The First 4 Eras: Results (Part 3)

Welcome back to The First 4 Eras: The Awards Ceremony.  We are sorry to announce that due to the unforeseen defection of a number of members of our staff to a different venue, which isn’t actually hosting any awards evenings as we speak and won’t be used again until at least December, we have been forced to scale things down slightly.  All future awards will now be presented via a Yahoo livestream from a nuclear bunker in Birmingham, and we have reluctantly sold our rights of control over the evening’s live performers to Simon Cowell, who offered us a lifesaving sum of £5.42 if we would allow an autotuned X Factor reject to perform Gangnam Style to the tune of Shake It Off.

Not really.  Let’s find out how the Academy has spoken about Speak Now, shall we?

SPEAK NOW: THE TOP 5

Summer 2010.  Those were the days.  My GCSEs had just come to an end, my Sixth Form days were about to begin, and I was moving further into the Swiftie sphere all the time – encouraged, no doubt, by the appearance of a new Taylor song that struck me, lyrically and sonically, as being Love Story Mark 2.  One listening later, I decided that although the similarities between Love Story Mark 1 and Love Story Mark 2 were clear, Mark 2 remained a stunningly beautiful novella of a song, not to mention a good progression from Mark 1 for lyrical maturity.  Mark 2’s actual title, of course, was Mine.  Needless to say, after that, the Swiftie sphere really was mine to explore.

Then along came my Sixth Form days.  Within three months, I was making the unprecedented decision to stand in our Student Presidential election, which required me to make a rousing campaign speech, write a lot of campaign literature and generally impress the student electorate.  Considering that I was an absolute nobody among my peers just a year earlier, this was progress, my decision having been spurred on by the elements of fearlessness that I had discovered back in the summer at that Prom where Love Story didn’t get played.  However, the campaign trail was initially rough, with two friends of mine (one of whom was also an opponent in the election) effectively saying to me, “If you get even one vote, I’ll eat my hat.”  Talk about words like knives.  Alas, things changed, the walls fell down and I somehow managed to win the position of Vice President, and this defined the next two years of my life, as I continued to grow and take leading roles.  All of this, however, was under the looming shadow of university applications, and the knowledge that everything I had, and knew, in this school life would soon be gone…

Speak Now undoubtedly represented a huge turning point for Taylor.  This was the era of great upheavals for her, with “moving out” and the realisation of her childhood dream being documented in its lyrics.  In her own words, every song on this third album is a message for some significant individual(s), telling them something deep and sincere that they really needed to be told.  And she went and did that by moving away from what I referred to last time as “the teenage girl stereotype”.  Speak Now is a feature-length message to the tune of “I’m two years older than I was when album 2 was released, and hopefully a lot wiser.  I’ve lived, hurt, regretted, but above all else, learnt.”  Thematically, it marks a huge progression from previously, with meatier subject matters – apologies, reconciliation and growing up – than were explored on Fearless.  There’s a seismic growth in Taylor’s vocals to match this, and let’s not forget they were exemplary on albums 1-2 as well.  But the quietest, and yet loudest, victory of Speak Now is the little subtlety that amplifies the importance of its subject matters, along with her artistic integrity and prowess: it’s 100% Taylor-written.

On that note, here are the album’s greatest hits…

5) Mean
aka the song that I briefly sang on stage one day this summer, as part of a joke about my Swiftieness and the intentionally bad efforts that my friends and colleagues put into trying to recite a tongue-twister that I’d just come up with.  My vocals were rather awful, just as they were when I sang along with it on the Red Tour… but at least I had enormous fun with it both times!

Mean is a definite odd one out on Speak Now.  While quite a few entries on this album (and Fearless, too) dabble in unconventional country or transcend genres altogether, this one is proud to be a pure country belter.  Sending out an age-old anti-bullying message in a format that it’s never been sent out in before or since, and having lots of fun over it, speaks volumes.  It’s witty, upbeat, bold and poetic, and crucially, there’s no explicit anger/vengeance on display.  The moral of this story: Taylor’s been on the receiving end of pathetic liars who are “alone in life”, and because she’s your secret friend, she wants to let you know that said pathetic liars are who they are, and not worth getting angry over.  This is Taylor shaking them off in the good old way.

Also, as several observers have brilliantly noticed, Mean sees Taylor singing about “someday… livin’ in a big old city”, while new delight Welcome to New York is all about Taylor coming to live in a big old city.  Mean suddenly takes on a whole new significance.  We are incredibly proud of you, Taylor.

4) Sparks Fly
What’s the greatest three-word Taylor lyric of all time?  I don’t know, but “drop everything now” is surely a serious contender.  It’s a Swiftie icon in its own right, and the epitome of this age of electric guitar dominance.  I inexplicably didn’t take much notice of Sparks Fly until its music video came out in mid-2011 (it was August 13 that year on which I first saw it), but my jaw dropped at once, and there was no looking back after that.  I’ll admit, I initially agreed with the widespread view that the song deserved a music video that didn’t just consist of archive footage of the Speak Now World Tour, but I’ve completely taken that back now.  Sparks Fly is an arena blockbuster, at its best when performed in the company of 15,000 Swifties.  Whether it’s opening the SNWT from a cloud of stage smoke or electrifying the Red Tour with the help of Taylor flying around the arena in an open pod, it has to be heard live to be fully appreciated.  And yes, sparks flew on the main stage when I was there watching her singing it.  (Sadly, though, it was during Sparks Fly that she flew away from where I was standing!)

Sparks Fly is also one of a handful of Taylor songs that I can legitimately claim to be able to sing in my sleep, if only that were a thing.  You know what I mean by that.

