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Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ made from the heart

She’s back with a new love and a new sense of power on new album

- Maeve McDermott Columnist

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.

 ?? EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP ??
EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP
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 ??  ?? “Reputation,” Taylor Swift’s first album since 2014’s “1989,” is out Friday. KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/GETTY IMAGES FOR NARAS
“Reputation,” Taylor Swift’s first album since 2014’s “1989,” is out Friday. KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/GETTY IMAGES FOR NARAS
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