Every Single Album - 'Speak Now' | Every Single Album: Taylor Swift

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

Nathan and Nora are here to talk about Taylor Swift's third album, 'Speak Now.' Beloved by fans, the album shows Taylor's continued turn away from country and into pop, displays her sharpening songwriting skills, and includes canonical songs like 'Mean,' 'Back to December,' and of course, 'Dear John.' Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringers music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs for the 90s that define the decade. Rob is joined by a variety of guests to break it all down as they turn back the clock. Check out 60 songs that explain the 90s exclusively on Spotify. Hello and welcome to every single album, Taylor Swift. I'm Nora Preciati. I'm here with Nathan Hubbard. And we are going to talk about Speak Now today, Taylor's third album. And I'm excited for this one, Nathan, because we just talked about Fearless, which was such a huge moment for her. And it struck me thinking about Speak Now that this is one that is very dear to my heart.

There are songs in this album that are so important to me. And yet it's really hard to place. Can you describe to me what kind of moment you feel like Speak Now had and what its legacy is for Taylor? Yeah, I thought you were going to tell me that you thought this album didn't hit wasn't as big as it should have been. And that's a concept we should discuss because I think we can argue both sides. of it, if you had said this wasn't a big album, I would have said, I think I reject the premise. Rolling Stone. That's why I didn't say it, right? Is because I don't quite have the parameters settled for what is the big Taylor album and what isn't, right? This was the number one album.

This was a huge, huge deal by any normal artist standards. But I hope you're going to tell me why maybe it's a little bit murkier by Taylor standards. Well, I think you're right that it came out of the gates huge. Rolling Stone said it's roughly twice as good as 2008's Fearless. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. It sold over a million copies. It was the biggest one-week sales tally for an album by a female country artist ever. It sold 4.7 million copies roughly to date in the U.S., which is more than Red has sold in the U.S. Red out sold it internationally. That really surprised me. Isn't that amazing?

Fearless only sold 592,000 copies in the first week. So this album roughly doubles what Fearless did. So it's a big album. And it's bigger in every way than what we've heard before. She's taking more risks. Her range is higher. There's tons of strings, orchestral arrangements. I mean, this thing has like Big D energy, and I mean Disney.

It's like there's the sparkle and long, flowy dress on the cover. but now she's tackling subjects with more maturity, right? She's had some real relationships, and this album becomes this reflection, a collection of letters to people saying things that she didn't say in person. But as great as the songs are on this, and I want you to talk about your experience of hearing it,

because I think this one is, this one, like the real ones know, this album is close to the heart of people who love her songwriting. But you can't help feeling at the end of that. this. Like, we're at the edge of the forest of what she can do within this genre. And with this kind of music and this kind of production, it doesn't get any bigger than back to December. I mean, that is just an anthem. It's iconic. But why didn't this album just go in our minds as big

as fearless? And I think it comes down to three things. One is, it's coming after a phenomenon in fearless. And the second act, the follow-up act, is always harder. We're fickle as a public. And this is, this is now sort of the third album that's in this style. Number two, the blade that she uses on this is sharper. She is more incisive. She is merciless in some of these songs. And you wonder if that maybe presented some crossover. The story started to get spun.

We need to talk about today about how you better not date Taylor Swift or, you know, she's going to write a song about you. Grossly unfair. But there was starting to be a projection of an image of her being ruthless in her songwriting. And then the third, I mean, let's be honest, the world's going heavily pop at this time. Right. We got Katie Perry. We got Gaga wearing the fucking meat dress to the Grammys. And even if you look at the artist that she herself started bringing up on stage on this tour, she's bringing up Nellie and Bieber and Jason Moraz and Usher and B-O-B and T-I and Florida. I mean,

she's not bringing up the country set on most of her guest appearances. So you can see that the world is going pop and maybe, maybe there was a little bit of a perception of her as a country artist that was still a hangover. We know what she's going to do with it from here. But you heard this album right in the wheelhouse of your teenage years. What did it mean to you? And how did these songs resonate when you heard them? It felt so much more personal than a lot of the other songs that I was listening to at the time. Because, okay, 2010, the top single of the year is TikTok by Kesha. This is the year of California girls and dynamite by Tayao Cruz. Like those are songs where if I told you to start singing them and you said the same

thing to me, you and I would start in the same place in the song. It's really obvious. If I said just like go sing TikTok, you would be like and we would start in the same place. As always. These songs that Taylor wrote for Speak Now, they are long and they are builders. There's only three out of 14 songs in this album that are under four minutes long. And this is an album that excels in little moments, a guitar lick, a sigh, a laugh, a particular phrase. So it was really different, I think, than a lot of the songs that, like, they were playing at my school dances.

This was an album that my memory is I would put it on to go for a run by myself. And like, you're in high school, you do pretty much everything. with other people. Like I played sports with other people. So I would really just go running if I just wanted some me time. And I would turn on speak now and just go. And if it rained, all the better.

And that was sort of the feelings processing time. I remember really like running to the top of this hill behind my high school and just being like, this is where I can get it all out. And this is how I can. can use it. And this album, I think when you contrast it, because the world was going pop, Taylor was in some ways going with them, but she was doing it differently. This album was so much more personal and confessional, which is why it's called Speak Now, that it did something really different than a lot of the top pop songs of that year did, which maybe made it a little bit dissonant with everything else

what was going on in a way that might have to do with why I don't necessarily feel like this album quite gets its due. It's a little bit hard to place because there are such special songs here. And yet the book ends to it feel like when she says, I just realized everything I have is someday going to be gone on never grow up. The just in there is so important because I feel like this era of this album starts when she has that moment of, oh shit, life's getting a little bit real. Well, and it does. Well, right. And this is out of the imagination of fearless and into reality, not just reality for her, but reality for everybody who's consuming it because the people that it's about are public celebrities. But then the other bookend is on long live for me,

which is it was the end of the decade, but the start of an age. The thing is, and this goes back to our original question of how you place this album, the new age comes on red. And I think maybe that's that's where some of the murkiness to me around how we remember speak now comes from because it's not the true sonic transitional album, but it is the thematic transitional album. And the ways that she communicates some of those themes and how honest and true to her they are is so, like, makes them so meaningful that I'm like,

why do we not scream and yell from the mountaintops about this album more often? but she followed it up with such a just like glass case shattering iconic album that is red that I think it gets lost in translation a little bit. Long answer to your question about me like taking angsty runs as a 17 year old or whatever. But if we fast forward too quickly to red, you miss why she went to red. And this album, I mean, first of all, you talked about the moment that she's in. You are smacked upside the head on the second. verse of the first song, which is mine.

