An ode to Speak Now: Taylor Swift’s most quietly significant work
The release of Taylor Swift’s 2010 album Speak Now was the first Swift album cycle I had the pleasure of living through as a fan. I picked apart each announcement, snippet, leak, and interview, desperate to know every minutiae of the album’s conception and release. After all, I had some catching up to do.
Late to the party, I rejected Swift’s earlier work on account of the fact that I greatly disliked (and still do dislike) the 2008 smash that was “Love Story”. I refused to listen to any of her music until the earworm that was “You Belong With Me” had gotten the best of me, and so my stubbornness wore off just in time for me to realise that Fearless was a genuinely enjoyable album, but I had no idea of what was still to come. Following up from Fearless was not going to be an easy feat- the incredible commercial success and Grammy wins were not to be balked at- but with an album written entirely by herself that takes trips into new genres that Swift had yet to explore, Speak Now did what few people expected it to do- better its predecessor.
Speak Now has been described as a transitional album, with Swift straddling the line between country and pop, doing so with enough self-awareness to release alternative versions of the album’s lead single, “Mine”: a country mix and a pop mix. Taylor would continue to move towards pop music in different ways, embracing dubstep elements on RED’s “I Knew You Were Trouble”, and going all out 80s on 1989- a shift Swift attributes to RED’s loss at the 2013 Grammys to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Speak Now has its heavier moments too. “Haunted” pairs classic Taylor lyrics with an instrumental that wouldn’t be too out of place on an Evanescence album with its soaring strings and dramatic, thundering drums, meanwhile “Better Than Revenge” drew comparisons to the early 2010 era’s pop rock bands. They might not be fan favourites, but they signaled a willingness from Swift and her collaborators at the time to take risks, and one might see these tracks as experimental cousins to 1989’s “I Know Places”.
But with Speak Now, there wasn’t just transition in the sense of genre- “Mine” saw Swift’s storytelling emboldened to move away from the exclusively personal and instead build on a tableau of turbulent young couples and shotgun marriages to spite careless parents.
“Mine” is notably impersonal, as is the title track “Speak Now”, which was heavily rumoured in fan circles to be about Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Farro. These songs paved the way for Swift to fantasise about complicated love affairs with people she’d just met in “Enchanted”, to live a 1940s Americana fantasy of boardwalks and bachelors in RED’s “Starlight”, and to project Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s ill fated relationship inside a giant metaphorical snow globe in 1989’s “You Are In Love”. That’s not to say there aren’t real life stories behind each of these tracks, but they are explicitly not hers, and it remarkably doesn’t make them feel any less authentic than the clunky teenage name dropping in “Teardrops On My Guitar” or “Stay Beautiful”.
Of course, the album wouldn’t be all fictional. “Sparks Fly”, a track that fans had obsessed over for years as a result of a low quality recording of a live performance circulating online, is often cited as the song that saw Swift move away from the overarching themes of purity that weaved through her previous work, perhaps best evidenced through the track “Fifteen” and its handling of virginity. “Sparks Fly” acting as the introduction to Speak Now lays down the law- this Taylor Swift is older, she’s been through it.
The aforementioned “Better Than Revenge” calls upon the same exploration of sexuality to demean another woman for sleeping around (albeit with Swift’s maybe fictional boyfriend), and this has aged just about as well as you could imagine, however can be absolved partly due to the retrospective regret expressed by Taylor towards writing it. But this song, along with earlier release “Picture To Burn”, would form the foundations of what some have called Swift’s troubled relationship with revenge.
“I was 18 when I wrote that, that’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realise no one take someone from you if they don’t want to leave.”
Long before she was openly singing about her bad reputation, she was still clearly hyper-aware. Speak Now was a first foray for Taylor into publicly managing her image through her songwriting, it was the first time she’d really had to. Speak Now would be the album that saw the musician Taylor Swift and the celebrity Taylor Swift collide in a much more blatant way than previously. It was anticipated by fans, critics, and celebrity gossip enthusiasts seeking an update on the incident at the 2009 Video Music Awards, otherwise known as “The Kanye Thing”… well, the first Kanye thing at least. This was of course delivered in the form of “Innocent”, which in the greater canon of Taylor Swift feud tracks has become somewhat unmemorable, but at the time had allowed for a single culturally significant moment to become a series of events, volleying the ball back to Kanye’s side of the court just in time for him to release “Runaway”, the lead single from the 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Beyond Kanye, Speak Now saw Taylor directly address other relationships in a way that felt distinctly different from her previous approach to coded messages in liner notes. “Back To December” gave a solid basis for online forums to dissect the timeline of her apparent relationship with Taylor Lautner, while the damning track “Dear John” delivered not only an uncharacteristically dark perspective into her relationship with the named John Mayer, but also one of the best bridges in Swift’s catalogue, no mean feat for an artist who actively sets out to take listeners to “Bridge City”.
Above all its tabloid teasing and tip-toed testing of the pop music waters, Speak Now solidified Taylor Swift as a star. “Long Live”, the album’s closing track, reads like a love song to everyone who had come on the journey with her to that point- her band, her team, her fans- with an elbow nudge that says “buckle up, it’s only the beginning”.
It might not be her best work, immature in some areas, and laden with fairytale imagery that almost saw the album named “Enchanted” after the track of the same name, it still undeniably laid the groundwork for Taylor Swift to become the artist and celebrity that she is today. There may be more secrecy and conspiracy theories around the subjects of her songwriting now, but without Speak Now acting as the clumsy, experimental bridge into adulthood and all its spoils, we may have never gotten here.
