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Taylor Swift

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Taylor Swift

 
Taylor Swift
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Avg: 4.5 (1833 ratings)

Country music and future nostalgia.

  • We Say...

    Review by Keith Harris

    Country’s cross-generational appeal is now almost as ingrained as its nostalgia. And yet, it has rarely sated the teenybop market with an age-appropriate idol its numbers have earned. Enter Taylor Swift, a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old, blue eyes framed by blonde ringlets, her songwriting credits respectable at worst, her newfound niche overdue for occupancy. As country prodigies go, Swift’s no more a LeeAnn Rimes, shamelessly flaunting her high-wattage pipes, than she is a Tanya Tucker, unwittingly trafficking in jailbait fantasies. On this very site, doubters have called her voice “immature,” while another listener pointedly avers, “you got some dues to pay first before you can sing about a broken heart.” But that’s beside the point — she’s self-consciously a teenager, young enough to fantasize about a future broken heart rather than mourn an actual one.

    Even listeners sonically allergic to pop country should make room for “Tim McGraw,” last fall’s big hit. “When you think ‘Tim McGraw,’” Swift sings to an old beau, “I hope you think our favorite song,” adding, “I hope you think of me.” A welcome addition to the noble tradition of songs-about-songs, “Tim McGraw” isn’t really about “the haunting power of country music,” as Swift told Country Weekly, and you needn’t have loved or even heard a McGraw song for it to catch you up. “Tim McGraw” is about the enduring power of any listener to imbue any music with personal meaning — Tim, he’s just incidental, a metrically convenient trio of syllables for Swift’s exercise in romantic nostalgia.

    But if Swift anticipates a bittersweet nostalgia for heartbreak, she also anticipates memories of happiness as well. She sings “Mary’s Song (Oh My My)” in the voice of a married woman who reminisces about when she was seven and her man was nine — eighty years ago. From there, she occasionally fades into midtempo competence, and falls for insights like “I’m just a girl/ Tryin’ to find a place in this world.” But for more successful teencentric vignettes, there’s “Our Song” (“He’s got a one-hand feel/ On the steering wheel/ The other on my…” pause, before adding “heart”), reminding us that country music is the last genre where people listen to the radio in songs, while on the spunky “Picture to Burn” (“So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy/ That’s fine — I’ll tell mine you’re gay”) she imagines Avril as a fourth Dixie Chick. If those comparisons seem a few years outdated, that’s intentional — like Garth Brooks smuggling soft rock into Nashville two years after the fact, Swift’s importing, and revitalizing, the attitude of confessional teenpop years past its prime.

    That same ‘tude subtly permeates the big hit as well. Maybe it’s that slide acoustic guitar lick gently nuzzling against the verses the makes “Tim McGraw” seem so much sweeter than it is. But from the very start, Swift hushedly recognizes that her boy’s line about the way her blue eyes shine is “a lie.” The last verse is a tart kiss-off, too, with Taylor boasting — what else? — that he’ll hear her on the radio one day. The video makes the story clearer, as the dude, sitting in his truck, wipes away a tear as he listens to the radio. “Tim McGraw” isn’t just for young girls to moon over a love they’ll someday lose. It’s a song about making boys cry. And that, girls, is something to look forward to.

  • They Say...

    Review by Jeff Tamarkin, All Music Guide

    All of 16 when she recorded this debut album, country-pop singer Taylor Swift's considerably strong voice straddles that precarious edge that both suggests experience far beyond her years and simultaneously leaves no doubt that she's still got a lot of life to live. It's a fresh, still girlish voice, full of hope and naïveté, but it's also a confident and mature one. That Swift is a talent to be reckoned with is never in doubt: her delivery on tracks like the uptempo "The Outside," the spare acoustic ballad "Mary's Song (Oh My My My)," and especially the leadoff track, "Tim McGraw," which was the first single from the album, is that of a seasoned pro, despite Swift's newcomer status. "Tim McGraw" may also be the album's highlight -- not a teenager's tribute to the country superstar, it instead uses McGraw as a marker in a lover's time line: "When you think Tim McGraw/I hope you think my favorite song." It's a device that's been used countless times in as many ways, that of associating a failed affair with items, places, and people, yet it works as a hook here and manages to come off as an original idea. Swift wrote or co-wrote every song on the record, a fairly remarkable feat considering the sophisticated manner in which she treats matters near and dear to the heart of one her age ("Now that I'm sitting here thinking it through/I've never been anywhere cold as you"). Producer/mentor Nathan Chapman has applied to some of Swift's songs a gloss that not all of them really require and in some cases would do better to shed. But Swift has no trouble overcoming any blandness taking place around her. She's come up with a commendable starter album that's as accomplished as any by a ten-year veteran who's seen a lot more road and felt a lot more emotion. Swift's young age may be a major point of interest in bringing listeners in, but by the end of the record she's succeeded in keeping them.

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