By Sania Chaudhary
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” – Pablo Neruda
Taylor Swift released the long awaited Red (Taylor’s Version) earlier in November. The album features unrecorded and unreleased songs, coupled with mature vocals which sent fans and critics in a flurry of excitement.
The new album holds 14 tracks from “Taylor’s Vault” that were originally not in the 2012 album with old collaborations like Ed Sherran and new voices like Phoebe Bridgers. It features everything great about Swift: storytelling, the theme of heartbreak, poetic merit; but this time around, it also features her listeners.
For many fans the new album is a rush of nostalgia to grade-school, teenage years, or simply the radio in the early 2010s. Whether you have listened to the album 50 times through or tapped along while her music played in the car, Swift has something for everyone.
“I really feel like I know my fans well,” Swift said in a Jimmy Fallon interview on Nov. 11. Most Swift fans have “All Too Well” at the top of their lists, and Swift said, “My favortie song and theirs [fans] aligned.”
The product of the mutual favorite was a 10-minute version of the song — the uncut “original,” featuring heartbreaking new lyrics, such as, “I’m a soldier who’s returning half her weight / And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue?” and “You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath”
With new songs, Swift touches on new themes. “How long will it be cute / All this crying in my room? / When you can’t blame it on my youth?” In “Nothing New,” inspired by the legend Joni Mitchell, Swift sings about loss as you age, and the curse that is constant scrutiny and infantilization of young women.
Through other songs, Swift takes on writing about childhood–something audiences are more familiar with, with songs like the tear-jerking “Never Grow Up,” from her album Speak Now.
In “Ronan” Swift delivers something the same. She sings to Ronan, a 3-year-old boy who lost his life in 2011 due to cancer, and writes from the mother’s perspective. “What if I kept the hand-me-downs you won’t grow into?/ And what if I really thought some miracle would see us through?/ What if the miracle was even getting one moment with you?.”
Swift’s songs will be all the rage this November, but some believe that her vocals do not give us the promised blast to the past and rather introduce greater loss and heartbreak with shallower instrumentals, a developed voice, and unfamiliar lyrics — an altogether mature feel. That may not be what everyone is looking for or familiar with.
The past two years have been full of activity for Swift with the release of Folklore, Evermore, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), and now, Red (Taylor’s Version). Moreover, on Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. Swift released the “All Too Well,” short-film casting of Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien, yet another treat for her fans. Her step into the film world as both a director and writer only sparks more excitement for the future.