in her lover era in pursuit of perfect packing

by Evan Gardner

Tears, laughter, and joy spill across the strings of Taylor Swift’s guitar. This is the Taylor I know and love. She is the one who always listens, the one who got me through middle school, the one who makes me jump and shout with glee—all with a mere click on Spotify. This Taylor disappeared with the release of Reputation, but her later album, Lover, is more complex: It lingers in the liminal, then bounces continually from majestic to awful and back again. Lover has moments of breathtaking beauty, sadness, triumph, and then some embarrassingly bad songs. After listening to the album for the first time, I could not decide how I felt about it. My indecision was not the passive kind that marinates in the back of your brain while you go swimming and eat watermelon in the summer sun; instead, it was the kind that followed me everywhere, the pros and cons frustrating me at every step. I simply could not come to a conclusion. Finally, I decided the only way to get it out of my head was to write about it: This piece is the story of my confusion, and what it might reveal about the way we see our greatest stars.

The beginning of Lover left me craving something to rid my mouth of the bitter taste of disappointment. The old Taylor is strangled by electronic beats and an overly-enthusiastic drum kit. “I Forgot that You

Existed,” the album’s first track, sets the tone with robotic pounds and claps that swallow her voice. There is no narrative; her distinctive tenderness and depth disappear into a chasm of empty “oooh’s” and “aaah’s.” This is nothing compared to “ME!”, in which Taylor takes her cringe-inducing high register to a new level that is neither catchy nor substantive. The only sound available to mask her vocal wandering is an aggressive drum, pounding listeners’ ears into submission.

After “Cruel Summer” comes “Lover,” the title track. The opening chord made my heart soar, and I was hopeful once more for the Taylor who had been so therapeutic to me in the past. The song begins with the line, “We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January / This is our place, we make the rules.” Suddenly, I jumped to my feet, clinging to the remnants of the old Taylor Swift resonating through the line. From the outset, she establishes a clear and unique setting, a throughline present in all her greatest hits. The lyric mirrors lines that have been burned into my mind through years of lip syncing into the foggy bathroom mirror; lines like, “There's somethin' bout the way / The street looks when it's just rained / There's a glow off the pavement,” from the first song on her second album, Fearless. In “Lover,” her guitar resurfaces on the track as well as in the imagery...