Lover
August 23, 2019
Table of Contents
Background and Themes
Months ahead of its release, Lover was preceded by the singles “ME!” and “You Need To Calm Down,” which attempted to perform two radically different tasks: 1) Re-establish Taylor’s bonafides as a maker of pan-generational pop hits, the sort of broad appeal, big-tent music that appeals to toddlers and senior citizens and everyone in between; 2) Placate critics who feel that Taylor “isn’t political enough.” The most common complaint about Lover is that those singles are easily the worst songs on the record, much like “Look What You Made Me Do” came to be viewed as the biggest liability on reputation by the general public.
Title Significance
In the voice memos for Lover, which are found on the deluxe editions of the album, Taylor further explained that after she wrote the song, she knew it would be the title and that it would “depict the tone for the record, and it’s been a real catalyst for what this album has become.”
«[Lover is] an album about all different forms of love. Even when love hurts, this album is about the full spectrum that love makes us feel, so I was like, 'This album is definitely going to be called Lover.'»
Taylor's Last Big Pop Album
«reputation was so far from what I usually do. And Lover feels like a return to the fundamental songwriting pillars that I usually build my house on. It's really honest; it's not me playing a character. It's really just how I feel, undistilled. And there are a lot of very personal admissions in it. And also, I love a metaphor. I've loved building on the metaphor for a very long time. You know, the whole of reputation was just a metaphor, but this [Lover] is a very personal record. So that's been really fun.»


Writing and Recording
«There isn’t ever one song that could sum up what the album is, but I knew that this one felt like a celebration. It felt like something that could make you feel good, and like, I just want that right now for people, and I want to feel that way when I perform it. I wanna feel good and positive and hopeful. And I think that a song is kind of like a mantra if you think about it. If you get a song stuck in your head, that’s the message you’re telling yourself — whether it’s intentional or not, whether it’s conscious or not.»
Taylor also highlighted that every song on Lover was written specifically for the album, devoid of leftovers from other albums; citing “This Love” as an example, which she had written closer to RED (2012), but ended up being on 1989 (2014). However, in a January 2020 interview with Variety‘s Chris Willman, Taylor revealed that “Only the Young“, the song for her 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, was held back from being included on Lover.
Album Artwork and Aesthetic
Taylor teased the album aesthetic on Instagram before it was announced, departing from the dark, gothic, serpentine black and white color scheme of reputation. The aesthetic of Lover has been described as daytime, spring and summer, incorporating butterflies, hearts, floral and kitsch, and consisting heavily of pastel colors. Taylor further defined the Lover look and feel as open fields and sunsets; calling it a “festival-y” album, while discussing the album’s accompanying (and eventually cancelled) tour, the “Lover Fest“. The aesthetic was also employed in several public appearances and live performances throughout the era.


Promotion
The New York Times highlighted Taylor’s “old-fashioned” way of releasing Lover, from the release of its lead single “ME!” till the album release. The newspaper stated that she is “steady in her traditional pop playbook, with radio singles, music videos, magazine covers, television appearances and a stream of things for sale, all on schedule”, even though the majority of the music industry had adapted to the digital era. With the release of her next album, folklore (2020), Taylor would ditch the heavy promotion cycle too.
Commercial Performance
Lover sold more than 3.2 million pure copies worldwide in 2019 alone. Republic Records reported that it earned 3 million units in global consumption in its opening week. The strong global sales of Lover led the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) to name Taylor the number-one best selling artist of 2019, earning the honor for the second time, her first being in 2014 after the release of 1989, making her the first female artist to do so.
In the US, Lover sold around 450,000 copies in its first day, earning the biggest sales week of 2019, breaking the previous first-week sales record of Jonas Brothers’ Happiness Begins (357,000) in a day. Lover debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, generating more than 867,000 units with around 679,000 pure sales, immediately becoming the country’s best-selling album of 2019, and the biggest sales week since Taylor’s own reputation. It is her sixth No. 1 album in the country; she also became the first female artist in US history to have six albums sell more than 500,000 copies in a single week. Lover earned more than 226 million streams across all platforms in the US in its first week, at the time marking the second largest streaming week of all time among albums by women. Additionally, Lover outsold all the other 199 albums on the chart combined in its opening week, the first album to achieve this feat since reputation.
All 18 tracks from Lover charted simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100, breaking numerous records—the most simultaneous Hot 100 entries among women, the most simultaneous Hot 100 debuts among women, the album by a female artist with most simultaneous Hot 100 entries and the album by a female artist with the most simultaneous Hot 100 debuts.


Critical Reception
Award Recognition
The album’s music videos garnered four wins at the MTV Video Music Awards: “Video of the Year” and “Video for Good” for “You Need to Calm Down”—having previously won the former for “Bad Blood” (2015), Taylor tied Rihanna and Beyoncé as the only female acts to win the top prize twice—and “Best Visual Effects” for “ME!” in the 2019 show, and Best Direction in 2020 for “The Man“.
Taylor scored wins in all her five nominations at the American Music Awards of 2019, becoming the most awarded artist of the night and the most awarded artist in AMA history (29 wins), extending her record in the categories of “Artist of the Year”, “Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist” and “Favorite Pop/Rock Album”. Additionally, she was crowned the “Artist of the Decade” of the 2010s, a very well deserved highlight in her prolific career.
Released | August 23, 2019 | |||
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Recorded | November 2018 – February 2019 | |||
Studio | Conway (Los Angeles) Electric Lady (New York) Electric Feel (West Hollywood) Golden Age West (Auckland) Golden Age (Los Angeles) Metropolis (London) | |||
Genre | Pop Synth Pop Electro Pop Pop Rock | |||
Length | 61:48 | |||
Label | Republic Records | |||
Producers | Taylor Swift Jack Antonoff Joel Little Louis Bell Frank Dukes | |||
TAYLOR SWIFT CHRONOLOGY | ||||
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STANDARD EDITION
- 1. I Forgot That You Existed
- 2. Cruel Summer
- 3. Lover
- 4. The Man
- 5. The Archer
- 6. I Think He Knows
- 7. Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince
- 8. Paper Rings
- 9. Cornelia Street
- 10. Death By A Thousand Cuts
- 11. London Boy
- 12. Soon You'll Get Better
- 13. False God
- 14. You Need To Calm Down
- 15. Afterglow
- 16. ME!
- 17. It's Nice To Have A Friend
- 18. Daylight