Flash forward and we're taking on the world together. And there's a drawer of my things at your place. And I'm like, wait, wait, what? What? We were just talking about 15 on the last album. And now, wait, she's staying at somebody else's house? And then you get through this album. Wait, she has her own apartment?

Wait, you're almost put in this position of having to let go of the teenage love songs that we were getting and realized that this woman is growing up. And that, I think, is an adjustment for some people as they sort of came into this record. The core fans obviously understood that she was growing up and this was sort of a welcome next step because, again, the songs are bigger. But I think about this album as like Taylor's last solo stand. Like, you know, the old adage, like if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

She's the producer on this. She's written every song on her own. She's written each song with a purpose, with a message to an individual. But I think the final lesson, when you look back on this album from 30,000 feet, you know that, starting with Red, she's going to start to bring in a host of collaborators from here

who will push her, she will push them, and then she and her music are going to evolve. She's going to evolve as a writer, a singer, a producer, a performer from here. And this feels like that last, hurrah of what was in her original comfort zone, that she and Nathan Chapman made the biggest, brightest, big Disney Energy album that they possibly could.

And maybe the fact that it didn't shoot all the way to the moon and that she didn't fully cross over is part of what gave her the inkling to start expanding beyond this bubble that was comfortable for her. Big Disney Energy is cracking me up because there's a, bonus track on the deluxe version of this album called Superman, where there's just this little moment on it where it goes, da-da-da-da-da-da. And it sounds exactly to me like the music that they play before they go to commercial on a Disney Channel original movie. Like that's what that is supposed to be.

It's just supposed to lead you into like a crest white strips commercial or whatever. I would push back on that a little bit though, because I think big picture you're right. but another thing that I hear on this album is Taylor trying on different styles. Tell me where. Well, I hear it on the story of us, better than revenge, haunted, a little bit of the sort of paramour, even evanescence, pop punkiness. She spent New Year's Eve 2009 with Haley Williams. I mean, she has a very close friendship with her, and you can hear it in those songs.

I agree. And I take that as evidence of this thirst, right? And there are some other points where she's trying, she's trying on other styles almost as a satirist, right? On Dear John with the guitar lick, on mean being so derivative on purpose of country. But some of that is for that effect. Other parts of it, I think, are just an honest desire to expand. Her horizons. And maybe that wasn't the original conception of what this album was going to be. But I think if you look closely, you can really see her kind of pushing against the walls. She doesn't shatter them.

Right. And that's when we get to read. And again, maybe that's part of the context here. But you can feel the desire for more, more, more. There's no doubt. Haunted sounds like an evanescence song. But still, I think there's so much attention on her. Is she going pop? You know, she's a pot, the sort of inside critics start calling her country pop or pop, right? But that is not necessarily a fair assessment because if you look at the commercial performance of some of these singles, you can see the tension that she had in managing her own career. I mean, story of us does not break the top 40 in the Billboard 100. It's like her only single that didn't do it. The two biggest songs, sparks fly and ours, which is on the deluxe album, wasn't even on the original.

original album are the two songs that go to be number one hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. The others do okay, but back to December's huge and it doesn't get higher than sixth. So I still think she's being pulled in a few directions here where it is not easy to break out of the box that is Nashville. We talked about that on the debut album, how she certainly walked into that box. Some of that box was built around. her by Scott Borchette and Big Machine, but it is not easy to break out and transition in that way. And there are radio people who are trying desperately to keep her

in the countryside of things. And as you say, the subtlety and nuance of this album is that she is pushing out as hard as she can against the walls of that box. She doesn't break them. We know that's going to come. But you wonder if they looked at this as a success.

I mean, for all of the chart-topping and amazing things that it did, Mien is the only one that wins a Grammy. It wins two Grammys in the country category. She doesn't get an album of the year nomination, and at this point, she is constantly trying to think about how to get better and better and better.

I wonder how she feels about this in hindsight, because the fans love this album. Right. This is her era of... This into red, I do feel like, are the Taylor fans, Taylor albums, kind of. And it is interesting to think about how much shine red gets for being iconic and sort of where Speak Now fits in as the precursor to that.

And we should say that we're not just talking about this in hindsight, right? She was getting asked a lot of questions about this as this was all going down. She told Rolling Stone in 2010, she said, I'm inspired by all kinds of different sounds. And I don't think I'd ever be someone who would say, I will never make a song that sounds a certain way. I will never branch outside of genres. Because I think genres are sort of unnecessary walls. So this was very much a part of the conversation. And let's get into some of these categories

because I think biggest song is sometimes on some albums, that's an easy one, right? On this one, it's kind of hard because of what you just described about chart performance versus place in fans' hearts versus awards. what do you have for the biggest song on this album? There's no way I'm going first on this one. You've got to tell me.

What is it? Come on. You feel like there's a murder's row of iconic Taylor songs on this album. That's what you said to me. What do you think? I chose mean. Because it wins the Grammy for Best Country Song. And because I just remember it more.

I remember thinking about it more. I remember being moved by it more. in the moment. And I think because this is a vexing album in terms of looking at the chart positions of a lot of these songs, I just don't remember, for instance, mine is technically the highest charting

in terms of the Hot 100, is the lead single. I don't remember being like, mine is this huge song from this album. That is not part of my memory of this album. Well, I have a hard time separating my own personal stuff from mean, and I'll tell you why. This song is about a guy named Bob Lefsetz, who is the music industry

blogger, and he writes about the music industry and pop culture and technology, but mostly at the time that this was happening, it's the music industry. And he effectively, after a couple of live performances, accused her, including her SNL performance, accused her of using Autotune and said that she can't sing, and just laid into her. And it was, at the very core, a mean thing to say. Now, we know, because he published the receipts afterwards, that she called him from London, I think twice, and protested and said,

listen, you can say that my voice is weak, but come out on the road and look at my touring gear. I don't use auto tune. Like, I sing the way that I sing. If you want to tell me I'm missing notes, that's fine. But don't challenge the authenticity of what I'm doing up there. And at the end of that description, he said that she had won him over. But the damage there had been done.

