The First 4 Eras: Results (Part 1)

Welcome along to the first part of The First 4 Eras in Review: The Awards!  (Cue much cheering in the background, with fireworks going off and the National Anthem being played.  OK, maybe we don’t quite have the budget for any of that.  We can still imagine it, though!  I do love a good overblown awards ceremony.)

The results are in; your scores for every Taylor song so far (discounting 1989, that is) have been counted and verified, and the time has come for me to let you know the definitive answer to the age-old question “What is Taylor’s best song ever?” / “What is everyone’s favourite Taylor song ever?”!  In Part 1, it’s album 1 that falls under the spotlight…

TAYLOR SWIFT: THE TOP 5

Debut albums.  They’re not easy.  They say it takes 20 years to make a reputation and 5 seconds to destroy one – but equally, without stamping one’s mark on the music scene and making the greatest possible first impression, those 20 years won’t get moving quickly.

Taylor’s eponymous debut is a frightfully picturesque blueprint, if you like, for Brand Swift.  “Here’s a singer-songwriter whose lyrical inspirations lie almost exclusively in her life experiences and dreams.  She’s been a lot of lonely places – unrequited love, post-relationship bitterness and regret, blissful post-relationship nostalgia, struggling to find herself or fit in anywhere – but also experienced the innocent excitement of the beginning of beautiful friendships, and that time when one knows that one’s found the special individual who, somehow, just deserves to be trusted with one’s greatest secret.  And the focus is always firmly on the lyrical story.  And they all speak a universal language.”  All of which describes her music as perfectly now as it always has done.  This is Taylor Swift in a nutshell.  True, she’s not been so isomorphically country in any of her work since this debut, but the influences have almost always carried through.  There may be certain sections of the Internet bemoaning the fact that she’s latterly been “taken out of country”, but remember this: there’s no “taking the country out of her”.  I don’t mean this in a strict sonic/stylistic sense, but in a much more basic sense – Taylor’s gone through a number of life lessons, as have we all, and expressing these lessons honestly and in good faith through music is how she chooses to reflect on them, all while (directly or indirectly) giving us some stories to relate to, because, after all, we’ve all been there.  That’s the true victory of album 1 – it’s a dictionary entry for Brand Swift.

So here are your top 5 songs from album 1.  I’m withholding their average scores out of 13, and the placement of the bottom 9 songs from album 1, until the day when I unveil the complete results board, just to preserve some element of surprise…

5) Picture to Burn
One of the first Taylor songs I ever heard, I think it’s fair to say this is perhaps her most isomorphically country track.  Not just in the sound and vocals, but also in plenty of the recurring motifs throughout the lyrics.  There’s a dreadful wordplay coming up here, but how else can we describe Picture to Burn, with all its talk of “[stating] the obvious” about missing out on “perfect [fantasies]”, and symbolically walking away from a “redneck heartbreak” with a “stupid old pick-up truck”, other than “a firecracker of a song”?

4) Cold As You
What really says it all about this quiet beauty of a number is the reaction given to its surprise (not shock – she doesn’t “shock” for a living, as she wrote in the WSJ a while ago) appearance at one show on the Red Tour.  I imagine it made quite a few people sit up and think.  “Wow, her vocal strength has improved so much in seven years,” some of them said.  “True,” said others, “but the brilliance was always there, hidden in plain sight.”  The brilliance certainly has been there all along, including in her vocals.  Cold As You is also a sly poetic contrast to the fiery Picture to Burn, and the dividing line between the regretful “cold” and embittered “fiery” songs has clearly recurred in Brand Swift over the years, so that’s full marks to album 1 on another level.

3) Should’ve Said No
I’ll be honest – I’m surprised (again, not shocked!) that this one features as highly as it does.  When I filled out the poll, this was one of my few recipients of relatively low scores, because I feel that its premise has been tackled with much more innovation on other occasions.  Nevertheless, I remain obliged to take my hat off to Should’ve Said No, for the very simple reason that it sounds like an exchange that really would be had; it’s incredibly believable.  It’s assertive and bold, and it paves the way for huge lyrical numbers on similar subjects through Taylor’s years.  So that’s full marks to album 1 on another level, and another reason why it’s a “dictionary entry” for Brand Swift.

2) Tim McGraw
I’m very nostalgic.  I love looking back at old photos of fantastic days, and reading things I’ve written about those days.  When I think “Boney M”, I think of dancing to the disco classic Rasputin with my school history classmates.  When I think “Tim McGraw”, there are no prizes for guessing whom I think of.  I have plenty of little artefacts in my possession that remind me of days gone by; while Taylor lyrically has that letter that “you” never read, I have the joke that I never told, and the fez that I wore on the best day of my life so far.  And strangely enough, I love album 1’s leading song.  Also strangely enough, I think I’m sufficiently well-known as a Swiftie among all my friends for “when you think [Taylor Swift], I hope you think of me” to be a reasonable reflection of my life at the moment!

And taking the top spot from album 1, what else do we have but…

1) Our Song
Another of the very first Taylor songs I heard, this one takes me back to my sixteenth year every time.  Sadly, this isn’t because it reminds me of the times when I would sneak out late and tap on her window, because I was shy enough back then that I never had any of those times.  I wish I had.  One of the main reasons why it takes me back to when I was 16 is because that was when I first heard it, in my very early Swiftie days.  Another reason is that the girl who inadvertently introduced me to Taylor (by keeping mentioning her in conversation) was the girl whom I very nearly “asked” to my Year 11 Prom – and I later found out that she and her other (girl)friends had been singing Taylor songs all the way to the Prom, and I can imagine Our Song being one of them (this was summer 2010)!

Anyway, where was I?  Lyrics.  Like Tim McGraw and numerous other Taylor songs through the years, Our Song ends with a repetition of the opening line, followed by a final payoff.  Such is a lovely way of squaring the circle within a song.  “I wrote down Our Song” is, of course, how this one ends, which can actually be taken as a subtle statement of “this is Taylor’s artistic style in a nutshell”.  So full marks to album 1 once again.  Also full marks to Our Song for being just one letter shy of an Elton John classic.

Fearless comes under the spotlight in Part 2.  Watch this space… it’s on its way!