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Move over Jack Antonoff haters - it’s 1989 supremacy time! We have been blessed with what might be the best re-recording yet, which is a hefty title I’ve been unwilling to take away from Red (Taylor’s Version), but the time might be upon us.

1989 was originally released as Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album, and it would forever change the course of her career. Her fourth studio album, Red, received heavy criticism for mixing genres - it was too country to be pop, too pop to be country, and while Swift felt it was some of her best work yet, it lost Album of the Year at the Grammy’s to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Swift, as an artist that historically takes criticism to heart and values mainstream awards, decided to merge into a different direction, and that direction was 80s synth pop.

In Swift’s own telling, she wanted to write an album more about her friendships and of a new time in her life when she was living on her own and figuring out her next direction. The release of this album coincided with Swift appearing on red carpets and peppering Instagram with photos of her and what would be titled “The Squad,” which mostly consisted of Victoria’s Secret models and other assorted pop stars. In Swift’s recollection, she was responding to the criticism that she was a serial-dater who only talked about her romantic relationships by focusing on her female platonic (or were they?) friendships, but what may have been good-natured to Swift was somewhat co-opted by the media as a Mean Girls style group of plastics. To be fair - they did give off a vibe of “you can’t sit with us,” but mainly because the majority of members were both blonde and literal models.

This round of 1989, for the reasons stated in the previous paragraph, among others, takes an alternative approach. I’m a bit indifferent to the sudden beach-ification of 1989 (Taylor’s Version). This album was so heavily drenched in New York City iconography when it first dropped, and it gave off such a “girl in her 20’s moves to the big city to reinvent herself.” Which, selfishly, I loved then and love now because that’s been part of my own story. TS mentions in some of the her promo for this album that she cut some of the vault tracks because they felt too LA when she thought the album felt more NYC as a whole. Hell, for the original album she was doing promo on top of the Empire State Building! We had more than one Times Square performances! The first track is called Welcome to New York! It’s the heaviest re-write of the original album aesthetic we’ve had yet but whatever, I digress, the beach thing is fine. Seagulls and sand abound on the new album art and I’ll live with it.

In my personal 1989 history, this is the album that made me fully re-commit to Swiftdom. She lost me with Speak Now, and while I liked some of Red, I didn’t fully love that album either. I did, however, listen to 1989 ad nauseum, and still do almost 10 years later. Unlike many of her albums, though, I didn’t immediately fall in love with it. The poppy nature of the tracks took me a second to get used to. I remember slowly falling in love with many of the tracks, in part because I slowly fell in and out of love in my own life, mirroring the lyrics in real time. I began to have more moments that felt like 1989 - experiencing the joys of being anonymous in a new city, the burn of falling in love only to be left heartbroken when it ended, feeling a bit like a serial-dater that “can’t make them stay”, and finding my own squad (who are all Victoria’s Secret supermodels in my mind).

For every re-record that TS has dropped so far, there have been a series of songs “From The Vault” which were cut for time off the original albums. It’s the most brilliant part of the re-record because while seasoned fans will listen to the re-recorded album no matter what, there’s an added draw in that there will new music on each one. Those who really loved the original album get a chance to fall in love with new tracks in the same style, and those who maybe didn’t love the OG album get a second chance to find themselves in the new tracks.

In my humble opinion, there are no skips on the vault tracks this time around. Where on the previous re-releases there was at least one vault track where I thought to myself “yeah, I can see why this didn’t make the cut,” the 1989TV vault tracks, unsurprisingly, contain no such weaknesses. But, there is one vault track that sits a cut above the rest for me, which is Is It Over Now?

Swift really starts to toy with anger and rage as writeable emotions in 1989 in a way that was more vaguely explored in previous albums. We feel it more palpably in 1989 with tracks like Blank Space and Bad Blood. I’d argue that even Shake It Off contains moments of rage - she uses the verses to play on people’s perceptions of her, which would become a mainstay in her writing from here forward. All You Had To Do Was Stay is pointed in its frustration - the lyrics feel like what you’d do if you could call up an ex and be like “you’re a moron who fumbled the bag.” Even the way she sings the “I Remember” line of the Out of the Woods bridge feels accusatory.

