1989.
Did you caption your selfie with “‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare, dressed like a daydream” or were you cooler than the rest of us?
I have to admit, my favourite Taylor Swift era is Taylor bored and off tour. Hear me out. When Taylor finished The 1989 World Tour, she ran off with Tom Hiddleston to Europe, giving us Getaway Car and the demise of Calvin Harris. Now, Taylor Swift off tour is giving us her sitting on the bleachers at football games, sponsoring the Sophie Turner-Joe Jonas divorce, and casually dropping the highest grossing concert movie of all time.
I’m Australian, so I know nothing about American football, and had never heard of Travis Kelce before he did this collab with Taylor, but I’m buying whatever they’re selling. I love them together, and I will be watching fan edits of their paparazzi walks, featuring Taylor songs about other men playing in the background, until further notice.
One thing about Taylor is that she’s going to meet the parents. Taylor wants to hang out with your Mum and hear stories about you on the T-ball team. She also wants to learn about your ancestry, write a song about your grandparents, and buy a home near your family compound.
I never thought I would be rooting for a guy with a moustache and a podcast, but here we are. Travis seems proud to be with Taylor, and willing to embrace all the craziness that surrounds dating a famous pop star.
As much as I love watching Taylor’s life from the bleachers, and drooling over her Reformation outfits, her music will never go out of style to me (Sorry, I had to, and will continue to). 1989 (Taylor’s Version) has dropped so let’s talk about the original release of this album, and all the new vault tracks. Slut!
1989
In 2014, when 1989 was originally released, I had got a new haircut, lost a ton of weight, and had already moved out of home to the big city. I was in my 1989 era!
It was probably the time in my life where my Instagram feed was most immaculate, and I had experiences I had always dreamed of: travelling to LA and New York City for the first time, gaining freedom and independence, living in a cool area near the Sydney CBD. It was wonderful, and an essential time for my development, but it was also so damn hard. While Taylor’s formative experiences were on a larger and public scale, there was still much of which we could relate to, and find parallels to in our own lives, as young women trying to figure it out.
If this era was a movie, it would be categorised under coming of age. The highs were high, and the lows were low, but Taylor came back stronger than a 90s trend.
It was the era of Tumblr, VSCO filters, American Apparel, the Polaroid renaissance, and quirky Instagram captions. Did you caption your selfie with “‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare, dressed like a daydream” or were you cooler than the rest of us?
The whole marketing campaign and album rollout for 1989 was her best yet. The handwritten lyrics in the liner notes, the Polaroids, the cinematic music videos, the squad pap walks, that Rolling Stone cover shoot — we were FED during the 1989 era, which is why her disappearing from us at the end of it felt like we had been cut off life support (I’m dramatic but still).
I’m surprised I don’t have an IMDb credit for it, but I was, in fact, at the 1989 World Tour Sydney show that was recorded for Apple TV. Yep, the “Sydney!” harmonies during Blank Space were mine, thank you for noticing.
At the concert, Taylor introduced herself by saying “My name is Taylor, and I was born in 1989!” — as a fellow millennial, I could argue that being born in 1989 is not the flex it once was, or perhaps it is, considering at 33, Taylor is still dominating the pop world. Taylor is redefining what it means to be a pop star in 2023, and is showing no signs of slowing down. It is not by chance or happenstance, given how hard Taylor had to work to get here. Taylor deserves this success, and she deserves to be praised without cynicism and eye rolls. Can you believe Pitchfork refused to review 1989 upon its initial release, but they reviewed Ryan Adams’ cover album of it? It’s okay though, because Taylor has been shaking it off all the way to the bank, The Grammys, and into the arms of Travis Kelce. She just had to go through hell, and kiss a few toads (ahem, Calvin Harris) to get here.
“Welcome to New York, it’s been waiting for you!” Taylor sings on Welcome to New York, the opening track to 1989 — I wish New York gave a shit about me! This album followed me to my first trip to New York City in 2015, and I listened to it as I was landing at LaGuardia Airport last year. It captures the blind optimism and naivety that many people embody when they travel to New York for the first time: when you love a city so much, that you want to make it your entire personality. Guilty!
On 1989, Taylor continued to write songs about her personal life, but it was the first time she leaned into the criticism she received from the media, and had fun with it. “I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me” Taylor sings on New Romantics, an empowering response to being the scapegoat for internalised misogyny and men in beanies playing devils advocate. Blank Space was a playful and cheeky response to the media narrative that she was a serial dater who couldn’t keep a man (“Boys only want love if it’s torture, don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn ya”). It was completely disarming, because how could she be the joke, when she was in on the joke?
The production on this album perfectly captures 80s-synth sound, paying homage to the year Taylor was born. Taylor worked with Jack Antonoff for the first time on Out Of The Woods, marking the beginning of a flourishing creative relationship, with Jack producing and co-writing the majority of her catalog since 1989. Out Of The Woods is believed to be about her 2013 romance with Harry Styles, and their infamous snowmobile accident (I’m sorry for laughing, but the song makes it seem like they drove off a cliff or something). Anyway, Taylor sings “I remember thinking” before taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories of their push and pull relationship. The repetitiveness of the question “Are we out of the woods?” a painful insight to what it feels like to be in a relationship that has no clear direction.
