On this week’s Popcast: Taylor Swift in some new poses — shape-shifter, naïf, New Yorker. And an old pose: hope for the record industry.
There has been a fair amount of interest in the question of whether Ms. Swift’s fifth record, “1989” — released Monday — will, like her last two albums, sell a million copies in its first week. (It doesn’t have the support of the country-music radio industry, which may be the only precinct crucially disappointed by her change of style.) If it does, it will be the first to do so since “Red,” her last album, from 2012. Whether it does or it doesn’t, what has Ms. Swift achieved here?
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As Jon Caramanica wrote in his review of the album, she’s worked to distance herself not only from country — as was the tenor of some of her previous work — but from a lot of current mainstream pop. “1989” is named for the year of her birth and, she has said, for the general date-range of her current sonic interests. With the help of songwriters and producers — including Max Martin, an old friend, and Jack Antonoff (of Fun and Bleachers), a new one — she’s now almost entirely renounced the acoustic guitar. But she hasn’t replaced it with hip-hop and R&B. Instead she’s going toward an imagined mid-to-late-’80s sound. It’s the territory of the new song “Style,” one of the record’s high points, which sounds to Mr. Caramanica like “something from the original ‘Miami Vice’ soundtrack, all warm synths and damp vocals,” and production-heavy tracks like “Bad Blood,” with a big drumbeat evoking Billy Squier (or Clipse).
How’s that working out for her? Is she connecting with her new subjects and source materials? Does the naïve persona in “Welcome to New York,” her ode to her new adopted city, fit her correctly? Is she giving us enough of a connection to the teasingly confessional songwriter she was before? And if isolating herself from the pack is the album’s premise, how far can she maintain it?
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