I am going to make a controversial statement.
Hold tight to your pearls. Taylor Swift’s Reputation is her most romantic album and era. Lyrically, thematically, stylistically (is that a word? Whatever I stand by it.) I know. I know. Stick with me: The year is 2017. It's late summer. Taylor debuts Look What You Made Me Do. A hand bursts from a grave, and Zombie Taylor emerges to, indeed, tell us all what we made her do. I was days from giving birth, and thus, a distant Swiftie. My brain zoomed in about 700 other directions, and none of them had much time or energy to emulate Taylor’s sweet curly bangs or dig for clues on what this new album may contain. In her words, the old Taylor (was) dead. Okay, I said to TV Taylor. Let me know when the sparkles are back. Zombies and angry snakes aren’t my thing. Then I had a baby. And Swiftie-dom stretched farther away. (Though I did sing the baby to sleep borrowing a handful of Taylor songs, occasionally.) End Game didn’t make a blip on my radar, as much as I love a Taylor and Ed collab, but Delicate did elbow its way into my sleeplessness, mostly because I was desperately worried about Taylor’s bare feet in a subway. (Friends, I was a mom now. Obviously, I worry about disease everywhere.) Then the era was over, as far as I realized. I knew the tour happened, and if I’d thought of attending at all, the closest it got to South Dakota was Minneapolis…on my kid’s first birthday. Hard no-go. We all blinked, or at least I did, and we were scuttled into the Lover era. Taylor followed through on her promise to me the night Look What You Made Me Do debuted - she let me know when the sparkles were back: with a snake exploding into butterflies. I remember thinking: “you know, I’ll take it.” Through the Lover era and COVID, my kid started walking, talking, and sleeping mostly through the night. He developed a love for Taylor himself, and grew particularly fond of ME!, Shake It Off, and a handful of Folklore songs. As we adjusted to this New Normal (I hate that phrase), in more ways than one, I started my side-gig selling blind dates with a book, with a Taylor-twist: include a playlist of songs that add to the book’s plot, characters, pace. One day last March, a woman emailed me looking for a book dedicated just to Reputation. “It’s my best friend’s favorite,” she wrote. “I just want to make her happy with a really fun gift.” Of course, I typed back. No problem. Oh, friends, it was a problem. I was not, as they say, ‘ready for it’. I didn’t know a thing about Reputation, except that the fans named the giant snake Karen. So I did what all professionals do: I procrastinated for about a week, and finally late one night, I settled in with my headphones, and turned on Reputation. I had to find inspiration, or at least fake it. Right out of the gate, I hit the ceiling. Holy shit, the BRRRRM BRRRRM BRRRRM scared the crap outta me. Could we use more bass? Am I this old already? I’m only 36! What is happening? Then Taylor cleared her throat. Oh, I thought, relieved. There she is. Taylor wound her way to “And he can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor,” and I snickered. I snickered. What a fun turn of phrase. So in her voice, so on brand, so … right. Fine, I allowed, as the song turned to End Game. Visions of the book I could create for my customer started to appear in vague visions: newspaper clippings, black stamps, dark emerald sparkles, hints of mauve, of the blackest black. I continued to let the album play: the forlornness of Delicate, the desperation of Getaway Car and Dancing with Our Hands Tied, the floaty fun of Gorgeous, and the sexy pop of Dress (which, by the way, contains one of Taylor’s best bridges, and I’ll stand by that until my own hand threatens to pop from the earth next to my gravestone). Holy crap, I thought. Reputation isn’t tragic or gritty, or even…heavy in a way I can’t carry. It's about falling in love. Those initial fears of commitment, when your sex drive is on high, and the other person can do no wrong, and you think you have every damn single thing in common and suddenly you’re in the back of a taxi squeezing their hand three times, because you…love them. It glows in the dark. That’s its whole point. Oh shit, I realized, about a month later, sitting at a stoplight next to a car wash, and while Dress and her bass reverberated through my seats. This is Taylor’s most romantic album. And I blew it off. I turned to my followers on Instagram, and posed this question: What, in your opinion, is Taylor’s most romantic album/era. Consider it lyrically, aesthetically, stylistically. Overwhelmingly, the response leaned Speak Now and Lover. Speak Now’s flowy purple dress and daydreams about boys and the future - obviously. Lover, with her pink and butterflies and sparkles and a dress made of bubble paint from which Benjamin Button purrs from atop - obviously. And I don’t disagree. But one comment - one single little comment rolled in, and it delighted me to my very toes: Anyone with ears knows its Reputation. (I’m not even the one who left that comment - I swear.) Fast forward yet again: just last night, I sat at my kid’s desi Lego table as we played cops and robbers with his Lego City Bank. The robbers are crafty little fellas - you can tell because their chins are covered in painted scruff. The cops have all of the tools they need to catch the bad guys robbing this bank: a net, a helicopter, a drone, plus my kid’s endless ingenuity and energy to play this game. But the bad guys? They have a getaway car. “Did you know Taylor’s got a song called Getaway Car?” My kid didn’t bother to look up, but the tips of his ears tinged pink, his dead giveaway for investment even when he wishes no one to know. “She does? Can I hear it?” I pulled up the Reputation Tour video, as my kid sent his police force into only-win situations to get the bad guys, but by the time Taylor hit the second chorus, he hummed along. As Taylor waved her arms poetically in the air like a sparkly bird and hit her poses with such grace I (not for the first time) longed to actually be her, my kid looked at the bad guy, splayed over the hood of his own getaway car, and draped the police’s net over the bank robber with more flare for the dramatic than what’s fair. (He is a Swiftie, after all.) “I like that song,” he told me later. “I like how she stole the keys.” Listen: Reputation is romantic. It’s not obvious in its romance, and there will never, ever be heart to be found in anything that claims to be of that era. It’s the little touches, surrounded by synth and base and giant, reclaimed snakes. The microscopic moments of intimacy: candle wax on the floor. Up on the roof drinking beer out of plastic cups. Starry eyes sparking up her darkest night. How she woke up just in time. I’m glad I did too.
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