Though no one knew it at the time, the 2016 Grammys marked the tail end of Swift’s reign as America’s sweetheart, before people began to associate her with snake emojis and “I Love TS” t-shirts. But once the awards were handed out, the evening’s ceremonies ended up being a career high water mark for an artist close to Lamar’s total opposite: Taylor Swift. With the Compton rapper receiving 11 nominations - by far the most of any artist that night - the Recording Academy seemed ready to start atoning for decades of sleeping on hip-hop’s sonic innovation and commercial ascendence. There can occasionally be stylistic whiplash from track to track, bringing to mind the endearing messiness of Red and Speak Now, but Lover’s eccentricities feel more like the product of an unwillingness to let go of good ideas than a lack of identity.The 2016 Grammy Awards were supposed to be Kendrick Lamar’s coronation. Jack Antonoff, Swift’s most frequent producer since 1989, returns for many of these songs, and proves himself a good collaborator able to easily build Swift’s world without imposing the ham-fisted 80s pastiche that sometimes manifests in his productions. You can hear the influence of Danielle Haim’s deep rhythmic timbre in Swift’s vocals on “The Man,” as well as Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die era on “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.” The vaguely abstract pop minimalism of “False God” seemingly nods to Blood Orange, and the sugary sighs and swoons on the giddy highlight “I Think He Knows” are reminiscent of Carly Rae Jepsen. Lover also happens to be her first album that’s in dialogue with the pop music of the moment, finding her trying on aesthetics from the more popular end of the past decade’s indie music. It’s confronting and, in a way, comforting to hear one of pop’s most coiffed and put-together stars write with such candor, even if only for a few minutes. She’s more cutting about her own identity than she’s ever been on “The Archer,” on which she resents past spite and, perhaps, her fame. Many of these songs are purely about Swift, as opposed to being about her relationships with others “Death By A Thousand Cuts” is ostensibly about a dead relationship, but the song’s central tension isn’t between Swift and her ex-lover but her own relationship with grief. What is new, however, is that love is no longer a one-dimensional source of joy or pain in her world. Swift has said that Lover is “a love letter to love,” which isn’t novel for her oeuvre. On “Lover,” the pleasure of a potential marriage comes not in being whisked away but in sharing minute, intimate moments “Cornelia Street” presents an open ended narrative in which Swift frets over the potential for a relationship to dissolve. On the glittering, sun-kissed “Cruel Summer,” Swift amorously describes an object of desire as she has many times before - but this time, she slips in a disclaimer, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of upset: “I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you.” She’s no longer writing narratives with clean beginnings and endings and easily demarcated emotions, instead now content to indulge in brief moments of pleasure as vignettes of a larger story. Which isn’t to say the record lacks passion. It’s staggeringly long, oddly sequenced, and quite possibly Swift’s most consistently pleasing record. Bearing the hefty length and stylistic incongruity of her best albums, Lover is a joy to listen to, creaking under the weight of good ideas and nuanced, hyper-specific songwriting. These albums, so reactive in their conception and execution, were good pop records, but not necessarily good Swift albums - they lacked, in some way, the polished unruliness that had come with her earlier records, and Lover confirms that Swift creates her best music when it’s not made to serve a specific purpose or address naysayers. Each was partially made in response to a hurdle she faced - 1989 to the fact that her 2012 record Red failed to win an Album of the Year Grammy, and Reputation to her gobsmacking public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. 1989 and its 2017 follow-up Reputation were the most discussed and dissected records of Swift’s career because they were designed to be. For the first time since before 2014’s gargantuan 1989 made her the most loved and hated person in the world, Taylor Swift has nothing to prove.
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