It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all the tension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fall for the song’s subject. They bloom beneath the skin of “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowing and true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s not important: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got dust on every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time like none of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangement to lyric. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to Fun.’s 2012 pop album Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. Swift knew this she described Red in Billboard as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone.… Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss-it all sounds different to me.” But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly both resolved with marriage. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Red is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged in a blue-black lake of shadow. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. Red is an album of disappearances, of things that have gone or are just about to go missing-lost relationships, old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re receding out of frame. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics-the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon. Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. One of the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep. Martin and Shellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography they incorporated many of them into Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country. It sounded like a new version of her, being fitfully born. It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new Taylor Swift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. A chord thrums from an acoustic guitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote in collaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”-a mutation is happening. Looking at the albums that followed Red, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through the distortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horror would come back.
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