Taylor Swift - Lover Album Review: What does a happy relationship do to the Queen of Heartbreak? (Not you Adele)
Stephen Jinku Hughes | He/Him
Taylor Swift is in a healthy and happy relationship. Two, actually—with her tall white boy and more importantly herself. Leading to the album’s creation, KWEEN Swift privately maintained her relationship and battled demons all while becoming more politically vocal, and publicly unabashed. In true Swiftian tradition, she has sonically documented it all into confessional bops for our voyeuristic support.
Lover’s 18 tracks all capture different sentiments of love and different facets of her intimate personal relationships with family, her lover, and herself. Swift pairs the songs of the albums into contrasting couplets to capture the wildly fickle complexities and intricacies of love (hence the name).
Each couplet holds almost opposing themes, production, and lyrics about a common story or subject. For example, “Cruel Summer” is a sonically contemporary fast-paced, synths blaring song about longing, doubting, and insecurity in love. In comparison, the title track “Lover” is a slow-jam, backed by classic instruments depicting a strong, assured love with a wedding vow-esque bridge.
This trend continues down the tracklist. “The Man” is a bold anthem boasting Swift’s self-assuredness in fighting for her accomplishments. This is contrasted with “The Archer”, a sparsely produced confession about self-doubt, vulnerability, and destructive tendencies.
“I Think He Knows” plays as an upbeat high school crush as Swift confidently “drives” away with her “indigo [eyed]” lover. This is followed immediately by “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince”, a bleak high school allegory, depicting Swift running away with her lover and “[painting] the town blue”.
Next up is, “Paper Rings”, a pop-rock anthem about the heights of love, with Swift looking forward to marrying her lover even with "paper rings”. This is coupled with “Cornelia Street” a dreamy slow-synth story reminiscing the beginning of her relationship and how heartbroken she would be to lose it.
“Death by a Thousand Cuts” is a dream-pop, hypothetical breakup song that shows the haunting end alluded to by “Cornelia Street”. The paired song “London Boy” is contrastingly propelled by chilled trap beats, highlighting her tongue-in-cheek self-assured enjoyment of her “London Boy”.
The next couplet examines love under hardship with religion as a vehicle. Amidst desperation of her mother’s cancer, “Soon You’ll Get Better” (SYGB) shows Swift gathering comfort in God. Contrastingly “False God” runs through slow jazzy worship of sex to prevail through romantic hardship.
“You Need to Calm Down” uses a bassy backing track and light reverbing vocals to doubly convey an assertive rebuttal of internet trolls and an envoy of LGBTQIA+ equality. While “Afterglow” contrastingly enough is a dramatic drum-driven apology track about how Swift “blew things out of proportion” and put her lover “in jail for something [he] didn’t do”.
“Me” the song that gave us “SpElLiNg Is fUn” is otherwise a fun, super poppy celebration track about self-love and perseverance despite one’s flaws. “Me”’s energy is contrasted with a minimalistic harp-driven “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”, a song that’s simply… well about how nice it is for Swift to have a friend in her Lover.
Then the final couplet of the opening and closing tracks are “I Forgot You Existed” (IFYE) and “Daylight” respectively. Appropriately, both songs reflect the overarching tones of the album. “IFYE” is a carefree, airy brush off of her previous feuds with those who have been forgotten, contrasted by “Daylight”, a deep and sincere reflection of her past and present.
Lover plays as a series of messy and masterful diary entries exploring ‘love’. Swift wrote, produced, directed, and recorded a sonically diverse yet thematically cohesive story—and it is clear she is happy, free, confused and not so lonely no more, in the best way.