The First 4 Eras: Results (Part 2)

Here we are again, with another round of unveiling the poll results!  It’s now the turn of Taylor’s courageous (I’m here all week) second album to face the music.  To present the award for Best Song from Fearless, we have a man who needs very little or no introduction.  Please welcome Luke Bryan…

..Sorry about that.  Where am I?  It looks like I’ve just woken up from a statistics-induced trance in which I was led to imagine a full-blown, flashy awards ceremony for this process.  Alas, there is no such ceremony – or if there is one going on somewhere, I don’t know about it!  Let’s just move onto some actual results!

FEARLESS: THE TOP 5

The Fearless Era.  2008-2010. To understate it quite mildly, this was a game-changing era for me.  In the first year of the era, I really began to feel myself coming “out of my shell” and shedding a bit of my social timidity.  I participated in a few quizzing events with my schoolfriends, and spent four mind-blowingly eye-opening days with them on a residential trip to Belgium and France, where we visited a series of battlefields from, and memorials to, the First World War.  I amazed myself by voluntarily singing along with them whenever we were on the bus going between places.  Then along came the second year of the Fearless Era, which was dominated by the build-up to our Year 11 Prom… and amidst all of this build-up, I came out of my shell even further, and (in a completely different turn of events) discovered a beautiful Pennsylvanian singer with distinctive curls.

I suppose this makes me a Fearless Era Swiftie.  Certainly, it was thanks to a handful of songs from Fearless that ensured my sustained interest in Taylor’s work.  However, I have recently found myself coming to the surprising (not shocking) decision that Fearless is her weakest album to date, and that’s not to say that it isn’t fantastic.  Its legacy, for me, is mainly defined by the fact that I discovered her during its lifetime, and so did most of the mass media, and so did plenty of now-devoted Swifties.  As such, Fearless was the unofficial blueprint for a lot of us in our view of Taylor’s music.  Dominated by lyrical tales of daydreaming about real love, reminiscing about heart-stoppingly beautiful moments of first kisses (and, in one case, the first kiss that never actually took place), lamenting those crushing moments when the façade drops, and wishing that the clock could be turned back after moments of “breaking, burning and ending”, Fearless is arguably the quintessential Taylor album.  It probably would be for most of my non-Swiftie friends, and it was for me for a short time.  Alas, for precisely this reason, it took me a little while to fully accept Taylor and her music (it wasn’t until as recently as 2013 that I started shouting my Swiftieness from the roof!), because Fearless’ lyrics are as far removed from my young experiences as one can get!  I’ve had a few crushes, yes, but I never spoke up – as epitomised by the Prom build-up moment.  Furthermore, back in these days when everyone was only just starting to get to know Taylor, the “teenage girl” Swiftie stereotype was all over the place, and there was no real counter-argument.  Musically and lyrically, I thought the stereotype was probably accurate, not least because of the group of female friends of mine who were the only Swifties I knew at the time.  So I kept my interest in Taylor’s music quiet.  “I shouldn’t be liking it,” I convinced myself.  “I’ll be destroyed socially at school if word gets out about it.”

In recent years, of course, the stereotype has been kicked, as the diversity of the Swiftie family has become self-evident (which is one of the many reasons why I love it).  My closet Swiftieness has also been vanquished.  You could say I eventually found some fearlessness!  Anyway, let’s reveal your top 5 songs from Fearless – again, their average scores have been withheld for now, and so have the fates of the rest of the songs on the album…

5) Forever and Always
Sonically, this one holds a lot of resonance for me.  This was one of the slightly less well-known Fearless songs that captured my attention and got me hooked for the long run.  Taylor’s rich talents as a vocalist and writer became particularly clear, for me, with Forever and Always.  “I believe it was a Tuesday…” – a beautiful use of her “throwaway details” trademark.  “It rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone…” – a painfully immaculate use of her long-running rain metaphor.  Needless to say, I was the one saying “forever and always” soon after hearing this.

4) You’re Not Sorry
Traditionally one of the last songs I would recall whenever I played Sporcle’s “name all the Taylor Swift songs” game, You’re Not Sorry, I’m afraid, isn’t one of my favourites.  Like with Should’ve Said No, I’ve never been particularly attracted to many of the straightforward, believable post-break-up songs.  But I’ll tell you what I do like about this one: it’s a cold song and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.  That’s generally preferable to a straightforward, fiery post-break-up song for me.  Plus, I love the thought that if We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together had been on Fearless, it would have taken the form of You’re Not Sorry.  Both tell the story of a dirty, dirty cheat whose repeated apologies have increasingly sounded like crying wolf, and tonally and musically, they’re each highly representative of their respective eras.

