5 years ago Taylor Swift broke free from the chains of the Big Machine

It seems like a distant time, but in reality only five years have passed since Taylor Swift published, on August 23, 2019, “Lover”her first album with the new record label Republic Records after having slammed the door of Big Machine which published the first six albums of the American musician. With “Lover” Taylor has begun a new professional life. What follows is our review of that album.

Taylor Swift is not as influential an artist as we often tend to believe. Yes, she has been able to build a strong image for herself, and she continues to make choices that have influenced the music industry. She does huge numbers, but she is not that relevant musically: raise your hand if you have the courage to claim that with her albums the pop star has left important marks from an exclusively artistic point of view. What she has done from the beginning up to “Reputation” (and – spoiler – what she continues to do with this new album, “Lover”) is to package albums of potential hits, trying to define a new pop. But she doesn’t take risks: she has often preferred to follow trends rather than anticipate them or dictate the musical line, as her colleagues have managed to do. Taylor Swift is much better as a businesswoman and manager of herself than as a singer-songwriter. The strategy that accompanied the release of “Lover” confirms this. And the fact that the background of an album is more interesting than the album itself should make those who raised their hands a moment ago change their minds.

While many artists are working hard to find catchy strategies to publish (or “release”, as some insist on saying, improperly translating “to release”) their respective albums – sometimes trying the route of a surprise release, other times that of a visual album, other times that of albums that are updated after their release – Taylor Swift has opted for a traditional tactic this time. “Lover”, her seventh album of new songs, was anticipated by interviews, articles, performances on the stages of festivals and highly followed television programs, a massive campaign on social media that even started last April (when she began to show her cards by announcing the first single of the album, “Me!”).

And then there are the political statements that have been talked about quite a bit in recent months (in the fall, she posted on social media to express her support for two Democrats from Tennessee, the state where she grew up, who were candidates in the US midterm race – Trump’s reaction was not long in coming: the president mocked Swift on social media, but his gesture prompted other artists to do the same). Without forgetting the story of Scooter Braun’s acquisition of Big Machine, the label that published all of the singer’s records: an operation that effectively handed over the master tapes of her songs to the manager, against whom Swift has publicly lashed out, accusing him of having bullied her together with her friend Kanye West (the feud between the two began when the rapper abruptly interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for an award at the 2009 Video Music Awards, protesting Beyoncé’s defeat): “He took away my life’s work that I wasn’t given the opportunity to buy.

“Basically, my musical legacy is about to fall into the hands of someone who has attempted to destroy it,” she said, later announcing that she will soon re-record her early albums to regain ownership of her music – we bet this will be another industry move that will set a precedent.

And what about the various agreements made with platforms and networks? From Amazon (which broadcast her performance on Prime Day and made special editions of “Lover” available on its site) to Spotify (where Taylor Swift uploaded voice messages in which she tells the behind-the-scenes of the songs on the album) via YouTube, iHeartMedia (the company that owns a thousand radio stations in the United States) and SiriusXM (one of the main American radio networks). A very old-school strategy, as the US edition of Rolling Stone pointed out in this article, based largely on the support of traditional media (newspapers, radio and TV).

Taylor Swift had already shown in the past that she was a great strategist (for example, that time when, to counteract the phenomenon of secondary ticketing, she asked her fans for “proofs of loyalty” by pushing them to interact with her more often on social media, listen to her songs in streaming or buy merchandise), but for “Lover” she really outdid herself. The 18 songs (!) contained in the album were recorded at the historic Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan – a point of reference for international pop and rock stars, in recent years also frequented by rappers such as ASAP Rocky and Kanye West himself. For the production of the album, Taylor Swift worked side by side with Jack Antonoff, former member of Bleachers and Fun., among her most trusted collaborators: this time, the Swedes Max Martin and Shellback (a regular presence in the pop star’s latest works) are not there, replaced by Louis Bell, Frank Dudes, Joel Little and Sounwave, already alongside – among others – Post Malone, Lorde and Kendrick Lamar. In “Cruel Summer”, the second track on the album, St. Vincent has a hand in writing the song with Taylor Swift and recording the guitars.

As the cover suggests, in terms of mood “Lover” is the exact opposite of the previous “Reputation”: the black and white of the 2017 album gives way here to pastel colors that reflect the atmospheres and sounds of the songs well. The manifesto of the album is the first track, “I forgot that you existed”, which represents an ideal restart. If in “Reputation” Taylor Swift defended herself from those who had discredited and attacked her, here she finally manages to leave everything behind: “It’s not love, it’s not hate, it’s just indifference”, she sings in the chorus.

Between echoes of the 80s (“The Archer”, “Daylight”) and a pinch of indie pop (“Paper Rings”), it is the sugary and synthetic pop of songs like “The Man”, “London Boy”, “You Need to Calm Down” and “Me!” that dominates, while the return to country in “Lover” and “Soon You’ll Get Better” (the latter recorded with the all-female group Dixie Chicks, one of the main points of reference for the genre in the States) tries hard to raise the level of an album destined to climb the charts, but which would perhaps go unnoticed if it weren’t sung by the pop star who perhaps knows the rules of the music business better than anyone else and knows how to exploit them to her advantage.