And the reason that I can't fully separate from it is Bob Lefsetz has written a lot about me personally. And he wrote a lot of very nice things. And then there was a time when he wrote something that was extraordinarily mean and hurtful. And the reason that it's mean and hurtful for even somebody like me is that you know the entire industry is reading this stuff. He is the blog that everyone subscribes to. And so your colleagues and your peers and other people in the biz. And in Taylor's case, that's everybody she sees every day. And so to have an accusation like that leveled, on my little tiny world, I know what that feels like.

and how, like, I was like on my back for a night. Like, oh, God, how am I going to explain? Like, it's wrong what he said. He didn't even understand what he's talking about. He's either, you know, making this up or he's lying or he's exaggerating, whatever. Well, that, yes. What was it? I don't really want to tell you because it's embarrassing.

I'll tell you what he said. I was an officer of a public company and my salary was published. And the way that that information gets published is, you know, when it goes in public, filings looks different than it actually is. And he basically said paying Nathan Hubbard this much money is like paying an opening band that much money or something like that. And it just like, it just was like, you know, he basically told the world that I was being overpaid. It's painful. It's hard to hear. And he'd said so many nice things about me before. As Taylor said, I thought you got me. That's the little. That was the liner note. Liner note, you know, hiddenish. And I felt like Bob got me. And

Listen, since then, I've spent a lot of time, and I still feel like Bob gets me, but I am wary that he's going to pull out the shiv and put it in between my shoulder blades at any moment in time. So I hear the song mean, and I can't separate myself from it because I'm so inside it, right? It feels like, you know, the first time I heard it, I was like, yes, fuck you, Bob. And I think that's really what the purpose of the song was. And she went out and sang it. And it is something that I know for a fact still sits with him. He does it's, it was a hard thing to hear. It was a public, you know, shaming in a lot of ways for the way that he publicly shamed her.

And so, mean to me is about that. As an iconic, I got to put it on and listen to it song. It's back to December for me. All right. and those two are in some ways, there's a link on a lot of the songs here. Look, whether it's you or Taylor or Bob Left Sets being sung about in a hit song, it's hard to be spoken about in public.

And that's a huge subtext to this entire album, including back to December. That's right. Which is a song about a teenage werewolf. I'm just kidding. It's a song about Taylor Lautner. I didn't even get a song. laugh for that. Geez, tough crowd.

Well, I mean, listen, we're going to go deep on Taylor Lautner. I mean, this is Taylor Lautner's biggest moment. Exactly. Yes. I mean, what happened to the guy? Well, so we're going to get to that later, but since this is a song about a teenage werewolf, I'm very curious to hear what about it speaks to

you, Nathan Hubbard. I, look, on the deluxe edition, there's an acoustic version of this song. I don't really love it, even though it's got some strings. It's the bigness of the song that, you know, she, look, vocally, she is experiment. She's pushing herself on this song. She hits, like, you know, some really big notes on this one. I just love, I mean, the mandolin is on this album, but it's buried.

This is this grand orchestral apology. She's never done this before. She's never been quite as vulnerable and confident at the same time as she is in this song. So I just love the bigness of it. I love, you know, they recorded these strings in Capitol Studios in L.A., which is this sort of like historically huge room where Sinatra recorded in the Beatles. And you can just hear the grandness of it. And that's what I love about the song.

And she says, sorry. That's the other critical component to back to December. Yes. She'd written a lot of breakup songs. but this was really the first major time where she said, I screwed up and I hurt you. And if you're going to write mean,

it's really helpful to also write back to December for the same album because everyone's fair game, including her. And that is why this song, I don't, I think about it, I guess maybe I have some recency bias just because that's even a bigger song to me than mean now.

And I think in the moment, I just remember, you know, you're young. There's a lot of times when you hold your tongue when you feel like someone's hurt you and you just don't say anything. So having someone like Taylor Swift just say like, fuck you. Yes. Someday I'm going to have so much more and be so much better than you are.

And like just having someone that you idolize, get that out there is cathartic. And the way that she recorded mean mattered to. The vocal track is right up in your face and it's dry. What I mean by that is a lot of times. you'll hear people's vocals have a lot of reverb or other effects on them processing. It sounds better.

Sometimes it covers up the way that you hit certain inflections and notes and so forth. But this vocal is dry and it's in your face in the mix. She does some vocal acrobatics. Guess who's not singing on this anywhere? Nathan Chapman. She's the only voice on this song. She's doing all the harmonies.

And it really just says, again, like you said, fuck you, I can sing. take this. There's the part in the song where a lot of the instrumentation drops out and it's just her harmonizing with herself and it's so dry like you said and that's the portion where when she performed it

later at the Grammys, she altered the lyrics to say someday I'll be singing this at the Grammys. That's where it detonates to me, both in the recorded version just because of how upfront that sound is and then she used that moment to create that second Grammy moment because I think one of the performances that was criticized for being weak

was a previous Grammy's performance. It was also the S&L thing, but I think she had another moment at an earlier Grammy show. Yes. That was part of it. Well, we're talking a lot about callouts. Oh, it's time. It's time.

Are we ready? We could do a whole pot on this. I know. I know. I mean, We're going to track five. Which means we're going to Dear John. We're going to Dear John.

Which, I mean, how do we even start on this? It is about John Mayer. It is an evisceration of John Mayer. It sends him to Montana, leaves him dressing up like the man in the yellow hat in Curious George for five years. People still haven't forgiven him. He got mashed on TikTok when he joined a couple weeks back

by Swift fans. It really was the defining takedown of a guy who had a history and has had a history since. How do we even begin to talk about what this song does? I mean, the way that she basically took gravity, took a lot of the energy and music from gravity, the way that the guitar licks mirror all of his most famous moves on the guitar.

How do we even describe what this thing is? What is more of ascuring? Is it the guitar lick? Or is it some of the lyrics? Don't you think I was too young? Yeah, I mean, that's it. When she comes out of the bridge, it's some of her best singing. I think it is her best singing yet. When she goes up and hits that high A coming out of that bridge, you're like, holy shit.

Yes, yes, I do think you were too young. You were too young. How creepy that a 32-year-old would go after a 19-year-old in this moment. And so you can't help but be pulled onto her side. The emotion conveyed in the song is so effective that it's really hard not to believe her about the real-life events here. And since all these songs are about people, there are varying degrees of that with each one.

It's interesting how the effectiveness of the song has an imprint on whatever situation it was written about and how people came to view it. I don't know how you can hear this and not go, this fucking douchebag. Fuck John Mayer. Just like, did, a horrible thing to this girl. And he's, he told Rolling Stone that he didn't know what it was about.

