When she was 18, Taylor Swift wrote a song called “Fifteen”. “At that time, I swore I would marry him someday, but I made some of my biggest dreams come true,” she sang, sounding more like a wrinkled great-grandmother than a rising veteran.
“Fifteen” is evocative, albeit a little hygienic: nimble mandolin fingerings imitate the nervous butterflies of the first day of school, while Swift sings wide-eyed with hope that “one of those older boys will wink at you and say, ‘You you know I haven’t seen you before. ‘ “
There was a certain emotional truth in the lyrics – several years of age difference ever seems more important than when you are a teenager? – but some older listeners were skeptical. “You applaud her skill,” wrote a reviewer for the Guardian in a mixed review of Swift’s second album, “Fearless”, “while feeling a little uncomfortable with the idea of a teenager pontificating like Yoda.”
Swift, now 31, sings “When you’re young, they assume you don’t know anything” in “Folklore”, an LP that is both compositionally mature and braided with references to the specific and often denigrated wisdom of teenagers. (Received five of Swift’s six Grammy nominations, which takes place on Sunday in Los Angeles.) At the end of the song, “Cardigan”, the narrator hollowed out a lot of flowery, but emotionally lucid memories, which she must conclude with force of a sudden revelation, “I knew everything when I was young.”
While not as hot a topic as ex-boyfriends, fame or celebrity feuds, age has always been a recurring theme in Swift’s work. A numerology enthusiast with a particular attachment at age 13, Swift also released a handful of songs whose titles refer to specific ages: “Seven”, “Fifteen” and, of course, “22”, the hit “Red” in which she summed up that particular junction of emerging adulthood as feeling “happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time”. Like her contemporary Adele, Swift seems to enjoy timing her music, sometimes presenting it as a scrapbook geared towards audiences that will always remind her what it was like to be a certain age – even with her millions of fans and arms full of Grammys, none of these women are exactly typical.
Swift’s critics often seem even more in tune with his age. Perhaps because precocity has played an important role in its history since the beginning – at 14, she became the youngest artist to sign a publishing contract with Sony / ATV; at 20, she became the youngest ever to win the Grammy for the album of the year – many listeners were fascinated with how her evolution into adulthood was, or was not, represented in her songs. People sift through Swift’s lyrics for allusions to sex, alcohol and profanity as meticulously as MPAA representatives make a borderline film. Particular attention was paid to his 2017 album, “Reputation” and the various mentions of drunkenness and dive bars – although Swift was 27 years old when it was released.
The relative puritanism of Swift’s music up to “Reputation” seemed like an intentional decision: unlike female pop stars who touted their “loss of innocence” as a sudden and irrevocable transformation, Swift seemed deeply aware that he didn’t want to repel young listeners – or lose parental approval. At best, it seemed like an acceptance of his status as a model; at worst, it smelled like a marketing strategy.
But the growing obsession with whether Swift was “acting his age” also reflected a broader double social standard. Famous or not, women face much more intense scrutiny around age, whether these are constant cultural reminders of the supposed ticking of the biological clock or the imperative that women of all ages remain “fresh” or risk their own obsolescence. . (“People say I’m controversial,” said Madonna in 2016. “But I think the most controversial thing I’ve ever done was stick around.”) And while female youth and ingenuity are rewarded in some contexts, also easily dismissed as silly and frivolous as soon as that girl gets too close to the sun – as Swift has experimented several times.
Although I was already a teenager (unlike many music critics), I confess that I am not completely free of these internalized prejudices. At first, I didn’t like “Miss Americana and Prince Heartbreak”, a song that appeared on Swift’s “Lover” album in 2019. When I first heard this, I wondered what an almost 30-year-old adult woman was still writing about prom queens and teenage gossip.
But over time, I started to appreciate music and its somber vision, which recognizes cruelty, depression and the threat of sexual violence (“Boys will be boys then, where are the magicians?”) More directly than any of the songs that Swift wrote when she was a real teenager. The older boys in this song are not the type to blink and tell freshman girls healthy things like, “I haven’t seen you around before” – which, unfortunately, makes them feel more authentic. Even the title “Miss Americana” alludes to a bigger world outside the school walls and to the larger systemic forces that keep these patterns repeating until adulthood.
“Miss Americana and Prince Heartbreak” now looks like a precursor to some of the richest songs in “Folklore”, which shows Swift returning once again to his school days with the keen and selectively observant look of an adult. Consider “Seven”, an impressionist recreation of his perspective at that age. The second verse, charmingly, plays as a breathless sequence of unprotected observations from the first year:
“And I was trying to tell you, I think your house is haunted, your dad is always mad and that must be why / And I think you should come and live with me and we can be pirates, so you won’t have to cry. . “
But “Seven” is not as cute as it is moving, because of the tensions that arise when Swift’s adult perspective intervenes. “Please imagine me in the trees, before I learn civility,” she sings in an anxious soprano, leading the listener to wonder what kind of wild pleasure she – and all of us – have traded for the supposed “civility” of adulthood. .
Several songs on “Evermore”, Swift’s second release in 2020, also alternate between the past and the present, aware of what is lost and gained over time. The fun “Long Story Short” passes a note to Swift’s younger self (“Besides me, I want to tell you not to get lost in these petty things”), while “Dorothea”, like “Seven”, revisits a friendship childhood fever from the legal perspective of adulthood.
Most impressive is the bonus track “Right Where You Left Me”, a hissing tale of a “girl who froze” (“Time has passed for everyone, she won’t know / She’s still 23, in her fantasy”) . This language echoes something that Swift admits in the 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana”: “There is one thing that people say about celebrities, that they are frozen at the age when they became famous. And this is what happened to me. I had a lot to grow up just to try to reach 29 ”.
But Swift’s recent songs, at their best, understand that “growing up” is not ever a linear progression towards something more valuable. See the songs “Folklore”, “Cardigan” and “Betty”, which use an interconnected set of characters to narrate the teen drama and celebrate the high emotional knowledge of youth. “I’m only 17, I don’t know anything, but I know I miss you,” Swift sings in the voice of James, a high school student who broke Betty’s heart and came to his door to ask for forgiveness. Perhaps it is a melodramatic thing to do; perhaps it is the kind of thing that adults would bear to do more often. Swift’s music helps us to remember that growing up doesn’t automatically mean getting wiser – it can easily mean commitment, selflessness and growing numbness to emotions that we once felt with invigorating intensity.
In a gesture to regain control of his songs, Swift is re-recording his first six albums (his master recordings were recently sold by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings to investment firm Shamrock Capital). Last month, she released a note-by-note update to her first hit “Love Story” and promised to release a whole new version of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” later this year. It has been fun to think of Swift coming back and inhabiting the voice of her teenage personality: Given that, “Fifteen” is particularly surreal to imagine her singing as an adult.
On the other hand, however, “Fifteen” – with its distant reflections on the youthful madness of expectations – makes more sense and carries more emotional weight being sung by someone in their 30s than by an 18-year-old. Perhaps Swift was preparing for such an exercise when he made “Folklore”, an album that escapes years of scrutiny and finds her enjoying the creative freedom of being as young or as old as she wants.