Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ made from the heart
She’s back with a new love and a new sense of power on new album
Her long-anticipated sixth album is largely a look at an artist in love
Don’t let the album title fool you — Taylor Swift doesn’t give a damn about her bad reputation.
Swift’s long-anticipated sixth album, Reputation ( ★★★), chronicles the most turbulent year and a half of the singer’s life, consisting of squads, suitors and one personal drama — her public spat with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian — that resulted in Swift all-but-disappearing from public life.
But, as she finally inches back into the spotlight, her 15-song chronicle of her year of reckoning doesn’t proceed anything like fans were led to believe from the album’s lead single, Look What You Made Me Do. Instead, Reputation is a look at an artist in love, and not the kind of flashin-the-pan romance or tragic heartbreak that populated previous releases. For the first time, Swift has written an album about a relationship while she’s still in it, sharing the story of the new relationship that she’s so fiercely kept away from the cameras.
The man in question almost certainly is British actor Joe Alwyn, whose blue eyes are a recurring motif throughout Reputation. The album follows a somewhat-linear narrative, starting with ... Ready For It’s taunting seduction and End Game’s daydreaming about romantic getaways, with the latter showing Swift trading chant-singing verses with Future and Ed Sheeran.
She falls deeper in love, coming clean with her feelings on the standout track
Delicate, then struggles through a rough patch, flirting with her fears of abandonment on Dancing With Our Hands
Tied and her uncontrollable feeling of lust on Dress, confessing that she only bought the garment “so you could take it off.”
And at the end of the album, she’s fine, with Call It
What You Want glimpsing her well-adjusted new reality and newly valued privacy. The final track, New
Year’s Day, provides a tearjerker of an epilogue and the most Swiftian refrain: “Hold on to the memories / They will hold onto you / And I will hold onto you.” Aside from the simple piano on New
Year’s Day, the album is all skittering beats, booming bass choruses and vocoder-style harmonies, a unified sheen of icy pop. Yet while Reputation tightens up 1989’ s wide-ranging pop experiments into a more defined sound, slower stretches may leave some nostalgic for her more playful pop stylings or the twangy guitars of her earlier releases.
But while Swift’s country instrumentals may be a thing of the past, her flair for storytelling shines through on the most engaging songs, such as the delightfully dishy Getaway Car, which tells the story of her tabloid drama with Tom Hiddleston by portraying him as her hapless driver, whom she abandons after their heist. Equally thrilling is This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, which winkingly memorializes days she spent partying with her squad and, even more pointedly, her former friendship with Kanye West. “And here’s to you, ’cause forgiveness is a nice thing to do,” she sings to West, before breaking out in laughter, exclaiming, “I can’t even say it with a straight face!” Yet there’s a key difference between Swift clowning West on Nice Things and her messaging on Look, which saw the singer regressing to the “playing the victim” role she has been criticized for throughout her career. Over the course of Reputation, Swift takes ownership of her narrative in a way listeners haven’t heard before. She’s the predator, the person holding all the control, the gatekeeper to her own heart, flipping the script of one of her songs from her long-ago Red era, I Knew You Were Trouble.
This time, Swift is the troublemaker, and over the course of the album, finds someone who can handle her newfound power. And that private reputation, she proves, is more important to her than all the headlines in the world.