but I don't think that. I think it's a melodically weaker song, frankly.

What resonates, the storytelling and the songwriting are what resonates here. And I think White Horse maybe in a same or in a similar vein to what we were just talking about with 15. It's not a melody that sinks its teeth into you. At least not for me. But here are the two things that make it essential. One is that she needed a song, at least one on this album, to shatter the fairy tale.

And she uses the same language, but she breaks it. And she says it's not true. That's not actually how life works. And her ability to go back and forth between imagination and love and Prince Charming and then say, no, that's fake. And I know it is really important. The other part is that she flexes one of her absolute best muscles here, which is the shifting of tense.

And it's a precursor to songs like Dear John, which also fall into this category. But she goes from this is a small town to that was a small town. And that is yummy.

This album overall is a really good text for just Taylor going all in on certain specific themes. We'll get to some of those later. I won't spoil it, but those are the two important things about White Horse to me. And it's not. It's not really about how it sounds. It's a pretty simple sounding song, but what she does with narrative, shattering the fairy tale and then using some of the storytelling tricks, make it really impressive.

That is the supercharged version of doing should have said no with the Jonas Brothers. That multiplied by 6,000 million megawatt tons, is when you get White Horse with John Mayer, which eventually uses. I mean, I think we can talk about it right here. Like the same trick in Dear John, which, as I love White Horse, but it does not equal in the combination of just like hurt, anger, all of those things. And yet she still, by the end of the song, has the remove and is moving On Shining Like Fireworks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this is the precursor to that. So just unbelievable that those two had that moment.

But I agree, this is the last.

I'm glad we're stanning Liz Rose because I love Liz Rose and just the idea of, you know, having a great female mentor at that point for Taylor must have been really, really awesome. So I'm kind of annoyed that I don't. Don't have her either here or. When we talked about the debut album. But I do have a different one. William Shakespeare.

Yeah, how could you forget? Taylor read Romeo and Juliet.

And she went, hey, this is pretty good.

But I want to tweak the ending. And then she wrote love story.

It's important because this was when the idea of, oh, boy, careful, you go out with Taylor Swift, she's going to write a song about you was just starting to get in the mix, at least after this album, because that's when you, you know, forever and Always is the Joe Rose track and whatever. We should be very clear about this. Taylor Swift does not have a source material problem.

And exhibit A. And there's exhibit through Z60 bajillion times, but exhibit A is deciding that you can change the ending to Romeo and Juliet and just turning it into a song. So that is my most important collaborator. What do you think the most purposeful Easter egg is on this album?

Yep.

We've talked and will continue to talk so much about authenticity and all that. One of the reasons that she can be really smart about what she wants to do in her career and still be believable, even when some of the themes, like by the time that she's performing you Belong with me, don't hold water in the same way is because the songs are believable, right? Like, when you hear the song, you know it's true. Maybe it's not true to her in the exact same way anymore now that she's famous, but you can hear it, and you know it's real. And when you hear Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind, and we both cried, you believe that they cried together about it. And it works, and it's really important. And she wasn't 15 anymore, but when she sings that, she is. And that's a testament to the songwriting and the performance of it and just sort of her ability to convey emotion in her voice. But it is an essential anchor to me in the believability debate, which is a big one.

What do you care? You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.

You're making me in some ways rethink my Easter egg from this one because it's hey, Steven.

And just the naming of the name in the song title yet again. And this song is. Is about Stephen Barker Lyles from the band Love and Theft. They toured together. It's like one of the most random.

No. Probably ties Enchanted being about the Owl City guy as like Taylor's most random crush.

And what we know from this. She doesn't need a lot. This goes back to the source material question, right? She does not need a lot. And I'm going to dunk on myself here. When you're a teenage girl you don't like, you just don't. I'm painting with a broad brush, but falling in love in 10 seconds or thinking you have is not that hard.

It's.

And hey, Stephen, which I love. I think that's a totally underrated song. It's not. It's not big, but it's just really sweet and I love listening to it. They didn't know each other super well. They apparently talked on the phone a decent amount, but they never dated.

And she's mining a feeling and she's mining the ability to project and even maybe be shattered by. Not in this case, not. Not with this song. But you can be shattered by losing the possibility of a projection of a relationship that doesn't even exist. That's totally part of growing up. So again, it's that source material thing where the assumption that to write one of these songs, she needed to have a big, serious, dramatic, romantic, physically intimate relationship just seems ridiculous to me. And it seems like anybody who's ever been a teenager or grown up or learned how to date people, like, how do you think that? I just. I don't get it. It's like one of these Taylor conversations where I'm like, what world do people live in? Yeah.

Lot of resource material that was not at its apex yet, though, because, again, a lot of these were imagined relationships, either on her part for coming up with stuff basically just going like, oh, he seems interesting. What might that be like? And then that translating to speculation about whether she, like, actually dated these guys later on she actually was dating them.

And there was a greater frequency of, okay, they're a little bit older. These are more real relationships. And we know. And the Internet was an even bigger phenomenon and photo evidence was more accessible and. And all of that. But I think in some ways, in hindsight, it's easier to go, oh, this song's about that guy. This song's about that guy. And it fuels this idea of, she dated all these people. That's right, she did. Like, in this case, she didn't when we get to the next couple of albums, a lot of those were. Those were real boyfriends.