3) Ours
There’s something about soft songs.  Ours is certainly one of the pillars of the genre.  It, like so many others in the same mould, is musically simple, but that certainly doesn’t mean simplistic.  In more ways than one, it’s a pretty definitive offering from Brand Swift – the Shake It Off-style message is as beautiful here as it’s ever been, but this is the story of exactly two people in their own micro-universe.  Basically, if Come Back… Be Here and Love Story were to be crossed with Shake It Off, the result would sound like Ours.  In other words, Swiftian positivity and adoration, personified.

The first time I watched Ours’ music video (which I could probably write another complimentary essay about) was December 13, 2011; aside from being someone’s 22^nd birthday, it was the cold, wet day on which I returned home from the University of Oxford after a series of application interviews.  It was the best, most relaxing thing to come home to.*  Sometimes, we just need a calming tune, and that’s Ours’ greatest triumph. 

2) Enchanted
While my friend and I were on the train heading up to London for our Red Tour concert, we discussed our very favourite Taylor songs.  I won’t say what I said was my number one, but she went with Enchanted.  It’s not hard to see why.  This is the ultimate personification of the “dreamy/romantic” genre at which Taylor has always excelled.  It’s a gorgeous musical progression from Fearless (the song, that is), and I could even go as far as to say that if the story of Fearless – with its tale of the most incredible first page of a love story – were a dream from which one were to abruptly wake up, the result would be Enchanted.  It’s the tale of the most incredible first page that was also, by implication, where a storyline ended.  We’ve all had those moments of beautiful storylines ending suddenly because of waking up from them, and then wishing they could have gone further; that’s Enchanted in a nutshell.  (The number of dreams like that I’ve had featuring me meeting Taylor… I can relate.  In one such dream, I found myself standing a few feet away from her at a supermarket checkout, and forced myself to speak up very timidly; it all ended in the middle of a shy conversation!  One week later, though, my friend and I got our Red Tour tickets, so maybe she was trying to tell us something…!)

And so the baseball cap is traded for a crown for Speak Now’s finest.  I’m afraid I have to admit to telling a slight fib a paragraph ago.  I said I wouldn’t reveal my favourite Taylor song, but the poll has given me no choice.  It’s this one.  I am absolutely overcome with delight in revealing that the award for Best Song from Speak Now goes to…

1) Long Live
I could probably write a short book about how much I relate to this song!  Alas, I haven’t got that much space or time here, so I’d better try and condense my thoughts.

I came out of my social shell when I was 16.  I was elected Student Vice-President two weeks after I turned 17.  I helped to organise and execute a series of incredibly enjoyable charity events around school over the following year, and loved having the opportunity to represent my friends and deal with their concerns about things.  I had to resign as VP just after turning 18 (in January 2012), but turned my efforts to playing a part in organising our Year 13 Leavers’ Ball, the classy dining-and-dancing event that really would signal the end of my school days.  I threw down the gauntlet right at the start of the Prom planning meetings and asked for Long Live to be worked into the night.  After all, this was to be a night marking the end of seven years of great academic fun, huge personal development and terrific togetherness with my schoolmates – there was no other song in the world that would have summarised my emotions more appropriately!

On Prom Night itself, I was unexpectedly named “most likely to rule the world”, having been voted the winner of this award by my Sixth Form friends.  Our charismatic Deputy Head of Sixth Form publically thanked the student organisers of the night, including me, and I briefly felt like a hero after all those years of hiding in the shadows.  I didn’t deserve to feel like much of a hero, but I somehow just did, and that was the beauty of the night: everyone was loving everyone else, right at the end of our years together, before our long walks to the unknowns of university life (a life that I was initially greatly apprehensive about… but I slowly settled in, and soon got the chance to represent the University of Southampton on the notorious televised quiz show University Challenge, which I’d dreamt of doing since I was 10 years old).

The final “goodbye” song of Prom Night was Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.  It was a beautiful choice, but it wasn’t Long Live, which I was disappointed about.  The following day, my family and I drove down to the New Forest for the day to celebrate my mum’s birthday, with images from the night before always echoing through my head (they even played Don’t Stop Believin’ on the radio while we were on the motorway!).  As soon as I got home, I knew I had to listen to Long Live myself, to make the school goodbyes complete.  I cried.  A lot.  I’m always trying to repay the debt that I owe Taylor for this moment, but I’ll never be able to.  (Many thanks also to YouTube user MyWinterFirefly for producing the lovely Long Live lyric video that went with this listening!)

Long Live also made me cry (buckets) after I’d filmed my last University Challenge match, bringing an end to my longest-held dream.

In the grand scheme that is Taylor’s musical progression, Long Live is a gigantic milestone for so many reasons.  Coming as the closing song on an ultra-confessional, 100%-Taylor-written album, with a secret message “FOR YOU”, it brings her friends, supporters, mentors and (of course) Swifties** into the picture.  She’d been searching for a place in this world for so many years, and dreamt of the day when things would change for her, and then she found both.  As such, Long Live feels like the very last chapter in her life story up to that point, bringing the curtain down on the “finding her feet” years documented in albums 1-3.  After that, the only way was up.  This marks a final, ultra-poignant side-note that puts Long Live right at the top of my list (whether it’s at the top of your collective list as well remains to be seen…!).  I want it to be the song for my last dance on my hypothetical future wedding day.

So, what do you think?  Next time, Red will be put under the microscope.  Tune in soon for that!

*By the way, my application to the University of Oxford – which I’d set my heart on – was ultimately shot down.  I was a bit dejected after that.  But as a direct result of not going to Oxford, I got to go on University Challenge, visit Doctor Who’s 50^th anniversary celebration event in London, and pay a visit to the Red Tour!  I can’t complain now!

**I have a joke these days that alleges that I am the subject of a Taylor song.  I’ve got a few raised eyebrows from that, but I’m talking about Long Live, rather than something like Forever and Always!