Review Summary: Impressively fearless.
Acting natural must be difficult when you have your life assessed and analysed by a hundred different media outlets every day, and that's the dilemma that faced Taylor Swift after her sophomore record
Fearless topped all sorts of sales charts in 2008; until then, her music had revolved around high-school crushes, brilliantly told tales of young naivety and the simplest metaphors for love stories. But then it all changed; it's difficult to stay innocent when you've been in the glare of the spotlight for so long, and to a certain extent, if
Speak Now was once again about the football team quarterback and white horses, it would seem the ultimate falsehood. So her challenge on the follow-up was simply stated but much more difficult to achieve; to create an album that was in no way artificial, which retained her old honesty in the bigger picture, not just on the level of youthfully direct lyricism.
Consider that 'Dear John' is a nearly-7-minute nearly-blues song directed almost nakedly at John Mayer, but still sounds like Taylor Swift to all intents and purposes; this is an example of how superbly executed a record
Speak Now shows itself to be. The experimentation Swift offers is not really experimentation at all, but in most cases a completely organic growth of her previously static 'sound'; not once does she sound like she's trying something just because by now she should be taking more risks. Some of the more upbeat songs here are almost complete departures from her country roots, like the incredible, dance-tinged 'Story Of Us' or the Paramore-influenced 'Better Than Revenge,' which might well be aimed at Miley Cyrus. And, on that topic, with leaving high school comes a notable loss of that halo that followed her around on
Fearless; she apologises profusely on 'Back To December,' but that's nothing compared to where she gets indisputably
bitchy on 'Better Than Revenge,' claiming that
she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress. Rinse.
And
Speak Now is endowed with the same charisma that Swift showed on
Fearless and her self-titled debut manipulated into different forms; let's just say that here there are numerous tracks which are unequivocally
excellent. 'Last Kiss', for example, is a ballad so delicate and desperate that it sounds like the girl might just give up on everything at any point. Compared to the slower tracks from
Fearless it's an absolute masterpiece, but it's a seriously touching pop song in its own right. And check 'Haunted' with its faintly
gothic outline! But again, Swift is the same vocalist, just standing in front of a different backdrop. And there are songs here which could fit on
Fearless too, which are not always as powerful as her ventures in other directions but strongly stand up to that album's best individual songs.
Swift faces much criticism from her detractors that her music all sounds the same, but anybody who still says that after the release today of
Speak Now clearly hasn't heard the record. She still knows how to pull out the songs that hit the melodramatic core inside all of us (see lead single 'Mine' for proof), but now she also knows how to smirk, how to
rock, and how to expand her pallette. And none of this is done because she feels she's under pressure to; it all fits. It maintains her youthful vigour and relatable phrasing, it's never pretentious or forced or overtly deliberate, and most of all it's
really, really fu
cking good. Honestly:
Speak Now sets Taylor Swift out as a popstar to watch, not just a country-pop pretender with a limited range of weapons in her arsenal. It's astounding.
So I'll go
Sit on the floor wearing your clothes
All that I know is I don't know
How to be something you miss.