And whether that matters or not is a completely different thing.

So I only have one cut from. From the actual album, which is. You're not. Sorry. What? You what? Wow. What a rise. Why?

There are. So here's what it is. There are three songs on this album that are thematically similar, and it's Forever and Always. Was I out of line?

It's Tell me why. And it's you're not sorry.

And Tell Me why. And Forever and Always are two of my absolute favorite songs on this album. So I think by the time you get to. You're not sorry. I just. I. It's.

No, Forever and Always. I like because she is spitting. There's. So there's an alternate. There's a piano.

It's great. It's beautiful.

It sounds really nice, but it's not how that song is supposed to be to me.

When I think I've said this to you before, I have this distinct memory of, like, watching rom coms when I was a teenager and kind of internalizing that. Yeah. You kind of wanted to end up with the right guy in the end, but what was really more important was, like, nailing the tell off line. And she does that so well on Forever and Always, and she writes on that song. And in a way, that is how people speak. That. Were you just kidding? Is exactly how you talk in a fight sometimes. And just the way that that becomes part of that song, to me, is so fantastic and satisfying. There's a little bit of that on Tell Me why too. And that's why those songs are that effective to me in a way that you're not Sorry just isn't I don't think it's a bad song. I just don't. It doesn't accomplish anything that other songs don't for me.

This is unbelievable to me. I thought you would love that song. I love that song. I listen to that song like all the time. Really? Yeah.

It just sounds really good. It's the same feeling of some of that big arena filling stuff that you get later on Red and I ignore the Hallelujah is like they just don't.

They wash over me in terms of the actual word, I guess. But it doesn't bother me. I love that song.

Not to mention that it never goes to a new artist.

Well, there are a few songs in her discography that I feel like fit that description because I don't disagree with you in that. The origin story of it I don't hear in the song itself. I just think it sounds really good. I think it sounds big in a way that some of the other songs on Fearless Ones that I like immensely for different reasons. So I like the change of pace. I like how it sounds. The song that I always think of when I'm like, I like this song. If you divorce it from what it's supposed to be about is Innocent, which comes later and feeds into the whole Kanye thing where I'm like, if this is about completely different subject matter, I absolutely love this song. Yeah, I really have a hard time merging the story behind it with what it sounds like and maybe changes a little bit like that as well. I do want to just. I have a couple cuts from the platinum version of that.

So the ones that I would nix are Come in with the Rain and the Other side of the Door. I will say, interesting. There is. There is an Taylor Swift is an incredible single. Sire is, I think, one of her underappreciated talents. And there is O on Come in.

Not like that, but yes. The core concept of expelling air from your mouth, I suppose, is what we're discussing here. She's really, really, really good at it. The best recorded Taylor Swift's Eye is on New Romantics. We'll get to that at a different time. Yeah, we're not going to spoil that. This is contentious for us and we actually don't really know why, but there is an. Just a place where she goes oh.

On Come in with the Rain where it's candy to me. I absolutely love it. I don't think that it's a particularly interesting Taylor Swift song, but that is one moment where you can see that she's gotten her voice. Isn't everything that it's going to become at this point, but she is better at using it right by this point. And there's a couple little tricks like that that I think are really wonderful. So it would be hard for me to part with just that moment. But overall.

Yeah. Do you like that song?

Yep.

I like Jump, Then Fall. It's not. So this is probably gonna really piss you off. I really like Untouchable, and I also really like Superstar, and I sort of know, like, there's just something Superstar makes no sense. I don't understand who she has this relationship with. Like, there's a bunch of it where I'm just like, what is this song? But I really like it. I like how it sounds. The idea of pining after like a touring rock star as Taylor Swift is also sort of funny to me. And it's cute.

So the. The Come On, Come ons I love, but mainly it's that it sounds a little bit different than what's on the rest of this. Right. Fearless is a supernova that captures teen girl energy. If it has a weakness, to me, it's that a lot of it sounds the same. And this is a nice change of pace.

I like the melody. I like how she delivers the lines. I think it's a little bit of a head fake in the sense that it just sounds different from a lot of what's on the album, but somehow it works. I totally buy. I buy the sentiment from her, even though it doesn't fit in with a lot of the rest of it. So I'm a fan. I like all 5 minutes and 11 seconds.

I like Fearless as the title. My only question is, how does this album change if it's called Love Story instead?

I think the answer to that is yes. Yeah, but it's possible it does something a little bit extra for that song, and that's the only thing that I can think of where you can make the argument. But I Fearless makes sense to me. I think there's, it's, it's active in a way that I think is nice.

The best ones from this are about touring. The first is that Justin Bieber joined her for two dates in the UK on the Fearless tour. Yeah, and he broke his foot during the first show and he still performed during the next one, which is what.

It goes back to what we were talking about in the first episode with High School Musical and that kind of youth moment where things like that were popular and there was an opening. Maybe his career doesn't go the same way without her. Or maybe with this. If he hadn't sucked it up and hobbled on one foot for the. Their second date at Wembley or wherever.

