Lover

“Lover” represents a more “positive” Taylor after the fraught (and fascinating) “reputation”, her album inspired by the series of personal and professional catastrophes that piled on after the massive success of 2014’s “1989“. In interviews promoting “Lover”, Taylor deftly instructed journalists and critics to perceive the album this way, talking candidly about the fragility of her mental health in 2016, when she was under siege in the media for everything from her reignited feud with Kanye West to her supposed culpability in the election of Donald Trump. The album certainly looks brighter — the goth aesthetic of the “reputation” album cover was replaced by the pink and blue cotton-candy, pastel skies imagery of “Lover”.

BACKGROUND AND THEMES
“Lover” was Taylor’s most adult album to date as well, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opened doors to the next decade of her career; it was also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s “RED”, one of her greatest albums and the unofficial start of her “pop” era. Critics and fans alike came to the conclusion that “Lover” was the first time since “RED” Taylor had attempted to gather together all the Taylors and sit them down for a summit. But “RED” was seven years prior, and there were now a lot more new Taylors in the mix. All over “Lover”, she’s in touch with her younger self — “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” revisits the high-school girl she was on “Fearless”, just as “Daylight” updates the six-months-sober young-adult romantic of “1989”. The girl who sang about making her mom drop her off a block away from the party is now driving her mom to the hospital. The teenager with teardrops on her guitar is now a woman with guitar-string scars. Yet on “Lover” she wants to show why all these girls are authentically her.

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”.

TAYLOR’S LAST BIG POP ALBUM
“Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators,” Taylor told The Guardian in 2019. At some points on “Lover”, it seems like Taylor wants to scale down from the big pop statements. There’s “The Archer,” which builds and builds toward a classic “1989”-style peak and then…doesn’t. There’s the title track, a self-written noir-soul brooder. Best of all is “Cornelia Street,” which revisits the anguish of “reputation” but with a softer, more romantic lyric about how “the street lights pointed in an arrow head, leading us home.” “Lover” is an album about being in love, which is both scary and hard to write songs about. “The Archer,” “Lover,” “Cornelia Street,” “Cruel Summer” — these are the kind of disruptively, devouringly hyper-emotional ballads Taylor used to write about her fleeting crushes, but it’s a totally different song when it’s about trying to hold on to a real human being (and trying to stay one).