![]() As tends to be the case with lyrics that exist entirely on a metaphorical plane, this isn’t one of her most emotionally connecting tracks. This “Lover” track is basically a play on the idea that all adult life is just like high school, but now she’s breaking up not with a boy but with the center-right assumptions that had her growing up assuming that America would always stay on the right track. (Of course the blowback from going vocal has amounted to many times the crap she ever took for keeping her mouth shut.) She still hasn’t gotten topical too often in song itself, but a major exception came in the form of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” which subsequently lent half its name to a documentary about her political coming-out. Swift has been surprisingly unafraid to boldly speak out about political matters in recent years, after being criticized for staying quiet in her early career. Are you ready for it? (Boom, boom, boom.) And having just named “Midnights” the album of the year, I didn’t think it was too soon to push some cuts from that record onto this “Eras”-spanning list. For now, there were just too many brilliant deep cuts to consider to let all the bigger hits hog the top ranks of the canon. And know that on any given day, the winds might have blown differently and we might even have put “Shake It Off” or “Love Story” on the list. If your favorite Swift song is missing from this highly subjective, critical 50-best list, rest assured that it’s probably in our unspoken 51st or 52nd slot. But given her catalog of 225-plus songs, even cutting a best list down to 50 is a tough task, so that ended up being where we drew the line. Sure, it would have been appropriate and maybe even lucky to come up with a 13-song list, or even 33 songs, in honor of her spot on the mortal odometer. It’s a good, celebratory time to try to pull out a best songs list. have to say to me today? Fortunately, we have such an occasion - Swift’s birthday, as the star turns 33 on Dec. So sometimes it takes a special occasion to tear yourself away from the chronic relistenability of a “Midnights” to ask yourself: What do “Speak Now,” “1989,” “Reputation,” et al. New shit is her brand - maybe her compulsion, too - and definitely our pleasure. Consider that, just since the last time she went on tour, Swift has released six albums, four of which were all-new, two of which dug into her vaults and proved she’s even more of a constant song fount than we knew. ![]() “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” Taylor Swift softly declared at the outset of “Folklore,” and truer sentiments are never constantly spoken than in the case of the woman who somehow manages to the best and most prolific songwriter in pop.
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