After ‘You Belong With Me’ the album takes a step down in tempo, with ‘Breathe’. She wrote it with the Californian singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat and invited the artist to duet with her on the recording. Taylor was a fan, declaring Caillat ‘the coolest thing out there right now’, adding, ‘So for her to be on my next album makes me feel cooler.’ Caillat returned the gushing praise, saying of Taylor: ‘She is so sweet, so beautiful, so talented, and honestly just a really intelligent young woman. She knows what she is doing and she knows how to handle her career and take charge.’ She added: ‘I love her.’
The song’s title is matched by its mood: here, the album seems to pause and take a breath. More broadly, the track also steps aside from the fury and recrimination that underpins so much of Taylor’s music. There is a sense of fate in the lyrics: Taylor notes that there is nothing she can do to save the relationship. ‘It’s a song about having to say goodbye to somebody, but it never blames anybody. Sometimes that’s the most difficult part. When it’s nobody’s fault.’ The lack of blame and bitterness in this track gives the album itself a freshness and poise. It shows that Taylor is not always a fuming finger pointer.
That Taylor, however, reappears in ‘Tell Me Why’. Liz Rose, who wrote the song with Taylor, knows how to open up the feelings inside an artist’s head. The tin opener she uses is a simple one: perceptive questions. So when Taylor arrived for a songwriting session in a pent-up and fuming mood over a guy in her life, Liz knew just what to do. She turned to Taylor and asked her, if she were given the chance to say everything on her mind to the guy, what she would say first. ‘I would say to him, “I’m sick and tired of your attitude, I feel like I don’t even know you.”’ From there, Taylor says, she ‘just started rambling’. Yet as she did so, Liz was busily noting down the essence of that rambling. ‘We turned it into a song,’ said Taylor.
And a lively song at that. We are back to the ‘sick and tired’ Taylor we are more familiar with. We also see her expressing themes that crop up a lot in her music: the sense that a man dismisses her life and dreams in order to make his own seem more important. She mourns being ‘fooled’ by the man’s smile – an error that many will no doubt be able to relate to. One wonders whether, if the man did attempt to tell her why, she would be a receptive listener or too overcome with anger to deal with the situation. In any case, she ends the song letting him go, with a final declaration that she will not fall for his games any longer.
Arguably the album’s most mournful song is ‘You’re Not Sorry’. While in ‘Breathe’ Taylor had herself been in openly apologetic mode, in ‘You’re Not Sorry’ she curses the fact that a man in her life has not afforded her the same honour. As in ‘Tell Me Why’, she feels she has been fooled. ‘He came across as Prince Charming,’ she said. ‘Well, it turned out Prince Charming had a lot of secrets he didn’t tell me about. And one by one, I would figure them out. I would find out who he really is.’ As she stumbled upon his secrets, he would apologise and vow not to repeat his mistakes. Yet then he would do them ‘again and again’. Eventually, she felt she had to ‘stand up’ to him and point out that he was not, in fact, sorry in any real sense. When she tells him that ‘she can have you’, the listener discovers that among the secrets was an affair. The production gives this a ballad feel – one could easily imagine a boy band attempting it, perhaps rising from their stools in the final third of the song. However, few male vocalists could deliver the song’s message of hurt and defiance with the same gusto as Taylor.
Some journalists, particularly the male of the species, have painted Taylor as a girl who will never be happy. So quick is she to complain about men, they argue, that there will never be a man who lives up to her exacting standards. Instead, they speculate, she is destined to a life of only transient relationships, each of which will be over too soon and then turned into a song. It is a harsh verdict, but not one she would entirely disagree with, as we see in ‘The Way I Loved You’. In this song she complains about how, as she dates a nice guy, she secretly wishes she was back with a bad boy. Her current beau is ‘sensible’, prompting envy from her friends. But she ends up yearning for the drama and volatility of a relationship with a less perfect man.
