Taylor Swift is more of a lover than a fighter. The singer-songwriter doesn’t say it out loud on her seventh album – the successor to 2017’s Reputation, an aggressive record in which she came out swinging – but it’s hard to escape the conclusion on a record that Swift is calling “a love letter to love”. “I’m in my feelings more than Drake, so, yeah,” she winks at one point.
Reputation’s murky mood board went big on snakes, bling and shade thrown and received, the aftermath of a highly public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West. By contrast, Lover is a kitsch-leaning festival of humour, pastels, butterflies and the desire not to be defined by negatives. It is, in large parts, a hoot.
For a songwriter of such control and emotional intelligence, Swift is rather over-partial to obvious juxtapositions – her lyrics often hinge sharply on roses and thorns, sunshine and rain. Daylight, the 18th and final track on this long album, finds Swift waking from “20 years of sleep”.
But her binaries aren’t always absolute. You get the feeling that if the “old Taylor” was “dead” at the start of the Reputation era, she was only ever in suspended animation, in a kind of R&B-adjacent fever dream. Lover returns to business as usual, the dramatic pop of 1989 via the confessionals of Red. Swift is back in her happy place, writing finger-snapping pop songs about falling in and out of love, abetted by a variety of producers, two of whom now ping-pong regularly between her and Lorde: Jack Antonoff, producer of Lorde’s 2017 album Melodrama and lots of Swift’s last two albums; and Joel Little, the midwife to Lorde’s early work. Trailers such as ME! – a duet with Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie that verges on a cheerleader chant – and You Need to Calm Down, a fabulously pitched takedown of haters, bigots and internet trolls, have exuded playfulness, tunefulness and wit in equal measure.
An album so long is bound to be a mixed bag. Strong opener I Forgot That You Existed is a breezy kiss-off to an old flame or, perhaps the whole Kimye era: “Lived in the shade you were throwing till all of my sunshine was gone,” Swift recounts.
By track 11, though, Swift is hymning her current flame, the British actor Joe Alwyn, who “took her back to Highgate” to “meet all of his best mates” on a cringe-inducing song called London Boy. This sort of thing might pass on one side of the Atlantic but, on the other side, it is redolent of Guy Ritchie-era Madonna in her tweeds drinking bitter. (In Swift’s partial defence, the song expresses a desire to see Hackney, “not just Louis V on Bond Street”.)
For every reasonable assumption of a return to form, however, there’s the suspicion that Lover might be at least a partial retrenchment until Swift decides what to do next. If it sounds as if we’ve been here before, it’s because we have. Many of Lover’s songs are recognisable in structure and content from albums past, with Swift’s signature shouty endings, her key changes that keep things moving along and her carefully deployed lyrical detail all to the fore. Anticipatory tunes such as I Think He Knows and Paper Rings flirt hard, but perhaps not quite as hard as 1989’s magisterial Blank Space did. “Who could ever leave me darling,” sings Swift on The Archer, a moodier, more elliptical track, “but who could stay?” – revisiting the idea of Swift being a romantic handful, present on Blank Space and other songs passim. Lover, the title track itself, is a perfectly good ballad, light on detail but with a fantastic pregnant gap in its dynamic and a husk to Swift’s voice that could grow to become more interesting.
The heart, not unreasonably, takes up a fair amount of airtime on Lover, but Swift has other concerns. There’s fight left in her, too, in the form of The Man, a bouncy Joel Little production where Swift decries the double standards by which high-profile females are judged. In an alternative reality, she’s “an alpha” making “power moves”, and not hung out to dry for dating a succession of men.
Soon You’ll Get Better, by contrast, is a stark song set in a doctor’s office that is likely to allude to Swift’s mother, whose cancer has returned. The track features backing vocals, banjo and fiddle by two Dixie Chicks, a country outfit whose opposition to the Iraq war landed them in hot water with US conservatives during the George W Bush administration. Their presence is indicative of some heavy signalling by Swift, who has been criticised for not being clearer about her own politics.
You Need to Calm Down is pretty unequivocal about LGBTQ+ advocacy. More coded, perhaps, is a song called Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince, in which Swift deploys a high-school setting and lines about her own “pageant smile” to land some allegorical content. “American glory / Faded before me / Now I’m feeling hopeless / Ripping up my prom dress”, it goes, voicing a generalised distress at the state of her nation.
Swift’s tanker has been slow to turn round, and is still turning. It’s said that celebrities remain stunted at the age at which they became famous, a kernel of truth that Swift seems strangely keen to emphasise. The four bonus editions of Lover come with journals, which mix entries from Swift’s own diaries, from her teenage years and beyond, that detail attempts in 2007 to locate a turkey fryer to the aftermath of Kanye West’s 2009 VMA awards hijack. There are blank pages for fans to fill in. At nearly 30, the singer-songwriter remains an intriguing mixture of industry power-broker and giddy cat-obsessive. Lover is fine with that, but the real battle is where she goes after this.