It’s not to say that she was never angry in previous records - I think we see a bit of cutesy anger in the country tracks of her first couple albums. Songs like Picture to Burn are angry but in this fun, unrealistic way. Dear John packs a bit of rage, but it’s all tinged with this melancholic sadness. You could make an argument that there’s some feminine anger in Red (especially in All Too Well), but a lot of it feels like anger focused on herself rather than others. You can feel a departure in her writing as Swift herself begins to grow up and process her emotions on a larger scale.

Women aren’t really encouraged to express anger, and they certainly are not encouraged to assign that anger to others. When women feel rage, we’re taught to internalize it, and not to pin the blame for it on someone else. If someone wrongs us, we are taught to ask ourselves how we created a scenario in which we were vulnerable to their actions. Swift often writes auto-biographically, so we hear her come to grips with these realities in her later albums. But it starts here, in 1989, when she begins to call out societal standards using cheeky satire and those pointed accusations.

Swift would go on to tease out this idea more seriously in dozens of other songs, in both quiet feminine rage like Mad Woman but also in bombastic outright anger as in Look What You Made Me Do. We get to watch her feel more comfortable releasing tracks with lyrics like “you dream of my mouth before it called you a lying traitor.” (an aside - I really think her original lyric was “fucking traitor” because it sounds way more natural than lying traitor). And here, Swift doesn’t remove herself entirely from responsibility. She owns her own misdeeds in lyrics like, “at least I had the decency to keep my nights out of sight,” and “I think about jumping off of very tall somethings just to see you come running.” She makes her own imperfections center-stage alongside that of the object of the song.

It would be too easy to sum up this song as a “breakup song.” As with a lot of her work, while the breakup plays a leading role in storytelling, we find when we zoom out that the lyrics tell a bigger story. This song tells a story about reinvention and its bitter aftertaste. I believe that at the root of bitterness lies a question unanswered - something that you can’t wrap your mind around understanding that plants a difficult-to-remove seed in the back of your mind. We hear some of Swift’s outstanding questions in this track. Many of which, I believe, would leave an echo for any of us. The answer to the titular question that Swift is chasing in “Is It Over Now?” seems to be simple: Yes. It is over now. But the song doesn’t leave you thinking that she will be devastated by that answer - she seems to have moved on to the guy unbuttoning her blouse. When you hear every facet of the track, you realize that she takes a more nuanced approach.

Leaving behind something that is no longer meant for you often feels like the bridge of this song - like you can feel the moment closing, so you rush to say everything you’ve been holding back. Other times, it feels like the resigned first verse where you’re basking in the quiet memories with a certain imperfect nostalgia. Then, perhaps only much later, does it feel like the jubilant synth and the larger-than-life drums that underline this track. There is, after all, something unbelievably joyous in realizing that your past helped you find your present. The past hurt that forced the reinvention becomes the echo of flashing lights and deep forests that you see in your rearview mirror as you move further away from it. You realize that you made it out of the woods, and that even though that moment ended, there was some serendipitous magic that was waiting for you around the corner.

The magic in “Is It Over Now?” and in the entirety of the 1989 album is that the author lets us sit in the turbulent emotions of reinventing yourself. She admits that it’s a messy process, and one that is often full of our own mistakes. She shows us how to embrace the often wrong perceptions others have of us, and even harder, how to welcome reinvention on our own terms. She reminds us that it’s human to yearn for our past and the people in it, but in the same breath, to be ready to welcome the future.

The answer to Is It Over Now? may very well be a resounding yes - but with a knowing nod to the path in front of you. The last lyrics, “but no” tell us that it wasn’t meant to be - and that’s okay. As the track fades with twinkling bells, you realize that the heartbreak will eventually fade into an echo of something greater.

P.S.

If you’re interested in reading more on this album, I wrote about 1989 prior to the re-release at the following links: Out of the Woods and Style

And….elephant in the room….I am tremendously bad at writing at a consistent pace for this blog. It was originally just meant to be a summer project and it has been amazing to keep up with it over time. There’s about 10 draft posts of different stuff I’ve been meaning to put out, and someday I hope to get to pushing publish on all of them. Regardless, for those that are still opening those subscription emails a year and a half later, thank you for being here.

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