Presenting Taylor Swift’s fourth studio album“Red” released in 2012. The album that resembles more than just one feeling, or one simple colour, it is a coming of age story.
This 16-track Pop Country album focuses on the radically different emotions of heartbreak, specifically through Taylor Swift’s perspective. Swift describes that these songs were inspired by “red emotions” due to their extreme and tumultuous presence. This album embodies Swift’s trademark themes such as heartbreak and witty love songs that one would expect, but this album is here, and it is taking shots.
The songs are diverse; the album goes from Billboard smashing hits such as “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to melancholy ballads such as “All Too Well” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic”. This story is as old as time, heartbreak, loss, and love. Everyone goes through it and the album expresses those emotions: these 16 songs are an embodiment of the cycle of what it is to fall in and out of love. The lyrics are powerful and this album has something for everyone, whether it is a fresh break up, or you just cannot seem to let go of someone.
In a track called “All Too Well”, Swift sings “you call me up again just to break me like a promise. So casually cruel in the name of being honest” dealing with the hard truth of sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Whereas in a song such as “I Almost Do” the lyric is “I bet it never occurred to you that I can’t say ‘Hello’ to you. And risk another goodbye”, Swift is the one giving up on her lover. Another track on the album called “22” is a young, lively song that covers what it is to be a young adolescent figuring out who you are in the midst of heartbreak: a lyric explains, “We’re happy, free, confused and lonely in the best way. It’s miserable and magical oh yeah. Tonight’s the night, when we forget about the heartbreaks”.
In the foreword for the album, Swift quotes “love is so short, forgetting is so long” a famous line from a Neruda poem that she felt inspired by. Swift continues to address that her “experiences in love taught me difficult lessons” in regards to “experiences with crazy love. The red relationships. The ones that went from zero to a hundred miles per hour” and how “it was awful”. Regardless of those negative emotions, she still thought of it as “thrilling”; but when time passed “it was something I’d never take back”. Swift continues to explain how poetic it is when you are young, and you don’t think about why you are falling for someone.
Swift ends her foreword by explaining that “this album is about the other kinds of love that I’ve recently fallen in and out of. Love that was treacherous, sad, beautiful and tragic. But most of all, this record is about love that was red”. Swift is a role model as she lets her emotions out on her sleeve, as she exhibits the vulnerable cycle of love, and why heartbreak is okay and it’s something to be proud of.
Written by Olivia Mickus
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