He said he was really caught off guard and that it humiliated him at a time when he'd already been, quote, dressed down. It's really hard to listen to that song. I'm not passing judgment about what actually happened, but it's just really hard to listen to Dear John and not go, this comes from a real ass place. Yeah. John, uh, John and I had the same producer for, the guy who produced his first record produced our records. And so I had a little bit of overlap with John. And I think at best you can say that John, you know, took a long time to find out who he was.

And that same interview, that same Rolling Stone interview that you alluded to at the top of the pod, she said, I'm always going to love John Mayer. I'm always going to love people like that who I feel are truly authentic. And that's not to say that my music will ever sound like theirs. but I'm inspired by people who I feel know exactly who they are, and that inspires me to continue to figure out and inform who I am as an artist.

That was written January 5th, 2010. This album comes out at the end of 2010. So something very, very painful happened in that stretch of months that led to the exact opposite. She wrote a song that sounded exactly like his about how inauthentic and how completely uninspiring of a human being he was and how he clearly didn't know who he was. What a killer.

My favorite moment in this song is when the girl in the dress cried the whole way home turns into the girl in the dress wrote you a song. A classic Taylor's twist of word and tense and, you know, in the last verse, right? She does this in a lot of songs. It's probably my favorite songwriting trick of hers, and it is not only a twist of words, it is a twist of the fucking knife. Like, this song is so good. John Mayer did eventually write a song about her. And I would posit that Paper Doll is the best song ever written about Taylor Swift.

Okay. All right. Let's get into this. So the candidates are, there's a Jonas Brothers song called Much Better, where there's a line that says, Now I'm done with superstars and all the tears on her guitar. Now I'm done with superstars. And all the tears aren't her.

She refers to that at the end of better than revenge, right? She refers to the song much better. Right. There's perfect by One Direction has, if you're looking for someone to write your breakup songs about, If you're looking for someone to write you break up songs about, baby I'm perfect. Feels like a post Taylor and Harry Taylor reference. Yeah.

Ever since New York by Harry Stiles is maybe about Taylor, maybe not at all. Who knows? I don't know if we want to put famous in this category. I don't think we're going to find a lot of love for Swish Swish here. Nope, we're not going to find a lot of love for swish-swish. Calvin Harris is too vague to figure out if there's anything in there. So yeah, I think it's Paper Doll. I mean, I like that Harry Style song.

And actually, Perfect is like a fun. Yeah. It's a fun listen. But it's, Paper Doll is probably the best song written about Taylor Swift. I think we can pretty concretely say that. Okay. I'm happy we agree on that. All right.

Are we okay? Have we, have, are we coming out of this? emotionally intact? Yeah, I think we are. I mean, this is the first song, track five, that really grabs me by the throat.

This is the one that feels you just, you can't help but be inside the pain and emotion of it. And, you know, cold as you, we talked about before, didn't grab me in the same way, for example,

on the first album. But this one, man, if you don't get this, you're probably listening to the wrong music. This is in some ways why I think Speak Now in Red is the core Taylor fans Taylor era. This is where the track fives are

just the true, true, true track fives, everything you think about when you think about a track five. And yeah, this defines the exercise. So this is the last album that she's going to do entirely by herself as a songwriter and she is a co-producer on this album. So a lot of this, as we said,

this is sort of Taylor's last solo stand. But with that said, then, who do you think is her most important collaborator on this record? I cheated here. I think the most important thing to think about when we think about how she's working, who she's working with with this one,

is that there wasn't one. Nathan Chapman is here, but they're doing things that they have already done. And I think it's much more important when we think about speak now to think about how she was getting to use all those influences, maybe not quite all of them,

but a lot of the influences that she wanted to try on. We talked about Haley Williams. We talked about, or maybe we haven't talked about this yet, but I think we both hear some Averillivine. There is Averillivine on this record. No doubt. The orchestra.

I just, I see her, like grabbing and pulling things in. And it is my assumption that that is coming from her. Like, oh, let's try this. Let's do this. Let's do this. And there are songs where it feels almost cinematic, the way that she'll just use, you know,

she'll have a spoken line under something. And I am attributing all that to her. And so I think that's the important piece is that she's starting to really want to flourish in terms of, how big the footprint can get. Do you buy that? I do. I think, look,

whoever is playing mandolin and banjo for her is now terribly afraid for their job because it is going away. I think Nathan Chapman has one last huge highlight on this album

and that is the supporting vocal on Last Kiss. And the line that, you know, like this, as they sort of drag out the word this, his underlying vocal to her is awesome.

That's like one of my favorite parts of this album. But I do think that her most important collaborators here are Mike Meadows, Paul Sadati, and Amos Heller, who are guitarists and bass players. They're really the meat of not just this album, which features a lot of rock guitar, but they are settling in as the foundation and the bedrock of her touring band.

and she is now becoming a huge, huge artist. On the first tour, she played to 1.2 million people. She played the same number of shows for Speak Now, but she played to 1.6 million people. She made $50 million more. She's basically going from 10,000 people a show to 15,000 per show. She is now graduating to stadiums.

She's playing lots of arenas, but a few stadiums, including, for the second time, your beloved Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. The second time that she played that is the world famous rain show. But coming out of these studio sessions, she is finding people who she trusts enough to bring out on the road where she can present visually the sounds that she's worked so hard in the studio on.

So it is her last dance solo, but I think those people are really important in what's to come. There are songs that are great vehicles for them, too, the way that the end of Long Live just explodes is so great for the band. Story of Us is not my favorite song in this album, but the only thing that I really like about it that much is just that it's a good vehicle for how good the band sounds. Do we know who this is actually about? Because at one point, like Rolling Stone or People said it was Joe Jonas,

but it's about John Mayer, right? It's allegedly about being seated near John Mayer at an awards show and feeling uncomfortable about being near him. Right, she came back. I like that it uses the lyric sparks fly. Yeah. But I don't totally get why this song didn't do more. I mean, this one does feel Haley Williams Paramore inspired.

Some Avril Levine in here for sure, like girl pop punk. Why didn't this do better? I don't love the vocal on it. I don't, there's, So it feels a little bit like a cousin of haunted. And in haunted, there is so much paranoia in her voice. Like, she just sounds so desperate. I don't get that on Story of Us.

