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Okay, here we go. Here's my thread with first, unfinished, messy thoughts on FEARLESS (2008). https://twitter.com/LennartSpion/status/1337369907206426630
FEARLESS is Swift's second studio album, released with Big Machine Records (who still own the masters of all songs). After the release of her first album, Swift was mostly touring as an opening act for other country artists.
FEARLESS is the first album that doesn't only credit her as a performer and songwriter, but also as a producer. The album starts providing crossovers that go a little further in the pop realm than Swift previously did, like "Love Story" and "You Belong With Me".
The platinum edition of the album (that added 6 new songs to the original track list) starts with banjo banger 'Jump Then Fall', a song in which Swift sings about being a loyal lover, urging someone to take a chance on her.
It plays into (by now slightly outdated?) tropes of teenage love, like the excitement of phone calls and the terror of unrequited love ('I watch you talk, you didn't notice'), a theme that also returns in songs like "You Belong With Me" and "Teardrops On My Guitar".
The second song is "Untouchable", which is a cover of Luna Halo's song with the same title, although Swift changed things around quite a bit:
She took the rock song and turned it into a ballad. She lyrically continues the narrative of convincing her love object they should be together.
The third song is the piano version of "Forever & Always," the song Swift wrote about Joe Jonas. This stripped down version is different from the other version -- track 17 on the album -- in that it focuses more on the emotion she conveys with her voice.
This is the era in which Swift was deep into (very white) fairytale discourse. The song adds to it by starting with the lyrics "Once upon a time". Swift sings about a person who once loved here but is now 'fading away' -- it's a pre-breakup song.
Track four, titled "Come In With The Rain," discusses how Swift is very tired of chasing people who don't love her back (the topic of the first three songs) and decides to stop actively pursuing them and let them come to her instead.
She sings 'talk to yourself, talk to the tears / Talk to the man who put you here', but keeps returning to her chorus of longing: "I'll leave my window open / 'cause I'm too tired at night to call your name / Just know I'm right here hoping / That you'll come in with the rain"
So far, all of these songs show the same thing: a young woman (Swift was 19 at the time) who is overwhelmed with feelings but quite passive as well. She presents herself as a bystander in her own life: never able to reach those she wants to reach, always waiting and pining.
The fifth song, "Superstar" is a song about crushing on a celebrity. Some fans think the song is about Jake Owen, mostly based on the "beautiful smile" Swift sings about. Swift opened for him during one of his tours and wrote about that on her myspace page:
The song is an example of how Swift used to position herself in that era (and for a long time): as a young, All-American, innocently naive -- and slightly childlike -- girl-next-door. In "SuperStar" she sings: "I'm no one special, just another wide-eyed girl."
(Her wide-eyed-girl thing annoyed many -- she has often been mocked for her facial expressions that always appeared to be somewhere in between surprised and frightened, seemingly astonished by everything around her at all times)
(Again: Swift was 19 at the times. This is a very white-girl-thing to do -- white women get a lot more time to present themselves as 'small', 'childlike' and 'innocent' than a lot of other people who are forced to grow up a lot faster.)
Song six is called "The Other Side of the Door." The song is about a relationship that ended but Swift wants back. Swift walked out on someone and considers breaking up, ignoring their phone calls, but, she gives them mixed messages.
She sings: "I said, 'leave,' but all I really want is you, to stand outside my window throwing pebbles screaming 'I'm in love with you'". This is a problematic narrative, obviously.
Personally, I'm a very big fan of men leaving when women tell them to and clear communication about boundaries and how to go about those to avoid this kind of nonsense: https://themuse.jezebel.com/paparazzo-whose-car-britney-spears-attacked-in-2007-abs-1846221177
The 'I'm saying one thing but want something else' dynamic plays into the popular 'hard to get' narrative: it allows women a nearness to sexuality without ever actually getting sexual. It's a hint of sexuality without giving up on myths of innocence and purity and so on.
If you tell someone to leave and they instead hang around in front of your house throwing things against your window and screaming in the rain you should probably call the police. That's not romantic, that is just scary.
The next song on the album is its title-track. In an interview, Swift said: "I really thought about what that word means to me, and I guess, to me, fearless doesn't mean you're completely unafraid and it doesn't mean that you're bulletproof [...]
[...] It means that you have a lot of fears, but you jump anyway." The song is about falling in love again after getting hurt. Whiteness is often connected to ideas of purity and cleanliness, incompatible with sexuality to a degree. (See for example Marina Warner&Anne McClintock)
In "Fearless", Swift however sings about losing some of her cleanliness (and purity in extension): "And I don't know why, but with you I'd dance in a storm in my best dress, fearless." Water here features as a metaphor for female sexuality, if you ask me.
She's ready to get dirty with this person, but at the same time distances herself from it cognitively: she doesn't know why. Irrational desire overwhelms her. "Fearless" dabbles in a budding sexuality, but is quickly followed up and neutralized by "Fifteen."
I have a special connection to the song "Fifteen" because I used this Grammy performance by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus as a starting point for my thesis on the representation of white female sexuality in pop music:
Mind you: Swift and Cyrus had a very comparable starting point in terms of their career, both being promising young girls with a country background crossing over into mainstream pop culture, but they transitioned into adult stardom with wildly different strategies.
In "Fifteen," Swift sings about her real life best friend "a redhead named Abigail" who plays herself in the music video:
Swift is again the embodiment of purity with her white dress and bare feet, walking through nature and strumming her guitar while pondering on the dangers of life and worrying about her friend who lost her virginity to someone who ignored her afterwards.
Swift here is not just the girl next door or your best friend, but also your big sister warning you about predatory male sexuality: "Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind, and we both cried."