I remember leaving New York on the train, on route to Connecticut, when the video for Bad Blood was released. My boyfriend Tim and I had stopped at a crappy gas station for tampons and water, and when we arrived at our location, we watched the music video laying down on the bed. I still had on dark purple lipstick and those black disco pants from American Apparel were were all obsessed with, which wasn’t very Connecticut, but it was very Bad Blood. Even amidst my travels, I was still committed to staying up to date on all things Taylor and 1989. I had always been drawn to this song because while Taylor was responding to Katy Perry “stealing” her dancers from The Red Tour, I was responding to an annoying coworker who liked water cooler gossip. I need a “I survived the Bad Blood fiasco with Taylor Swift and Katy Perry back in 2015, despite loving them both, so I can survive anything!” t-shirt (Too wordy?).
Although this era celebrated Taylor’s independence and female friendships, 1989 still has tracks like This Love and Wildest Dreams that have the classic whimsical lovestruck lyrics that we had come to expect from Taylor. It has been said that You Are In Love was inspired by her producer Jack Antonoff’s then-relationship with writer Lena Dunham. There’s also tracks filled with her desires of what she wishes her love interests would do (How To Get The Girl, I Wish You Would), and the bittersweet feeling when they do it much too late (All You Had To Do Was Stay).
Apart from the music, the 1989 era was particularly iconic and memorable because of The Squad (Yes, it deserves to be capitalised). For those who don’t remember, Taylor basically woke up one day and was the cool girl. She was no longer the girl on the bleachers, or the girl with teardrops on her guitar, she was the girl that every Victoria’s Secret model wanted to be friends with. It was very “I have friends, I definitely have friends” from that skit in the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. “I have this loser complex from high school” Taylor revealed on David Letterman in 2014. Songs like The Best Day and Fifteen also gave us insight to Taylor’s high school experience and how her confidence was fractured during those formative years. Taylor responded to the criticism her squad received in a personal essay titled “30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30” she penned for Elle Magazine in 2019.
Even as an adult, I still have recurring flashbacks of sitting at lunch tables alone or hiding in a bathroom stall, or trying to make a new friend and being laughed at. In my 20s, I found myself surrounded by girls who wanted to be my friend. So I shouted it from the rooftops, posted pictures, and celebrated my newfound acceptance into a sisterhood, without realizing that other people might still feel the way I did when I felt so alone. It’s important to address our long-standing issues before we turn into the living embodiment of them.
Okay, dare I say it, let the damn woman heal her inner child in peace with the help of her hot friends.
“There was so much that I didn’t know then, and looking back I see what a good thing that was” Taylor writes in the prologue for 1989 Taylor’s Version. I think we can all relate to the youthful optimism of the 1989 era — the desire to move to the big city, make new friends, and have new adventures. With the re-recordings Taylor now has the opportunity to look back at her discography with a mature perspective. I’m sure she has Polaroid pictures with friends she’s no longer in touch with, or is maybe embarrassed about her old haircut, but I get the sense that Taylor has reached a stage in her life and career, where she can look back and have empathy for her past self.
“The lights are so bright, but they never blind me” Taylor sings on Welcome To New York — I can’t help but think of all the highs, lows and in-between Taylor has had since the 1989 era, and how throughout it all, she has remained grounded, hopeful, and above all, in a world of black and white, still shining in screaming colour.
Taylor’s Version & From The Vault tracks:
1989 Taylor’s Version was released yesterday, almost a decade after the initial release on October 27th 2014. “To be perfectly honest, this is my FAVOURITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind” Taylor wrote on Instagram when announcing Taylor’s Version of 1989. I second that — these vault tracks are insane, and they are all I will be listening to until further notice.
When we got the track list, I was obviously intrigued by Slut! leading up to the release, Tim has been singing “If I was a slut, then I’d be the slut!” in the tune of The Man. The actual track is a little different, a mid-tempo bop about willingly risking being slut-shamed, because it might be worth it to be with your crush.
Now That We Don’t Talk is one of my favourites — a Mama Swift reference, a melody that builds, and lyrics like “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock, or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht, with important men who think important thoughts”. That’s gotta be about John Mayer, right? There’s also a mention of this guy growing his hair long — I would assume this song was written in 2012, and John had long hair during that year, amid his Born and Raised album cycle. John is also clearly a fan of acid rock, given that he has been in the band Dead & Company, an offshoot of the Grateful Dead, since it formed in 2015.
Tim had the audacity to say that Is It Over Now? was about Calvin Harris — do you really think Taylor ever cared enough about Calvin Harris to fantasise about jumping off “really tall somethings” to get his attention? I don’t think so! This was clearly a song about a boy that never goes out of style, a boy she knew was trouble. The way she sings “Is it over now?” is also reminiscent of how she sings “Are we out of the woods?” in OOTW— a song said to be about Harry Styles. There was also another reference to their snowmobile accident (“Red blood, white snow”).
Suburban Legends is track that sounds a lot like The Archer from Lover. A song about reuniting with an old high school crush. It belongs in a John Hughes film. It’s glittery, nostalgic and has the perfect amount of tragedy.
Say Don’t Go is a certified bop about begging someone not to leave. There’s vulnerable emotion and desperation in Taylor’s voice. I can’t help but think it is the older sister to All You Had To Do Was Stay.
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WAIT THIS ENDED TOO SOON -- I could read your writing all day 🌞 thank you my Taylor pop column kween!!!