3) You Belong With Me
aka the second Taylor song I ever heard.  I heard it completely independently of the Kanye moment, which I like to pretend never took place.  (Side note: over the summer, a group of campers at my place of work performed a comedy sketch entitled Music Awards, in which they impersonated a series of contemporary musicians.  One of the group walked on stage and started “crying hysterically” over the line, “I broke up with this guy… and wrote a song about him”, at which point someone else barged onto the stage in a Kanye moment parody.  Standing at the side of the stage, I decided that this “Taylor impression” was unacceptable, and spontaneously went all dead behind the eyes as if to say the impression had shot me through the heart.  I then pretended to drop dead.  The moral of this story: if I’m around, make your Taylor impressions accurate and inoffensive.)

Anyway, where was I?  Lyrics.  They’re so singable in YBWM that they go off the scale.  But I didn’t go and learn them all until the night before my Red Tour concert earlier this year, largely because the aforementioned “teenage girl stereotype” scared me away from YBWM for a long time, for which I am very sorry!  Fortunately, when YBWM (albeit in an unfamiliar, jazzy format) came up at the Red Tour, it gave me one of the most boundlessly fun moments of the night.  I sang every word and adored doing so.  That’s a good legacy.  Plus, Taylor’s in-song persona is the kind of girl I can see myself falling for.

One of my camp colleagues dedicated YBWM to me at breakfast one day, which was astonishingly unexpected!

2) Fearless
aka the Surprise Acoustic Song performed on the B-Stage at my Red Tour concert, while I held up my “You’ve made us proud” flyer some 15-20ft away from where Taylor was singing.  This, in itself, ensures Fearless’ immortality in my affections.  On a musical and vocal level, however, its immortality should never be in doubt.  Listen to those soaring guitar notes on “capture it, remember it”, the rapidly-changing romantic intensity of the middle eight, the climactic sonic and vocal excitement beginning at “Well, you stood there with me in my doorway…”, and the diminuendo at “it’s flawless, really something”.  My 16-year-old self would have been a complete idiot to have abandoned Taylor and her music after noticing these sublime elements.

And the non-Luke Bryan-presented award for Best Song from Fearless goes to… I bet you can’t guess…

1) Love Story
Not to be confused with the 1970 film starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal.  My mum has made that mistake a few times.  Also not to be confused with the autobiography of Kurt Cobain’s wife.

Where do I begin* with this one?  This is the song that started it all!  This is the song that I’d heard whisperings about from various corners during 2009.  Then I saw a live performance of it on BBC Children in Need on 20 November that year.  It was an overwhelmingly romantic performance, with vocals that took me somewhere else, lyrics that swept my critical alterego off his feet, music that spoke to the heart effortlessly, and a singer who epitomised natural beauty, elegance and humility.  Although I didn’t hear Love Story again for a few months after that, the groundwork had been laid for the day on which I officially became a Swiftie.

I can’t actually pin that day down to any date in the calendar.  It happened gradually – but it definitely happened thanks to Love Story.  As I’ve mentioned on my profile page, in the build-up to my Year 11 Prom, I became increasingly confident, and almost dead certain, that Love Story would be played at the Prom as a suitably romantic, singable number.  So I decided that I had to prepare for it by binge-learning the lyrics, at which point I fell head over heels for the song again and was slowly drawn into the Swiftie sphere!  June 9-10, 2010 were the first two days of my lyric binge-learning, so I guess these are the days on which I became a Swiftie, but I prefer November 20 as my anniversary.  (Here’s a scary coincidence: at the Prom, I wore a purple tie, with that specific shade of purple being known as Verona.  Verona is the setting for Romeo and Juliet, the basis for Love Story.  No wonder I was so sure it would be played at the Prom!  Sadly, it wasn’t to be!)

Nearly four years later, at the Red Tour, I finally had the chance to do what I hadn’t been able to do at the Prom – sing Love Story live.  My Swiftie story came full circle at once!  Hence, I cannot argue with the verdict that this is Fearless at its very best.

In part 3, it’ll be time for us to speak now about Speak Now.  See you there!

*Where Do I Begin was the theme song from that 1970 film Love Story.  I couldn’t resist.