Red

In early 2012, Taylor Swift turned in 20 songs to her label for what would become her fourth album, Red. They were all further outgrowths of the pop-country sound she had mastered in her early years, as a teenager finding her voice in the Nashville scene, trying on songs like “Tim McGraw” to reflect the starlight over Georgia and the allure and disappointment of romantic love through a lens that was unmistakably hers. As she amassed a body of work for Red, she was still writing songs about love and its fugitive presence, songs about relationships that swelled like an obsessive thought, songs that picked up and enhanced the smallest pixels of intimate detail as if they were scanning security footage in a crime procedural. When she strummed a chord, it shimmered and just hung there. It sounded like Swift, an organic progression from her previous records.

Looking at the albums that followed Red, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through the distortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horror would come back. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote in collaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—a mutation is happening. A chord thrums from an acoustic guitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum. It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new Taylor Swift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. It sounded like a new version of her, being fitfully born.

Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Martin and Shellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography; they incorporated many of them into Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. One of the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep. Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon.

Red is an album of disappearances, of things that have gone or are just about to go missing—lost relationships, old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re receding out of frame. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged in a blue-black lake of shadow.

Red is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly; both resolved with marriage. But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Swift knew this; she described Red in Billboard as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone.… Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss—it all sounds different to me.”

So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to Fun.’s 2012 pop album Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. They bloom beneath the skin of “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowing and true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s not important: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got dust on every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time like none of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangement to lyric. It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all the tension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fall for the song’s subject. Then the guitars and drums melt into dark, wet echoes like pelting raindrops, as Swift’s focus narrows toward a driveway in the distance: “Two headlights shine through the sleepless night/And I will get you alone.”

Even the songs she recorded with Nathan Chapman, the producer of her first three records and the initial 20 songs she turned in for Red, are expanding, sometimes sounding like a bloom of sound from an empty arena. On opener “State of Grace,” guitars chime like sonar, as if trying to measure the diameter of Swift’s feelings: the early blushes of a relationship, when you seem to recognize something in someone else that you’re not certain anyone else has seen. “We are alone/Just you and me/Up in your room and our slates are clean,” she sings, wiring images into a lattice of memory, “Just twin fire signs/Four blue eyes.”

If Red holds together at all as it rockets through hybrid genres, it’s in the attentive way Swift dwells on memory and loss and the effect of time on both. In the liner notes, Swift borrows a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—and, accordingly, the songs on Red stretch to the length of their forgetting. “Sad Beautiful Tragic” sways like a slowcore desert mirage, a Taylor Swift song on the verge of signing to 4AD. “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,” she sings, while the music simulates that stuttered crawl of days after a breakup, a soft melt of chords that make seconds feel like hours.

“Time won’t fly/It’s like I’m paralyzed by it,” Swift sings in “All Too Well,” the centerpiece of Red and potentially her entire career. It might be her own “Tangled Up in Blue”; like Bob Dylan, she sweeps up drifts of time into loosely-chronological piles of images. “There we are again in the middle of the night,” Swift sings, “We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The tenderness with which she observes this moment of intimacy makes it come to life; she reanimates a feeling instead of reacting to it, exploring all the howling negative space a person leaves behind when their shadow recedes—the things you talked about, the kinds of attention you gave each other, the arguments you had, the rooms where you held onto each other desperately.

A kind of Chekhov’s Scarf that Swift sheds in the first verse reappears in the final verse (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/’Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”) as a metaphor for the continuity of their connection, how feelings persist long after they’ve lost their use. Nothing dies without leaving some trace of itself, she seems to say throughout the length of Red, and in “All Too Well” she becomes one of those traces—“I was there,” she sings in the chorus. “I remember it all too well.” Swift, like anyone, is a hostage to her own experience, but she’s also capable of being a witness to it, able to see a relationship—even as it shrinks further and further away in her vision—for what it was rather than what it couldn’t be.

Taylor Swift: Red

$12 at Rough Trade

$24 at Amazon

$14 at Target