She explained: ‘It’s about being in a relationship with a nice, punctual, practical, logical guy and missing the crazy, complicated, frustrating guy.’ Taylor co-wrote it with John Rich, a former member of the popular band Lonestar who then went solo. He is also a widely respected songwriter who has penned tunes for the likes of Bon Jovi and Faith Hill. For him, the experience of writing with someone so much younger than him was not a problem. He said: ‘Sure, there’s an age difference, but she knows herself and her audience very well, and she’s so connected to who that audience is. She knows she’s still a kid and embraces it. She writes things that are important to her. If she breaks up with a boyfriend, that’s traumatic to her, and she’ll write about it.’
As for Taylor, she noted that, in Rich, she was to a certain extent writing with the sort of character she was yearning for in the song. ‘He was able to relate to it because he is that complicated, frustrating, messy guy in relationships,’ she said. ‘We came at the song from different angles. It was just so cool to get in a room and write with him, because he really is an incredible writer.’ Taylor’s evocation of 2 a.m. arguments and screaming in the rain are vivid.
Rain is a favoured element in Taylor’s songwriting, and it appears yet again in ‘Forever & Always’. This upbeat track was a very late addition to the album. Just as the collection was ready to be mastered, Taylor suddenly became determined to add the song. She phoned the label and initially met with some resistance to her idea for a late change. So she ‘absolutely begged’ them to change their minds and let her include the song. Some industry figures are terrified by such last-minute changes to an album. They like the process to be calm and ordered. Taylor, however, gets excited about changing things around. ‘I think it’s fun, knowing that two days before you’re scheduled to have the last master in and everything finished and they’re ready to print up the booklets, I can write something, call my producer, we can get in the studio, put a rush on it, get an overnight mix and that can be a last-minute addition to the record.’
As for the song itself, it is about a sad, inexorable decline in love. ‘It’s about when I was in a relationship with someone and I was just watching him slowly slip away,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know why, because I wasn’t doing anything different. I didn’t do anything wrong. He was just fading. It’s about the confusion and frustration of wondering why. What changed? When did it change? What did I do wrong? In this case, the guy I wrote it about ended up breaking up with me for another girl.’ As for the music itself, it has, as she told the LA Times, a ‘pretty melody’, yet by the end the intensity of it all has risen. ‘In the end, I’m basically screaming it because I’m so mad. I’m really proud of that.’
‘The Best Day’, as we have already seen, is one of the album’s sweetest moments and, indeed, arguably the most heart-warming song Taylor wrote for any of her first four albums. Her vocals here are notably, and deliberately, gentler than elsewhere on Fearless. As she is singing about her childhood, she wants to sound younger than her years. Although some of the lyrics, such as those about the trees changing colour in ‘the Fall’, could be accused of being clichéd by a cold heart, this is a song of warmth. Its sweetness and vulnerability are what make it so potent.
Not that the song is whitewashing or deluded. After the bliss of the first verse and chorus, in the second verse Taylor turns to the tribulations life throws at teenagers. She focuses on the day she was rejected and then humiliated when she suggested a day at the mall to some girls she considered her friends. She gives Andrea credit for easing her out of the pain of that episode, and others similar. She then sings about her ‘excellent’ dad and how God smiles on her brother Austin who is, she sings, ‘better than I am’. Taylor’s maturity mounts throughout the song and, by the end, some o
f life’s mysteries have been solved for her, thanks to her mother.
The track itself was a very sweet Christmas surprise from Taylor to her mother. The girl who grew up surrounded by Christmas trees chose just that festival to show her mother how much she loved her and appreciated all her efforts. Andrea told the story of how Taylor unveiled it to her during a television interview. ‘The first time that she played “The Best Day” for me was Christmas Eve,’ she told TV show Dateline. ‘She had made this edited music video. I’m looking on the TV and this video comes up with this voice that sounds exactly like Taylor’s. And I looked over at her and she said, “I wrote it for you, Mom.” And that’s when I lost it. And I’ve lost it pretty much every time I’ve heard that song since.’ Such tears are understandable. Even for a dispassionate listener, this song is touching. For Andrea it must be like an emotional juggernaut.
Where ‘The Best Day’ was all gentleness and vulnerability, ‘Change’ sees Taylor’s tough side come to the fore – but in the best of ways. A motivational call to arms, this is a wonderfully fierce tune. With its stadium-rock production and punchy lyrics, the song details how hard she had to work when she signed for a brand-new independent label, having passed on the chance to tie herself to an unsatisfactory agreement with a more established industry giant. It is pertinent that, here, Taylor does not cast herself as the sole hero, overcoming the odds alone, as many a rock and pop diva has done.