And it doesn't have the huge sort of strings explosion. Yeah. She's breaking the fourth wall, though, with the like next chapter. Yeah. And I think that stuff is fun. She does that a little bit on better than revenge, too. Again, not my favorite song, but it's cool that she's doing that.

I just, there's these little bits, but it doesn't, I don't think it lands fully. Interesting, because that was a single, it did okay, it didn't do great, but it feels like if it had been released as a Paramour or an Aver Levine song, it would have crushed. I don't know. That trial balloon that they floated

by releasing this song, which I think they actually only released a pop radio. Yes. That was a troubling signal back. Like, it wasn't like going to, be rainbows and unicorns just moving directly into pop. And again, we talked about how ours was an example of a song that wasn't even on the original album that was a big hit on country radio. They got a few signals from the marketplace back that maybe pop wasn't 100% ready for her,

at least not in this form. And I think that's the key. One of the things that was really helpful for her in terms of holding the attention of a mainstream audience was the heavy-duty Easter egg placement on this. And the assigning, which she says she does in the liner notes, of every song to a specific person. And we know, right? We just had this story of us conversation. Very few of them are opaque. So can I go to you first? Will you give me your most purposeful Easter egg first, Nathan? I will. I'm going to punt it back to you quickly, though. I mean, for me, it's the John Mayer guitar pieces and just

the way that she had those players rip off, not just in the solo, but even the rhythm tracks underneath, there's some patterns that Mayor plays on a bunch of his songs, in particular the song Gravity. So that

Easter egg is barely an Easter egg because it's so in your face. It's just brilliant. That's the most brilliant one. I chose a different one just because you don't the guitar lick makes dear John

absolutely sore and it's so clever but there are so many you know the title alone like you know who Dear John is about that one's pretty easy to figure out I gave it to 32 and still growing up now on Innocent

because I needed something pretty clear to know who that song was about Because tonally, it is hard for me to get this is my reaction to the Kanye VMA's moment in music. By the way, John Mayer was 32 also. Sure. So 32-year-old's just really, really troubling territory. Yeah, she needs to stay away from 32-year-olds is the answer.

It's just a bad. She turns 32 next year. It's going to be trouble. One of my friends calls 32 The Witching Hour for men. Well, apparently. So, and maybe this is, I'm just thinking this is through. This is maybe evidence to that theory. But we do, we, we can glean that innocent is about Kanye.

The liner note says life is full of little interruptions, which is a clear reference to the VMA situation. And she spoke about it publicly as forgiving someone who had been hurtful to her public. I mean, this is, this shows just remarkable forgiveness and almost pity. And the thing that's hard about talking about innocent for me is, as we do every episode, we have to pick a song or two that we're going to cut from this album. And one of the things that I will say is what's interesting about this album is there's nothing obvious to cut to me. And that's what makes Speak Now really great.

And I think her most underrated album. If I was going to pick one and you're going to push back hard on me on this, I would have either picked Innocent because, you know, fuck that. like it wasn't received the way it was supposed to be received and it didn't obviously change the behavior and it certainly didn't cauterize the wound. So let's just get rid of it. Tell me why haunted is so great again and not just an evanescence song. First of all, there's nothing wrong with Taylor Swift doing an evanescence song. I agree.

She captures the nervousness really perfectly and that there's like a tremble in how she delivers it that I think really works. It's getting dark and it's all too quiet. You have to receive it as almost a little bit campy. Yeah. But if you do, I'm a sucker for those strings. And this is the song when I told you that story about going on like dramatic runs up behind my high school.

I was going. Like I'm sure my mile splits would always increase on Hunted. So it's not like my favorite song from this album or anything, but I keep it. and in your case, you want to cut Enchanted, don't you? What? No. God.

Okay. Thank God. Okay. I can't believe you just said that. Well, I don't want, look, I mean, first of all, it's the Al City guy song. Which is hysterical. No, that's, that is one of the, Enchanted is one of the songs that I was alluding to when I was saying there are absolutely like canon Taylor Swift songs on here. No, enchanted is incredible.

Okay. The way that towards the end of Enchanted when the internal monologue of like, please don't be in love with someone else. So at first, those go back and forth, right? Like you get, this night is sparkling and then you get, please don't.

And then by the end, they're on top of each other. And it's like, I've listened to that song in my bathroom after every great first date I've ever had in my entire life, including one where I was moving out of my first apartment. And I was like dancing around to it and I tripped over a stack of books. and like twisted my ankle and then just like laid there on the floor until this song was so.

Well, she does two amazing things on this song. One is there's a lot of Al City in the chorus and in the way the vocals are treated. Like, it's awesome. Number two is it's the highest note that she's sung to date by a mile. She sings a high D sharp here, which I talked to you about the A coming out of Dear John Bridge. A D sharp is high. and it is very Al-City-esque, but she nails it. What doesn't get nailed is the response of Adam the Al-City guy to this song.

And I need you to just explain what the hell happened there, because it's one of the most cringy responses. If John Mayer's Paper Doll is the best song written sort of in response to Taylor Swift, this might be the worst thing ever written in response to Taylor Swift. Yeah, so the Al-City guy covered Enchanted, and it was so embarrassing and bad that she never responded to it. So she basically went from being like spellbound by him to just being like, I can't talk to you anymore.

And he posts a response that includes the words, You are a true princess from a dreamy fairy tale, semi-colon. I forgot about that. A modern Cinderella. So first of all, Big D energy, Disney energy. But God, that is cringy. Like, be cool, man. just you don't need to even respond.

Let everybody talk about it. Let's just, let's keep in context that we're talking about Adam from Owl City and you're like, be cool, man. Like, Al Al City had a great moment. I remember that. But yeah, I don't know that. I think once you're leveling up, Taylor Swift writing an iconic song as a response to briefly meeting the Owl City dude and then he's trying to add another layer on top of that.

Like, I think you're probably, he was probably just a little bit beyond his depth. But I think he can feel very proud about having inspired one of my absolute favorite Taylor Swift songs. Okay. We're not cutting enchanted. Thank goodness. I just got worried. What are we cutting? I'd cut Speak Now. It just sounds like a soundtrack song to me. There's a couple funny-ish lines, but the characters in it aren't interesting. And I feel like it's on the album just because it's the album title. Why are a lot of her fourth songs that way? Like, We felt that way of... Yeah, that's interesting. You know?