And that actually fits perfectly with another little Taylor tidbit here, which is that she sold out the Staples center in two minutes for this, which is just crazy.

Do you think that's. And I'm showing a little bit of bias here, but you probably could make an argument for her most important venue being either Staples Center. She's had some really big Gillette Stadium moments.

You kind of want to give New York something, but it's a little. I don't know what it would be because there's. What's happened at the Garden, what's happened at MetLife.

I think it's either. It's one of those.

The last thing that I had was what we already talked about with change being written, about being part of an indie label and trying to compete. And then it ended up as the theme for the 2008 Olympics, which is a little strange. But let's move on. Let's. Let's give out the Tom Hiddleston Award. Where do you see the work coming through on this one?

What do you think that makes sense. I've got just the number of re releases, international editions, digital bonus tracks, platinum album, Walmart, Target dvd, yada yada yada. Very smart.

Just commercialized. I don't know about over, but you can tell what the point is.

And you can tell that there's a willingness and a comfort to operate in that sphere, which is sometimes tricky territory for an artist to just be willing to go and do that, because it's going to help you in a lot of ways. And I. I give her all the credit for doing that and being smart about it. But when you go through, you can see it, you can see the work. And when you look at the number of different versions of that album that exist now, you can definitely tell. And even we go back to Fearless being the first album that she's going to re release. And she says, okay, there's gonna be 26 songs on this, Taylor's version of this album. Well, you're starting from 19, right? Because you make the platinum edition chock full of all those extra songs.

And part of that's because she had those in the tank. Right. But it's a version of the same thing because now she wants it to be her own and she wants to have this opportunity to not only give people a different version of that album, but one that they're gonna hopefully choose over the original.

And she'd already done. She actually kind of made it more difficult for herself because she'd already put a lot of those extra songs into. We're gonna get even more people in the moment of it by doing the platinum album. So now she doesn't have like, Taylor Swift is plenty prolific. I don't think she has an issue in this area, but it's actually a version of the thing that she already did when she went through this whole process.

It's the waterworks. Yeah, it's the Waterworks. It's. It's all the rain. There are, if you count, if you use the platinum edition and you count both forever and always is there are seven references to rain. There are back to back songs with pouring rain on them. I mean it is just. She is controlling the weather. It rains in your bedroom. Everything is wrong is one of the like Taylor Swift is really underratedly funny to me. And the level of drama that that line achieves is so good. It is so impressive and so ridiculous. And I certainly choose to believe that she is both feeling it and in on the joke in that moment. But Peak Taylor is all of the rain on Fearless. What do you think?

I think it's either 15.

Years in this town because she's a little too removed from it. Although that, I don't know. There's an everlastingness to that song. It could actually come out on forever and always in that the quality of that song that I love so much about how biting it is. You have to believe that she cares that much.

And when you're that young, of course you care that much.

20, 21. Taylor Swift, I don't think cares that that much about that story.

And it's possible we could end up hearing that on the record. I don't know if we will, though. She might be able to just put the hat on and pull it off, but that's an unanswered question for me.

That's a really good one.

By the way, you're not as high on Untouchable as I am, but that could be a really good RE record.

Mine is change for the reasons that we talked about, where you could actually easily fit it in on Red.

But I think it could also fall into the subtle genre bending that she starts to do a little bit more of on Speak now. Forever and Always, though, is my belatedly best song. And it is the regular version, not the piano version. I really have a big place in my heart for that song.

You didn't give it to. You're out clubbing. I just made caramel delights from Thug Story. That's not your best lyric.

No, mine is also from 15, but it's. When you're 15 and somebody tells you they love you, you're going to believe.

With an honorable mention to this. Love is difficult, but it's real. Which is the line that she started Love Story with, which I think is also good. But the I choose 15 final album grade. What do we give it? I give it an A. Minus.

Give it an A. I'm trying to not.

I'm being that professor who's like, in my 35 years of tenure, I've never.

You're.

But if I can give it. If I'm allowed to give it an A, I give them all an A. No, that's not true. I wouldn't give every single album an A.

More variety, I guess. And that's where I grabbed. I think that's where I gravitate a little bit. To change and to untouchable. Because, look, I spend spent and spend a lot of time with this album.

So while I love Story and you belong with me are different songs. I don't fall into that category where it's like, this is all too thematically similar, sounds the same, or whatever. I think that's ridiculous. I do like the change ups.

And maybe I could have had a few more of them.

So what do you give? What's your grade?

On an A minus. All right, well, that's a good segue into the album that we'll do next, which is Speak now, which was the first Taylor Swift album that I listened to as a high school student. So if you think that this was angst inducing, just wait. For Nathan Hubbard, I'm Nora Princioti. This has been the second episode of every single album. Taylor Swift. We're a week into this project, and it's been awesome to get feedback from you guys. Please keep it coming. We are on Twitter and Instagram and just eager to hear from everyone who's made this such a fun process. And you can join us again on Monday when we'll be breaking down one of Taylor's most underrated albums. Speak Now.