However, when Taylor sings about how ‘we’ made it work, there is a more encompassing triumph at play. ‘There were times I was working so hard that I didn’t realise that every single day our numbers were getting bigger,’ she said. ‘Every single day, our fanbase was growing. Every single day, the work that we were doing was paying off.’ After she won the Horizon Award at the CMAs, she suddenly realised how much had changed. ‘I looked over and saw the president of my record label crying. Walking up those stairs, it just occurred to me that that was the night things changed.’ She added: ‘It changed everything.’ Scott Borchetta noted that it was one of the first songs she wrote that wasn’t about love. ‘Live, it’s becoming this tour de force. It’s almost like a U2 moment now. So the maturation process is amazing, because she’s found a different place where the songs are getting even more important. But it’s still her.’ Still her indeed – but what would the world make of Fearless?
Oftentimes, a young artist who has received plentiful praise for their debut album then receives something of a critical pasting when they release album number two. It is the backlash syndrome. This comes about for two reasons. The first is that the critical bar is set enormously high by a successful debut. The second factor is that reviewers are keen to make their name with a counter-intuitive write-up. Therefore, there was reason for Taylor to feel anxious as she awaited the media’s verdict on Fearless. After hearing the album, Rolling Stone magazine was moved to describe Taylor as ‘a songwriting savant with an intuitive gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture’. To emphasise how strongly the magazine felt that songwriting was among Taylor’s arsenal of talents, it added: ‘If she ever tires of stardom, she could retire to Sweden and make a fine living churning out hits for Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry.’
However, The Guardian felt that Taylor’s lyrics have been overrated. Star reviewer Alex Petridis declared: ‘Back home, comparisons have been made to Randy Newman, Hank Williams and Elvis Costello, which turns out to be setting the bar perhaps a tad higher than Swift can reach.’ He also complained that Taylor showed ‘a tendency to use the same images over and over again’. He added that Taylor was ‘fantastically good at regarding teenage life with a kind of wistful, sepia-toned nostalgia’.
Many of the reviewers singled out ‘Fifteen’, particularly the chorus’s observation that, at the age of 15, if someone tells you that they love you, you are going to believe them. The Boston Globe said the song’s message showed that ‘hindsight apparently comes early for Swift’. The Washington Post also lapped up the song, describing it as ‘a wistful cautionary tale’. Its reviewer Chris Richard concluded: ‘And that makes Swift’s most obvious precedents the legendary girl groups of yore. Like the Shangri-Las, Crystals and Ronettes before her, Swift has found a way to swathe the fun in profundity.’ Billboard preferred to contrast rather than compare, arguing that ‘aside from sharing, possibly, a box of Clairol, there is nothing remotely Britney- or Christina-esque about Swift’.
Probably the harshest verdict came from Slant magazine. Not content with declaring Taylor a ‘terrible singer’, Jonathan Keefe also couched his review with cynicism, more interested in crediting the collection to purely commercial decisions made by ‘Swift and her management’ team, rather than to Taylor the artist. ‘There’s simply no risk to these songwriting choices, with easy images that seem chosen primarily because they will evoke a desired response from an audience of primarily very young listeners, not because they show any real spark or creativity or work cohesively to build larger themes,’ he complained.
Taylor rejected this image of long, clinical summits in which every syllable of each song was weighed up for its market potential by money-driven men. Indeed, the way she described the creation of the album was rich with the spark that Slant felt she lacked. ‘Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less,’ she said, during an interview with Time magazine. She said that ‘Love Story’ had been written in 20 minutes as she lay on her bedroom floor. ‘When I get on a roll with something, it’s really hard for me to put it down unfinished.’ Perhaps the best way to try to reconcile Slant’s view of her songwriting and Taylor’s own description of it is to wonder: would it be wrong even if Slant had called it accurately? Writing for one’s audience is surely better than writing against them.