The third songs are always home runs for me. But sometimes, and we talked about the sequence, not always being the awesomest, speak now, I think there was just so much about what the words meant to her and how that theme permeated the album that not putting it there maybe is what you want to do. I mean, it's sure that we know that's a song that was inspired by Haley Williams as well,

like a story that she told about going to... I think her ex-boyfriend was her drummer and went to the wedding. and then she had a dream and wrote it. So I get the lyrical components of it. It just isn't super inspiring. So I don't blame you for picking that one. Is there anything else on here that you would remotely think about cutting?

Well, so the answer to that is no. But there's an interesting question for when she re-recorded this, what she does about better than revenge. Because she's a little mean. Is it misogynistic? That's the chatter that she may not record this song because it is mean. So, yeah, it is a little bit.

Here's the thing. People have weak moments. And people have moments when they say things that maybe they shouldn't have said about someone. And it is interesting to me that you get that full spectrum of behavior on this album. So the line in question is, she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress. This was written about the woman who dated Joe Jonas after her. After her, yes.

Camilla Bell. I wonder if she could rewrite it from Camilla's perspective. Whoa. And make it really cool and interesting. Maybe Camilla was just as mad at her as for responding this way, as Taylor was a Camilla. And maybe there's a way of, because here's the thing is like, you have to be angry in this song.

And I don't want to totally let her off the hook for it because, yeah, it's a jerky thing to say about someone. Like she doesn't know, right? Like she doesn't know her, this like random girl's sex life. And that's a thing that if you're a young woman and you're jealous and you're angry, like, yeah, occasionally people say some things that they regret about that. but maybe there's a way to do it where you spin it.

I don't know. I would kind of like to hear her try. I'm not going to tell you that it really deeply bothers me because, again, that's part of being young and going through the gamut of all these emotions. But that's my vote for how she could do that because I don't want this song off the re-recorded album because I do like it.

She played it through a lot of the tour. So it wasn't like she wrote it and then gave it. I mean, the song that follows it is innocent, by the way, a song about forgiveness. So it's interesting the positioning of those two songs together. I have not heard that she's really spoken about the song much. There's been a lot of conversation about it in the community, but not directly from her. So it will be very interesting to see what she does with this song going forward. Now, I'm just not sure that we spent enough time on Taylor Lautner. Did we? Well, we will. Okay. I promise we will. I just want to make sure it doesn't get

lost because I do need to ask you about the song from Valentine's Day, which is going to be included in Fearless. We didn't talk about it on Fearless. But I do need to ask you about that because today was a fairy tale debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, and that was higher than any of the other songs on this album. Isn't it weird? Just like don't quite get what happened there. Every move you make everything you say it's right. Today was a fairy tale. I mean, I know how much love Valentine's Day. You say this to me all the time. I did see that movie.

I do remember seeing that movie. It's not terribly good. I don't know that Taylor's IMDB page is really the most impressive part of her career. But, you know, it's Taylor Lautner's fourth best movie. So, Willie, what is it about her that makes you so happy? Well, she's beautiful. She makes me laugh. And she does my geometry.

Bonus. And Felicia, what is it about Willie that's so cool? Oh, well, besides, fact that he's totally hot. He's an amazing athlete. All right. We're going to get, I promise you we're going to get to it. You're so, you just want to talk about Taylor Lauder so badly. I just don't know what happened to him. All right, we'll get there. Let's go. All right. Well, first we got to talk about the title of this album, which we talked about a little bit on, on Speak Now. This is actually a good thing to do together because, again, I think Speak Now stayed because

it's the title track. And it does, it's a good title. I would not change the title of this album. Should it have been called enchanted? Well, as she wanted to call it, and then at least per Scott Borchette is telling, he told her, you're not all fairy tales and princesses anymore. You got to think of something else. And she came back with Speak Now. Yes, I think that's a good point. And I like identifying this as a confessional album.

I just don't think the song is good. Like, for instance, I think ours is a much better song. Like, I would swap ours and speak now for what made. the original record. That's the only problem. Ooh, you would swap in ours. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and the music listening public would have agreed with you at the time. And also just for people throw rocks at things that shine alone. Like, I want that song. Yeah. Okay. I get that.

I mean, I don't wish that the title had been any different. I wish she'd called it Dear John because in a lot of ways each of these songs is a dear. or John letter, you know, sort of it's over, and I'm now telling you what I actually think, and I'm gone. Can you imagine?

Well, I know. But that would have been the thing. Like, he would have had to enter witness production. Yeah. So we get into the Hiddleston Award for Showing the Work. I want to have a discussion really quickly about the liner notes on this album. Because the liner notes and then subsequent interviews, you know, we read a couple from Rolling Stone, but she did a lot of interviews during this period.

She really is clear about who all of these songs are about. And there is a very thin line between communicating, you know, the origin story of these songs and intentionally or probably unintentionally is going to be my argument, publishing her personal life. And this is really where it starts to happen, where there's so much focus on who it's about and because in so many of these songs who it's about is a public figure,

the press and a lot of the public take that as carte blanche to be forever speculating and asking and talking about her personal life. Do you think that she regrets publishing her personal life the way that she did around this album?

I doubt she regrets the songs. but she played into it in a way. And I don't know that the liner notes, again, those are so special to fans. And there's something still sort of fun and earnest about that. They are. So for last kiss, the liner note is forever and always, which tells you that, okay, maybe this is a song about Joe Jonas.

The intro to this song is also 27 seconds long, which is the same length, allegedly, as the voicemail he left to break up with her. And those details in the songs, I think, are really clever and wonderful. I think most fans feel that way. I bet she feels that way, too, when it's within the song. What I think she might feel some regret about or maybe some anger about everybody let me do this and sort of egged me on, she hosted Saturday Night Live. And she does this, it's called monologue song. It's how she does her monologue.