The song focuses on how impressionable young girls are, presenting them as always at-risk (see Harris 2004 on this era of can-do versus at-risk girls in the social imagination).
It is a song that promotes abstinence as an agentic and rational form of empowerment, whereas sexual practices are featured as something in which girls are passive victims who are not thinking clearly, with little desire (let alone pleasure) of their own.
The Grammy performance was important to both Cyrus' and Swift's career, because it allowed them to articulate themselves as mature young women, no longer the child stars they used to be.
They presented themselves as big sisters to their mostly younger fans. In an interview about the performance Cyrus said: “A lot of girls are inspired by us, so this song is us giving our advice” (Vena 2009).
According to reviewers "Fifteen" is great. Jon Caramanica for example claimed it was Swift's best song ever. A lot of other reviewers commented how wonderful it was to hear such thoughtful lyrics from a teen who did not sexualize herself. They found her conservatism refreshing.
The ninth song on the album is "Love Story," a song perpetuating Swift's fairytale obsession, mixed with a little Romeo and Juliet narrative.
Swift described the song and music video as 'timeless': "I think it could happen in the 1700s, the 1800s, or 2008." This ahistorical approach worked well in 2009, but was later criticized (by, well, among others, me) for how it naturalizes whiteness and renders power invisible.
For more on the history of whiteness and fairytales, see Marina Warner's book 'From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers' (1995)
(And while you're at it, perhaps also check out Mason Stokes' 'The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy' (2001))
Song ten, "Hey Stephen," is about Stephen Barker Liles (Love And Theft) who opened for her Fearless Tour. He wrote Swift a song talking back to "Hey Stephen" called "Try To Make It Anyway":
In track eleven, "White Horse," Swift is sad. "I shoulda known that I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairytale," she sings. Mind you: on the original release of FEARLESS this was track five, adding to the track five canon instantly. https://www.nme.com/en_asia/blogs/taylor-swifts-track-fives-ranked-my-tears-ricochet-2829601
"White Horse" was not going to be on the album, since Swift wanted so save it for the third album, but then Betsy Beers and Shonda Rhimes said they wanted to use it on Grey's Anatomy. This caused it to end up on the album anyway.
Track twelve, "You Belong With Me" continues articulating Swift as existing on the fringe of the high school experience, always on the outside looking in.
In the music video, Swift is a virtuous yet uncool protagonist who is trying to convince her love object that he should pick her over his current sexualized girlfriend (also played by Swift).
The girlfriend has dark hair, is being difficult, demanding and too sexual. With the Madonna/whore binary firmly in place, and Swift here embodying both, her sexualized villain is presented as ironic and different from "the real Taylor."
The dorkier Taylor is presented as authentic and relatable. Director Roman White described the roles as 'evil cheerleader Taylor' and 'good girl Taylor'. The music video climaxes with a prom scene, where Swift is no longer wearing dorky clothes but a beautiful gown.
(And Swift is of course much appreciated for her gowns by many.)
Now that Swift is appropriately beautiful in the video, her love interest suddenly loves her. They kiss. The end.
Track thirteen is a duet with Colbie Caillat. Caillat did background vocals, loud enough for people to recognize her voice but not loud enough to take the song from Swift. This is something Swift often does in duets with other women.
It's about breaking up a friendship, fans suspect it to be about Emily Poe who used to play the fiddle in Swift's band but left to go to law school in 2007.
Track fourteen is "Tell Me Why," again about Joe Jonas. She sings of being pushed around and hurt by her lover. It is followed by track fifteen "You're Not Sorry," that continues the narrative of her walking away from someone. It's possibly a response to Joe Jonas' song "Sorry".
Track sixteen is called "The Way I Loved You" and discusses a current relationship with a man who is "sensible and so incredible" and says all the right things but also kind of bores the protagonist. She misses the explosive dynamic she had with her ex.
"I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain," she sings. In the bridge she sings "he can't see the smile I'm faking / And my heart's not breaking / 'Cause I'm not feeling anything at all".
This is mean stuff that might seem hard to connect to good-girl-Taylor, but at the same time works very well with Swift's narrative in which she keeps getting swept off her feet by bad boys, falling victim to their charms, insisting on herself as vulnerable, innocent and naive.
Track seventeen is the upbeat version of "Forever & Always." The piano version focuses on sadness, but this version sounds determined and energetic. Its placement near the end of the album is perfect, since it claims a more empowered position than the piano version does.
"The Best Day" is an ode to Swift's mom, Andrea Swift, and has a music video with a lot of home videos of Swift growing up on the Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania where she used to live.
The bridge emphasizes her all-American dream-like youth:
"I have an excellent father, his strength is making me stronger
God smiles on my little brother, inside and out
He's better than I am
I grew up in a pretty house and I had space to run
And I had the best days with you"
"I have an excellent father, his strength is making me stronger
God smiles on my little brother, inside and out
He's better than I am
I grew up in a pretty house and I had space to run
And I had the best days with you"
The album ends with "Change," an underdog narrative about persistence and resilience. "Can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down. This revolution, the time will come, for us to finally win, and we'll sing hallelujah, we'll sing hallelujah!"
It's officially all about Swift's breaking through as a star, but also got claimed by white nationalists/supremacists as a battle song. It was one of the songs they interpreted as Swift signaling that she was 'on their side', dreaming of a white christian US with them.
The Daily Stormer crowned Swift their Aryan princess in this era. It also features the line "it's hard to fight when the fight ain't fair" that was later used on social media in Taydolf Swiftler memes. If you want to read more on that, go here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19392397.2020.1704431
