From the moment Taylor Swift revamped her social media with all pastel colors and heart motifs, any true Swiftie could sense a new era was coming. All the signs pointed to an album of dreamy, gushy songs about her lover. The overall sound of the album has signature Taylor Swift moments but clearly has matured from her previous discography.
Classic lyricism
Taylor Swift’s strong suit has always been her ability to weave grand stories of love and heartbreak into her songwriting. With Lover, she achieves some of her most well-crafted lines, whether she’s singing about her mother’s cancer or a marriage fantasy. From lines like “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings” on “Paper Rings” to the motifs of getting paper cuts from writing pages and pages for a lost love on “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” Swift proves her strong command of imagery and the rhetoric of love songs.
However, not every track on the album has ingenious lyricism. In fact, her first two singles, “ME!” and “You Need To Calm Down,” consisted of remarkably juvenile songwriting. Swift skips the deep and cutting lines and relies on simple rhyming schemes reminiscent of reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do.”
Experimental pop
Since 1989, Swift has fully transitioned into the pop genre. With reputation, she began experimenting stylistically with rap and electro-pop. In Lover, she reverts back to her 1989 sound. Tracks like “London Boy,” “I Think He Knows,” and “Paper Rings” are my personal favorites, because they sound like the Taylor Swift version of punk that you can definitely bop to. Other songs like “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” and “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” have a slower, haunting backtrack that I am also a huge fan of.
Unfortunately, also with 1989, Swift began leaning into radio-friendly pop music. Like “Shake It Off,” the first two singles off Lover and “I Forgot That You Existed” not only have childish lyrics, but also have generic mall-sounding qualities that make it catchy, but easy to get sick of.
Political undertones
Perhaps the greatest change in Swift’s music is the sudden references to political issues. Her songs have always been painfully honest about her personal life, but before this era, she was completely silent about her political leanings.
The best political song on the album, and a strong contender for her next single, is “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.” At surface level, it seems like a typical Taylor Swift ballad about a high school lover, replete with references to homecoming, school hallways, and marching bands. A closer listen reveals the extended metaphor of the 2016 election. The lines about feeling hopeless after looking at the scoreboard and “American stories/Burning before me” refer to the loss of American values. She even refers to the Democratic party in the line “We paint the town blue” and Trump’s allies in “The whole school is rolling fake dice” and “I see the high fives/Between the bad guys.” Though her feminist anthem “The Man” was clever, I would consider “Miss Americana” the most artful way of bringing politics into her album, as opposed to the forced and artificial gay-rights anthem “You Need To Calm Down.”