Taylor Swift Unabashedly Embraces Her Inner “Lover” on New Album: Track-by-Track Review
Many years ago when I was first being trained as a clinical psychologist, I worked with a young woman who was hell-bent on rebelling against her father following a family tragedy. After reflecting on the case my supervisor mused, “It’s always so fascinating when people conflate rebellion with independence. If how you act is completely determined by the impact your actions will have on someone else, isn’t it that the ultimate display of dependence on them?” I think about that nugget of wisdom often and it came back into my mind after my third full listen through Taylor Swift’s new album Lover.
Taylor Swift’s almost unfathomably critically and commercially first six albums — which won a staggering 10 Grammys and sold 30 million copies in the U.S. alone — are all varying degrees of terrific. They also all feature Taylor Swift trying to prove something about herself to others. 2006’s Taylor Swift and 2008’s Fearless found her striving to be taken seriously as a teenage singer-songwriter in a world that doesn’t take people her age — or her gender — seriously as artists. 2010’s Speak Now and 2012’s Red found her striving to be accepted by the mainstream with an increasingly mature and decreasingly country sound. 2014’s 1989 and 2017’s reputation found her striving for world domination as a pop music…