I like writing songs about douchebags who cheat on me, but I'm not going to say that. In my monologue, I like writing their names into songs, so they're ashamed to go in public. But I'm not going to say that in my monologue. And then there's lines where she's like, I'm not going to talk about Joe who broke up with me on the phone. And it's a little uncomfortable to watch back because it feels like she's eagerly stepping into being kind of a toy for people of like, oh, go dance and do that thing and call people out. Like, do your trick. And when it breaks the world of this is part of the album, this is part of the art, this is part of the liner notes, and is on that like very public consumption world stage, then it gets more uncomfortable. to me. And I bet she wishes

she did some of that differently. And look, she eventually writes the lyric, my words shoot to kill when I'm mad. I have a lot of regrets about that. So I think we can pretty concretely say that, yes, some of this she has regret. That's one of my favorite songs that she's ever written. But what we're finding here is there is this internal safe harbor

community of Taylor Swift fans who love this stuff and where it's, again, safe for her to publish these things. And she wants to interact. She wants to give us the nugget. She wants to give us these Easter eggs and create that sort of scavenger hunt to get at what was really at the heart of the song

because the connection between Taylor and her fans is about that emotion that she's writing in these songs. But what she's learning here and what she learns with left sets and the reaction that she has and what she's going to continue to learn as she goes forward is that there are people who are not in that internal community.

and for whom a lot of this leaves her open and vulnerable and those people take advantage of it. And she is listening just in the same way she listens to every fan to try to make that experience great. She's out in the internet, tay lurking now, but she's reading the bad stuff too and she hurts from it. And it's going to continue to impact the way that she write songs and the way that she presents herself going forward. Nora, what did we find on the internet? There's fun ones for this. So ahead of the album really, at the CME is. And this is a great example

of what you were just saying where she's just always paying attention to the end user, the fan. Taylor did a 15-hour meet and greet. What? 15 hours. She, like, shook hands

and signed babies or whatever for 15 hours. It was supposed to be 13 hours, but they were still going, and she did 15, which is just unbelievable. I hope someone gave her a Gatorade. Spark's Fly was an old song

that originally used really heavy banjo and fans would always ask for it so they updated it for the album but made it way popular, which I think is interesting because one of the reasons why that there's a drawer of my things at your place feels like,

holy shit, how did you grow up this much in two years? These are more recent songs, whereas fearless, there's a lot of mixing and matching of, okay, some of these are still really old songs that she wrote a few years ago.

Some of them are new. Some of them are two days before. The album is finished. but there is that one example of that had been a really old song. Zero swear words on this album, not even like a hell or a dam. Writing in the LA Times, Anne Powers, music critic,

commented that there were no Swedish Spengali producers working tricks on this album, which I think is very funny and ironic, because we know it's about to come. This, I need to offer just a warning, that my fact-checking on this has to do with just looking at a lot of Google images, but it looks like the two people

who were seated between Taylor and John Mayer at the ceremony that led to her writing story of us were Brad Paisley and Keith Urban. So somebody asked those guys if they could feel the tension in the room. And then the apartment that she moved into in Nashville, which she references on Never Grow Up, sounds frankly insane.

Yeah. Like, she talked about, she gave an interview to Vulture where they noted, they went to the apartment and they noted that there was a topiary rabbit wearing a marching band hat,

a heart-shaped kitchen backslash, several rooms of multi-pattern mixed wallpaper. Okay. A wooden bird cage hanging from the ceiling. I think it's a human-sized birdcage, right? Yes, yes, like you could crawl in there. And then she also had a photo of the Kanye stage crashing moment with the same inscription from the liner notes, life is full of little interruptions, like framed in her living room.

That's fascinating. Some of that imagery makes its way into the stage on the Red Tour. Yeah, the marching band hat and the rabbit and the whole Alice in Wonderland thing. Yep, yep, yep. Interesting. Well, we're on to Peak Taylor. And I'm going to jump in with this one, because for me, Peak Taylor is launching a fragrance line with Elizabeth Arden

called Wonderstruck in 2011, which, again, wonderstruck is the line from Enchanted. It's the word she put in the song so that Al City guy would know that it was about him. and then basically made sure that because one of them had emailed the other one with the word wonder struck in it and she was like, oh that's great.

Yeah, he had used the word emailed her. Wundersruck. But it is Peek Taylor in part because she is turning herself into a business woman. And I mean that in the JZ sense.

Like she's not a business woman. She's a business, comma, woman. You know, in all of these single releases, she's putting out exclusive numbered copies coupled with merchandise. Sometimes they're through Target, but sometimes she's selling stuff exclusively through her own website. She sold like a special black leather bracelets. Some of these packages had headphones. She's building a direct to consumer business in 2010, 2011, when most people thought, well, you just got to put your stuff through

Amazon if you want to do e-commerce. She's finding ways to do that. In parallel, she is releasing some promotional material through iTunes and Amazon, some singles through iTunes and Amazon, which is a continuation of her trying to figure out the tension between digital and physical music. The leak that happened of the first single mine forced them to move up the release date of that song by two weeks. A big machine released it two weeks earlier because there was a shitty MP3 version that got circulated. But it really starts this awkward dance with digital music, how to harness it, how to protect against. the downsides, and we're going to see over the course of the next couple of albums that she really

tinkers with different strategies for how to ensure that she sells the most stuff possible, that digital doesn't undercut her business, that she does it in a way that is fan-friendly and rewards those fans who buy direct from her, but that also begins to embrace what's happening in the digital music world. Everybody can't see when Nathan gets his business cap on. He's like really going, just like really getting really getting into it. I love it. I have no notes. It is fascinating though because I don't think that I was as tuned in to all of that at the time of this album. Although if anybody, if anybody still has Wonderstruck and wants to like send me a little vial of it. What does it smell like? I would

really love to know what it smells like. I sort of bet it smells like the Al City guy. Ew. Oh God. I'm never going to get over that. That's disgusting. Can I blow your mind a little bit here? Please do. Peek Taylor on this album is it's the other Taylor. This is Peek Taylor-Lotner. Yes, finally, the time. This is the best it ever got for Taylor Lottner.

I mean, he's the one who announced and gave her the Moon Man at the 2009 VMAs before Kanye came up and grabbed the stage, right? Who would have thought that at that episode, the person whose career got killed was Taylor Lottner? Unbelievable.

And here's the thing. Like, he was a really, really, really big deal. I think it's kind of... Yeah. Like, so, okay, original Twilight is 2008. But first of all, Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner, like, she was with him really at his apex. Because it's the second half of 2009 when they're going out. And she also, she basically confirmed it on that S&L monologue because she's like,

I'm not going to talk about any of this, but then she mouths high Taylor and, like, waves at everyone. But the second Twilight had come out in 2009, which is really important because that's the one where he gets to take a shirt off a lot. So she really found Taylor Lautner at his peak. Very important. I will say, look, I don't want to. You're going to like turn red when I say this. But look, Taylor eventually does the song with Zane for 50 Shades of Grey. Yeah.

