Day 8: Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift , not to be confused with Taylor Swift, was Taylor Swift's first studio album. The year was 2006 and the place was Nashville, Tennessee. Taylor wrote most of this album while a freshman in high school. On one hand this makes me feel incredibly inadequate; the writing from my freshman year of high school is so horrendous that I'm afraid to look back at it. More than anything I wish I was a few years older so my middle school and early high school years weren't so well preserved online, but apparently this was not a concern for the young Taylor Swift, who wanted the whole world to learn her name.

And learn it they did! The first song on her album, Tim McGraw, reached the top ten on the Billboard country charts, and she even ended up performing the song at a Tim McGraw concert. It seriously doesn't get much better than that.

If I'm being honest, I don't think this album has aged very well. If I'm being even more honest, I don't think it was ever very good at all. The first three songs, Tim McGraw, Picture To Burn, and Teardrops On My Guitar are by far the best on the album. I don't think this was lost to the young Swift or her producers, since they were strategically placed at the start of the album. They were also three of the five songs released as singles, the other two being Our Song and Should've Said No. The former has aged better than the latter, but they both suffer from the same issue as most of the songs on this album.

And before you say it, no the issue isn't that they're all country music. I actually have quite the soft spot for country music; I listened to it a lot as a youth, including music by Swift herself. Good country finds a way to make almost any emotional subject matter and still make it fun and catchy in a way that's difficult to do in other genres. Some of Taylor's best work does this very well, and continued to do so even after she moved away from the country genre.

No, the issue with so many of these songs is their homogeneity. At this point in her career Taylor still hasn't developed her distinct style, which will really start to emerge on er next album, Fearless. This is understandable, after all despite her musical talent she was very new to the industry and hadn't had her work under the eye of the public before. It's also worth noting that many of these songs were written about the experiences of people she knew rather than her experiences alone. It's no surprise that more compelling songs are developed when the writer has more life experience to draw from. As a result hardly any of the songs end up sticking with audience for longer than their run time.

I want to make it clear that I don't dislike any of the songs on this album, and I'm not just saying that to be nice. When I listen to Taylor Swift, I lose focus and stop really listening way more often than I do compared to her other works. It's not actively bad, just mostly disappointing.

That's all for now, I will take a deeper at the songs on this album at some point in the future, for both the good songs as well as the not so good ones.

See you tomorrow,
-C