Taylor Swift, isn’t known for being shy about her personal life in her music and in her new CD, “Speak Now,” the 20-year-old country starlet still feels the same about dishing out how she feels about what’s happened in the past two years since her last album, “Fearless.”
“Mine,” the first song on the album and the first single which was released on Tuesday, Aug. 4, is a love song about how the boy she’s fallen in love with has been the best thing that’s ever been hers. This song, a lot like Swift’s other songs, is a progressive love story, meaning that throughout the duration of the song, Swift and the boy she’s in love with love progresses into marriage & babies, or a break-up and a sense of closure. For this song, there’s a mixture of both, which I really liked, because Swift tends to write about perfect fairytale love.
The next song is “Sparks Fly,” which as of Wednesday, Oct. 27, is the third most popular song on the iTunes songs top chart and I can understand why. Opening with the lyrics, “the way you move is like a full-on rainstorm / and I’m a house of cards,” Swift expertly combines fantastical love with descriptive lyrics to paint an attraction between two young kids in love. She also does this with the fourth and titular song off the album, “Speak Now,” which is about proclaiming love just before the preacher says “speak now or forever hold your peace.”
But just as Swift is famous for her fantastical and fairy tale love songs, she’s also known for her “you should have known” break-up songs, as seen with the songs, “Back to December,” and “Dear John,” a song dedicated to her short-term relationship with fellow singer/songwriter, John Mayer. In the Prologue to Swift’s album she says that “Back to December” is about “the beautiful boy whose heart I broke in December” and her guilt over having to be the heartbreaker instead of the heartbroken this time. I think by putting this song on the album shows Swift as more than just a girl who falls in love a lot and ends up with a broken heart.
There are also a couple other songs on Swift’s album that don’t have to deal with love at all, such as “Mean,” which is about someone who Swift used to be afraid of and “Better than Revenge,” which is about a girl who stole something from hers. These two are particularly some of my favorites on the album because of the lyrics and the girl-empowerment message behind both of them.
Another notable song of this album is the song, “Innocent,” which anyone who’s seen the MTV VMA’s these past two years would know is about the infamous Kanye West incident last year. Right away, as the song begins, I noticed that this song is a lot more emotional and slower than all the other songs on the album. Swift sings “Oh, who are is not where you’ve been / you’re still an innocent” in the chorus, so it seems like Swift has pretty much forgiven West for what he did, which shows that Swift isn’t much of a person to hold a grudge.
While I could go on and on about how awesome each song on Swift’s new album, I highly recommend that any fan go out and buy the whole album, because it’s not worth to just all the popular singles. This album deserves to be listened as a whole, because who knows, it might be another two years before Swift decides to pop out an even more awesome album.