Offering her own assessment of the album, Taylor said that Fearless was ‘the same’ as Taylor Swift – ‘just two years older’. She agreed the album had ‘crossover appeal’, but preferred to refer to this as ‘spillover, because I’m a country artist and I write country songs, and I’m lucky enough to have them played on pop radio’. The album was released on 11 November 2008. As midnight struck on the previous evening, she made a promotional appearance at her local Walmart store in Hendersonville. She signed albums and thanked her delighted fans for their support. She also appeared on Good Morning America on the day of release, the same show she had rolled up to on the launch day of her debut album. For her, the album was a significant step up. ‘I’ve never been more proud of anything in my life,’ she told US newspaper Newsday. ‘I wrote every song on it. I co-produced it. So to have people go out and actually buy it, it’s wonderful.’
People were indeed going out and actually buying it. The first-week sales were a step up from her debut: in the first seven days it was on the shelves it sold over 10 times the number that its predecessor did in the same period. It reached number one in the Billboard 200 in doing so. Taylor was showing that her previous successes were no freaks and that she was not a gimmicky artist. Here, she was setting down the roots that hold strong to this day. She was in it for the long haul.
Yet her brand was not above being exploited commercially. That same month, as her album was hitting the store shelves, Taylor herself did so, too – in the form of a plastic doll. The product was released with her approval. Citing the ‘great connection’ that ‘tweens’ felt with Taylor, the manufacturers launched a range of figurines, including one that brandished Taylor’s signature crystal guitar. ‘When I was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming a country music star and having my very own fashion doll line,’ gushed Taylor in the promotional blurb. ‘Now it’s come true! I can’t wait to see little girls play with my doll and rock out with my crystal guitar!’ It felt cheap.
In truth, Taylor felt a deeper sense of pride and excitement when she received awards – and a fresh shower of honours rained down on her in November. She landed no less than three BMI Country Awards, including ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’ being named Country Song of the Year. Hank Williams
Jr, who was honoured as a ‘music icon’ on the same night, gave Taylor a thumbs-up as she walked to the stage to accept the gong. Later, Kenny Chesney texted his congratulations and to tell Taylor he loved her. At the Country Music Awards, she finished the evening trophyless for the first time in three successive ceremonies. However, she still made her mark with a theatrical re-enactment of the video for ‘Love Story’, with Justin Gaston taking the male lead on the night, as he had in the video itself.
The month’s next ceremony was the American Music Awards (AMAs). Here, there was a reverse of her CMA experience – having never previously won an AMA, this time she did. The category of Favourite Female Country Artist was a clear fit for her and she duly lifted the prize, writing later on her blog that she was unable to express how ‘thankful/amazed/excited/ecstatic/overjoyed/blown away’ she was. She added that it was the fact it was a ‘fan-voted award’ that made it so special to her.
The press continued to crave a real-life romance for her. Like a young princess watched by an expectant nation, Taylor seemed to have romantic happiness being wished upon her. Although she sang about her private life, Taylor had thus far managed to keep it out of the media. When she began to date a famous pop heart-throb, though, that was bound to change – and it did. Joe Jonas was one-third of sibling boy band the Jonas Brothers. Between 2005 and 2013, the trio from New Jersey enjoyed enormous commercial success. Thanks to a tie-in with the Disney Channel network, they adopted a clean-cut image, which was carefully maintained by their management. It was partly due to the requirements of that image – that the three brothers appear to their fans to be not only available but virginal – that Joe’s relationship with Taylor was such a complicated affair, and one destined for failure.
They met in the summer of 2008 and, as whispers circulated about them, the press began to speculate that they were romantically involved. With both parties regularly granting interviews to the media, questions were soon asked of them both. In retrospect, their first and curiously similar public statements on the matter seem carefully coordinated. Taylor told MTV News: ‘He’s an amazing guy, and anyone would be lucky to be dating him.’ Then, asked if he was dating Taylor, Jonas said: ‘She’s a great girl. I think anybody would love to go on a date with her.’ Yet Taylor had recently stated that she wanted to date someone from the showbiz world, ideally a celebrity who would understand the pressures on her. She saw the advantage of getting together with someone ‘who gets what you do and gets that you’re not going to be around a lot’.
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