Out of all her six studio albums, Taylor has published 6 songs that are more than 5 minutes long. 5 of these 6 songs appear on Speak Now, including the only two songs to be longer than 6 minutes. The longest song Taylor has ever published is Dear John coming in at 6 minutes 43 seconds. That's almost twice as long as the shortest song on the album, Better Than Revenge. These songs aren't outliers either, the average song on Speak Now is much longer than the songs on her other albums by a significant margin.
I know, I'm a nerd (please note that the y-axis is truncated)
The length of a song has inherently very little to with it's quality. Rather, I think that the wide range of song length on this album says some really interesting things about both where Taylor was in her career at the time as well as her songwriting process as a whole. The key to this line of thinking comes with recognizing that having long songs is always going to be a huge risk. It would've been a poor decision to have that many long songs on your breakout album; people are much less likely to listen to a 6 minute song if they aren't already familiar with the artist's other work. So in one way, the long songs are a reflection of Taylor feeling more comfortable with her position as a celebrity, knowing that she has cemented her position in public image enough to guarantee people listening to her music no matter what she releases.
That explains why Taylor felt she could release longer songs, but it doesn't actually shed any light on why she did. I think this is where it starts to be important to consider the songs themselves and how they compare to the other songs on the albums. The most extreme example has to be Dear John, which is almost a perfect microcosm of how extended song length can make it better. As previously mentioned, this is the longest song Taylor has ever released by a huge margin.
The most obvious aspect of this song that extends it is how slow it moves. It has the pace of a slow dance song, something many of Taylor's long songs have in common. Something not quite as obvious is the deeply personal nature of the song. Dear John is, with one exception, Taylor's only song that names one of her actual exes by name, who in this case is John Mayer. The fact is that songs that are nearly 7 minutes long just don't get played as much and I think Taylor was probably okay with that. Have you ever listened to a friend talk about an ex? It's a miracle if it takes less than 30 minutes, so trying to do the whole thing justice in less than a quarter of that is respectable. Even though the song moves very slowly, it's very dense in information, making some pretty insightful comments about the kinds of things that can go wrong in relationships. This may seem like just another passing remark, but it's actually incredibly important. If each line takes a long time to deliver it's more important than ever that each one has a significant impact on the listener, especially when the song is lengthy. Otherwise the listener will quickly tire of the song and just move on.
I'm going to wrap this up, otherwise it'll end up being the Speak Now of my blog posts in terms of length. Overall, I think that these long songs are a result of Taylor making decisions based on what she think will result in the best song, not necessarily in what will be the most marketable. In the future she certainly got better in condensing these ideas to shorter packages, but if you don't mind a longer song then Speak Now certainly delivers emotion. It's also worth saying that not all the long songs hit as hard as Dear John, the only other one that plays on the same level is, in my opinion, Enchanted. I didn't get a chance to talk about the actual music in this post as much as I was hoping, so let me know if you would be interested in hearing more about that in a future post.
Long lasting indeed
Anyways, that's all from me today. Have a good one!
See you tomorrow,
-C
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