For Taylor Swift, 2014 might have felt like one long debutante ball. On her fifth album, 1989, she emerged as a pop superstar, platinum coursing through her veins, Victoria’s Secret models flanking her like groupies, and a jewel-encrusted microphone permanently affixed to her right hand. For the first eight years of her career, she had been known for her intimate, open-hearted songwriting. On 1989, she traded in six-minute open letters and vivid diary entries for songs that were bright, punchy, and dramatic. It was her “first official pop album,” as she herself put it at the time (dubstep drops on 2012’s Red be damned), inspired by the decade of her birth but totally contemporary in its single-minded pursuit of chart domination and Grammys supremacy.
The gambit worked: Your aunt who only listens to Whitney Houston probably bought 1989; the guy who thinks his indie records are much cooler than yours definitely told you it contained “some really well-crafted pop songs” on a Tinder date once. The album yielded five Hot 100 top 10s, including three No. 1s, and hovered in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 for its entire first year of release. Behind Adele, it was the best-selling album of 2015. And it crystalized an image of Swift that she hasn’t been able to shake off over the intervening decade: that of an invulnerable, sweetly Machiavellian pop deity, arranging her music and the world around her with equal precision.
1989 (Taylor’s Version), the fourth entry in Swift’s series of re-recordings, goes some way toward fleshing out this chapter in her career. The “vault” tracks packaged with the Taylor’s Version series range from astonishing (“Nothing New”) to feeble (“Castles Crumbling”), and while the five songs added to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) lack the wallop and precision of the album proper, they also sometimes reveal humanizing depth—the equivalent of seeing a star exhale and slump their shoulders the minute they step from the afterparty into the Escalade. Toward the end of “Now That We Don’t Talk,” a glittering catwalk-stomper shot through with the bitterness of Speak Now’s “The Story of Us,” Swift basically positions the poise and shine of 1989 as a way to cope: “The only way back to my dignity/Was to turn into a shrouded mystery.”
If 1989 lacks some of the texture and nuance that defines her best work, the vault tracks can be encumbered by their wordiness. On “Suburban Legends,” Swift writes in the dense, largely rhymeless run-on style that defines later records like Folklore and Midnights. The second verse builds to the lines, “I am standing in a 1950s gymnasium/And I can still see it now”—an unwieldy contrast to the appealingly quantized bounce of 1989 cuts like “How You Get the Girl” and “Style.” But this messiness can yield the kind of bittersweet gems that are Swift’s specialty: As ever, she excels when channeling the cocktail of victimhood and superiority that foments in the aftermath of a breakup. On “Now That We Don’t Talk,” she tells an ex that “from the outside, it looks like you’re trying lives on.” “You dream of my mouth before it called you a lying traitor,” from “Is It Over Now?” is an instant addition to Swift’s already-heaving canon of perfect last words.
The most striking moments of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) are shivering and defensive, taking a bat to the knees of the pageant-ready main record. The title of “‘Slut!’” raised a lot of eyebrows upon announcement, with many assuming that it would be a rejoinder to misogyny in the style of “Blank Space,” Swift’s comment on her treatment in the tabloids. Really, it’s far meeker than that: Over a Chromatics-style synth fog, Swift sings about trying to hide a relationship for fear of becoming gossip-rag fodder once again. When she attempts an empowering chorus—“If I’m all dressed up/They might as well be looking at us/If they call me a slut/You know, it might be worth it for once”—she delivers it listlessly, unable to hide the false sentiment. It’s a compelling idea that nonetheless is the weakest of the vault tracks, ambling and aimless in comparison to the songs that come after it.
By contrast, “Say Don’t Go,” the best new addition to the record, shimmers with tension. Where much of 1989 wears its ’80s influence loosely, if at all, the patient verses of “Say Don’t Go” seem like a shot at the glowing slow builds of Phil Collins, to whom Swift would pay tribute a few years later with an exceptional “Can’t Stop Loving You” cover. Its booming chorus is like her take on the grand, percussive hooks of her friends in Haim, but the lyrics bridge the gap between 1989 and Red, almost vicious in their angst.
“Say Don’t Go” is the only vault track written with an industry stalwart: Diane Warren, who penned a swath of megahits through the ’80s and ’90s. The rest were written with Jack Antonoff, whose rise to pop music ubiquity largely began with these songs. (Max Martin and Shellback, who co-wrote and produced most of the record, are absent, and their tracks on the main album were recreated with Christopher Rowe, Swift’s main re-recording partner.) Many of the new songs could slot easily onto Midnights, the pair’s first album-length collaboration. I don’t doubt that chunks of these songs, whether large or small, date back to the original 1989 sessions—“Is It Over Now,” in particular, feels mostly shorn from the same cloth, as does “Say Don’t Go”—but it feels as if many of them were fragments that were built out at a much later date. Swift’s style has changed dramatically in the past nine years; melodically and rhythmically, these tracks don’t wholly match the original 1989.
Not that it really matters. Although the vault tracks extend 1989’s runtime to about 81 minutes, they also make the record’s cloying moments seem more palatable. The fresh-start optimism of “Welcome to New York” is more believable when set in relief against wearier breakup tracks; “I Know Places,” a boilerplate on-the-run-from-the-media narrative, plays like a flipside to the defeatist “‘Slut!’”. These songs aren’t technically better now, but they’re certainly easier to understand. Not everything can be saved by this added context: Nearly 10 years later, “Bad Blood” sounds more basic, bratty, and boring than ever. And while I have a soft spot for the peppy, doe-eyed “How You Get the Girl,” I suspect that no amount of time will mellow its HFCS-level sweetness. (Aside from the slightest tweaks in vocal delivery or processing, the 1989 recreations are the closest to their source material yet.)
No new wrinkles are necessary to appreciate the record’s immaculate highs: the tug-of-war between yearning and anthemic on “I Wish You Would”; “Style”’s Miami Vice strut; the Tumblr-teen euphoria of “New Romantics.” It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.