Which is what Twilight grew up into. Okay. So am I saying that Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner have sort of paced a through line of the sexual awakening of a generation of women? I don't know if I'm saying that, but I'm not not saying it. Okay. And I'm not red. That's all right. Taylor Lautner inspired a great song, right?

Back to December. He'd been in his biggest movie and his fourth biggest movie, Valentine's Day. And his last movie. His last great moment. Maybe he's been in some, like, cool indie stuff. I don't know. But this was this was the apex for Team Jacob. So I think we got to give it to him.

Well, there's one other interesting twilight connection. And that is that I think belatedly the best song in this album is Last Kiss. I love it. And it bothers me listening to it because it sounds so much like a thousand years by Christina Perry which is the song from the second

Twilight saga Eclipse and Christina Perry released it after this album came out so I am I think it was a little it's a little later than that too

because eclipse is the third or fourth and the second one is New Moon the second one is New Moon so maybe it's eclipse but like This song, it feels like, first of all, Taylor definitely inspired that song. And it's just another example, I guess, of her killing Taylor Lautner's career. I mean, what else do we have to talk about except that?

I mean, I'm on his IMDB right now. There's nothing. There's some movie called Abduction in 2011, which is probably about stealing his career. I don't know. All right, let's move off of poor Taylor. Well, so can I just tell you? Hold on. Last kiss, you'll never convince me otherwise. There's a really important episode of Grey's Anatomy in season two.

It's the second part of the two-parter where there's a bomb and a guy's body cavity and you get through the first episode. Yeah. Like you're at the end of the first episode and you're like, how can this get ratcheted up even more? And then Meredith sticks her hand on the bomb and then you find out that not only could they all explode in the OR, They're also on top of the main gas line for the hospital. So, like, everybody could explode. Everything's going up. Yeah.

And it's just, like, Shonda just toying with your emotions. Like, probably the two people who have just, like, mentally fucked with me the most are are Taylor Swift and Shonda Rhymes, I'm now realizing. But one of the... This was a hard episode for you. Yes. An under, like, a sub-narrative of that episode is that Meredith can't remember her last kiss with Derek. Because this is when he's with Addison.

And it's driving her crazy. And I'm just, I will never believe that that wasn't part of the inspiration for that song, which I also like very much. I love it. My belatedly best song on this one is Dear John, which we've talked about enough, but for the record. And my next album appetizer is long live, which we also addressed a little bit. But to me, again, it's that it was the end of the decade, but the start of an age. I think it's a wonderful way to end this album. and get into...

Isn't this just a better version of change? Yeah, but I like change. That doesn't make it bad. I'm just saying, doesn't this feel like sort of the hopeful, forward-looking, somewhat generically lyriced song that is better than change?

Yeah, and I don't... My point about this is not based in the sonics of it, because we're going to talk about read next, that is such a hard, clear, obvious shift that I don't think, like, none of us knew that was coming. I don't think there's anything on this album that really tells us that was coming, but I do think that just that lyric to me is so, is so perfect for the place that this album has. I also, I will say for this song, and this is probably why it is a better version of change,

It's like the same as change for three minutes. And then it just boom. And the band sounds awesome. It's an awesome song to play live. Like that's where Long Live really gets to me. But to me it's just that lyric. Yeah. Well, she used Long Live to close the main set on this tour.

So it was a big band hopeful, rock it out, you know, finish the show on a positive note. song. And I think that's a little bit what change was, but I like this song a lot better than change, to be clear. What's your hint for what's to come? Mine is that they changed her dress color on the deluxe album from that purple to red. To red. Oh, that's clever. That's a good one. Thank you very much. All right. Best lyric. For me, I love, she thinks I'm psycho because I like to rhyme her name with things, which is a great lyric. I was not expecting that for me. It's a great lyric from better than revenge. And it's a great lyric on a standalone basis, but it also rhythmically fits the song just perfectly. She thinks I'm psychokos I like to rain my name. I just love it. It's so good.

It's a good tongue twister. Yes. That's how Nathan warms up to record the podcast. That's right. She thinks I'm cycle because I like to rhyme her name with things. Says it five times fast. mine is, there's like eight that we could choose from dear John, but mine is, I lived in your chess game, but you changed the rules every day. Yeah. I knew you were going to bring some dear John, so I figured I needed to go outside of that. Yeah. Well, so I had the other candidates to me are you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter. Mm-hmm. On mine. Is also just says a lot with a little. And then I already mentioned this I wouldn't choose, but I do think, don't you worry your pretty little mind. people throw rocks at things that shine is sort of, it's just nice. It's like a special Taylor moment.

All right. I've stalled enough. You have to give it great. This is so hard to do. It really is. Do we agree that this is her most underrated album? Yes. Well. Ah, wait. See, because ever, yeah. Zip, don't say. Well, there's like, there's three candidates for this. Okay. Okay. this is a highly underrated album. Yes. And I think it got caught in the wake and the slipstream of Fearless and the stardom that came after it. She made a really great album in Speak Now

that didn't quite have the enduring icon status as an album, but many of the songs did. And therefore, Nora, your grade is... I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this so much. Because here's the thing. If the point of what passes the test of time is the high end, this album is an A. It truly, truly is to me. Because if I mean, Dear John, Enchanted, back to December, mean and long live. That group of five songs is like just. heavy hitter after heavy hitter, and to assign something, like, I'm fine, whatever. I'm going to give it a minus. Yes. That is the right grade, in my opinion, as well. But to assign something like that, to an album that has those songs on it is, like, sort of devastating to me, but I get that we have to consider the whole product. I understand. I think top to bottom as an album, I think it might be

better than fearless as a collection of songs. I think it is better than fearless. She's pushing the productions better. Her vocals are great. They have evolved since fearless. She takes more risks. It's more diverse. There's more everything. It's a bigger album.

And top to bottom, I think the quality of the songs are stronger. It is missing one thing. And that is the group sing-along factor that we got from Fearless. I mean, people still sing along to Mien and back to December and a number of the other songs.

but this one feels like more of an insider for those core diehard group of fans who got her. Again, that said, this album sells more copies in the United States of America than Red. Never forget. A minus. Long live. It's a really special album. I'm going to go listen to it. Next time we meet, we're going to talk about Red. Oh, boy. Changes afoot.

This has been every single album Taylor Swift. For Nathan Hubbard, I'm Nora Pinciotti. Thanks for listening to us Breakdown Speak Now. We'll be back on the ringer dish feed Thursday talking about Taylor's fourth album, Red.