May These Memories Break Our Fall
A review of "Speak Now (Taylor's Version)"
Part nine in my ongoing and apparently endless series on the music of Taylor Swift—see parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight)
There’s a strong, conscious element of retrospection to Taylor Swift’s ongoing campaign to re-record (and thereby reclaim ownership of) her first six albums. That’s certainly the case on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), a record that’s about growing up—and all the bruises and welts and aches and pains that go along with it.
It's something Swift suggests in the written prologue to her version of the record: not for nothing does she characterize the ages between 18 and 20 when she first wrote and recorded the album as “the most emotionally turbulent ones in a person's life,” one she recalls as “so vibrantly aglow with the last light of the setting sun of my childhood.” The result was a record she calls “unfiltered and potent,” one full of “vast extremes” that “tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing… and living to speak about it.”
As an album, Speak Now harks back to the teenage songwriting prodigy of Fearless while looking ahead to the mature artist of Red and beyond. It’s a record that sees Swift stoking the emotional embers of adolescence as she feels her way into adulthood. Its mood swings back and forth between angst and indignation, heartache and regret, nostalgia and self-confidence. Swift learns hard lessons about intimacy and relationships on songs like “Back to December,” “Dear John,” and “Last Kiss,” while teenage urgency and romantic daydreams still percolate just below the surface of tracks like “Sparks Fly,” “Speak Now,” and “Ours.”
It’s also a record that dwells extensively on time and memory, and consciously so. The album’s opening and closing tracks, “Mine” and “Long Live,” make that much clear. In the energetic opener, for instance, Swift and her significant other reminisce about the start of their romance and the hurdles they overcame to make their relationship last. The rousing closer sees Swift urging herself and her fans to cherish the memories of their time together—a call that’s even stronger in the wake of her monster Eras Tour. It’s a theme threaded through other songs on the album: the power ballad “Enchanted” recalls a brief but memorable encounter with a possible romantic partner, for instance, while the hard-charging “The Story of Us” chronicles a romance careening off the rails.
But it’s the delicate acoustic track “Never Grow Up” that best encapsulates Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Swift looks back on a series of memories from her childhood and adolescence, reassuring her younger self that she “won’t let nobody hurt you/won’t let nobody break your heart” and observing that “nothing ever burned you/nothing’s ever left you scarred.” Though she understands teenagers can’t wait to strike out of on their own, Swift urges her younger self to “take pictures in your mind of your childhood room” because she knows “everything I have is someday gonna be gone.”
The track ends with Swift confronting the harsh realities of adulthood for the first time and wishing she’d never grown up. It’s more than a little trippy to hear a thirty-two-year-old Swift—the age she re-recorded this album—say she wishes she’d never grown up; indeed, the passage of time lends the song’s final verse and concluding chorus a certain archness, as if she’s very much aware she’s playing with time and space here. But it also reflects Swift’s own sense that she hasn’t lost her earnestness and idealism despite growing older and accumulating her fair share of emotional scars, a self-confidence comes through in her resonant vocals on this track. She’s not embarrassed to hold fast to these purportedly unsophisticated qualities in a world that wrongly takes ingrained cynicism and irony to be markers of adulthood.
Indeed, Swift’s early work continues to take on new meaning with both time and her re-recording project—a dynamic also on display with the previously unreleased tracks included on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Brooding on persistent and prominent themes of self-doubt and the basic human desire for intimacy, these songs show Swift leaning ever-further in the directions she’ll head in the future. She still lingers on romantic fantasies of adolescence, but it’s very much a straight shot from these unreleased tracks to Red and beyond.
Take “Electric Touch,” for instance: with their world-weary and wounded vocals, Swift and Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump bring out the longing and desperation of repeated romantic disappointment. But Swift’s lyrics also stress the need for hope and persistence in the face of repeated disappointment and disillusionment, reminding listeners that “all it takes is to get it right/Just one time.” Even the slim chance for romance outweighs the risk of heartache: “All I know is that this could break my heart or bring it back to life.”
Swift engages in some implicit self-criticism on “When Emma Falls In Love,” a finely rendered encomium to a friend’s skill at navigating romantic entanglements. Unlike Swift herself, the song’s protagonist “waits and takes her time” and doesn’t “lose herself in love like I did.” Much the same goes for “Foolish One,” the self-lacerating flip side to the romantic fantasies of “You Belong With Me” and “Speak Now” in which Swift takes herself to task for ignoring “these voices of reason inside my head” that tell her not to wait on “confessions of love/That ain’t never gonna come.”
She dives headfirst into her own self-doubt in “Castles Crumbling,” a duet with Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams that prefigures the airing of similar insecurities on later songs like “Anti-Hero” and “Dear Reader.” Swift worries her success and popularity will prove fleeting with a fickle public that will now “look at me like I’m a monster.” Worse, she harbors severe doubts about herself and her ability to live up to the expectations placed on her by her fans: “And you don’t want to know me/I will just let you down.”
Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) closes with the achingly romantic “Timeless,” a track that embodies both Swift’s youthful fantasies and the album’s preoccupation with memory. Indeed, there are few things more romantic than the lyrical portrait Swift paints here of a fated love that transcends space and time. Stumbling on old black-and-white photos from the mid-twentieth century in an antique shop, Swift imagines herself and her significant other finding each other in historical periods ranging from the sixteenth century to World War II. “Even in a different life,” she declares, “you still would’ve been mine/We would’ve been timeless.” In the end, Swift foresees she and the object of her affection will have their own “cardboard box of photos of the life we’ve made.”
As an album about both growing up (in every sense of the term) and memory, there’s a certain strangeness to Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Like her re-recorded version of Fearless, it’s an album whose songs have taken on new and different meanings over time, for both Swift and her listeners alike. But it still very much testifies to who she was and what she experienced during the tempestuous interregnum between adolescence and adulthood when she first wrote the record. As Swift herself put it when introducing “Dear John” as a surprise song during her second Minneapolis show this past June, “I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together… We have all grown up. We’re good.”
So have the songs themselves: “Enchanted” and “Long Live” in particular have risen above their origins and endured as fan favorites, becoming much more about the bond between Swift and her fans than anything else. For its own part, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) isn’t just an album about memory and growing up—it’s now a musical memoir of growing up, a look back at the stumbles and scrapes we necessarily incur along the way.
As Swift herself would remind us a decade later, though, if we never bleed we’re never going to grow.