Hey folks,
I know it’s been a while but I had to write about Taylor Swift’s re-release of Red. I mean, the title of this newsletter is ‘Wildest Dreams, and one of my first newsletters was all about my journey with Taylor Swift, so I had to say something.
But I haven’t forgotten about this newsletter, I have been trying to work on ways that I can do this more regularly without completely abandoning my streams of income, but I will let you know once I’ve come up with a solution.
Some Red background: Basically Taylor Swift lost the rights to her earlier albums when her record label was sold and they would not sell it back to her, so she is re-recording her albums. She has previously released her version of ‘Fearless’ and now “Red’.
Red has reminded me of how much time we used to spend guessing who Taylor’s songs were about. And if you love celeb gossip, which I’m guessing if you read this you probably do. This album comes from the era in her life when she’s in her early 20’s, post-dating Jake Gyllenhaal and Connor Kennedy. The height of her fame. I was 22/23 when this album came out, and I have distinct memories of staring out of the window of the train, tears in my eyes, on my way to a job that I hated.
I’m now 32 (like Taylor Swift will be on 13 December) and there’s something so therapeutic to look back at the person you were ten years ago, and see how you have grown or changed, and what lessons you can glean from this. One of the big changes between the original album and this one is that Taylor has included extra songs that she had originally written for the album but which were left off in edits. This means we get a lot of new beautiful songs, which makes me enjoy the album so much more than I enjoyed the original. But alongside this is a 10-minute version of her song ‘All Too Well.’
‘All Too Well’ is like a classic break-up song, but it also speaks to a very specific relationship that most of us have had – when your partner is perhaps older, perhaps more educated, perhaps wealthier and they belittle you in order to feel more powerful. Taylor wrote and directed a short film alongside the song, starring Dylan O’Brien (my man Stiles from Teen Wolf) and Sadie Sink (Max from Stranger Things) as the main couple and you can feel the emotions. You see the age gap, you see her trying to please him, and his gaslighting and it’s triggering AF. And this is literally something that only someone ten years removed from the relationship could have created, it’s a lookback, a retrospect.
The film itself is told in chapters, and it goes so much further than a music video, and it fits so well into Taylor Swift’s storytelling-esque song writing. A lot has already been written about how deliberate the casting of these two actors are, but the film, itself is excellently put together with stunning cinematography, and probably one of the best performances by Dylan O’Brien I’ve ever seen. Sadie Sink is also amazing, I haven’t seen her in much other than Stranger Things, but she threw her heart and soul into this performance.
I love stories about break-ups, there is something about watching the disintegration of relationships that prompts introspection and growth. I recently wrote about this for Tagged Online about the new remake of Scenes From A Marriage and why we love watching break-up stories like this, Marriage Story, Revolutionary Road and more. You can read that article here, but I categorise this in a similar way. Yes it is a cautionary tale, but it also tells a story of a relationship that ‘maims’ you in a way that you are no longer the same after it. No matter how short the relationship is, you feel the loss, you feel the severed hopes, you remember the feeling that you don’t belong, that you aren’t wanted, that you aren’t good enough. And that is what All Too Well encompasses so well, that feeling, that rejection, that pain.
You can stream the full Red album on Apple Music or Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Musica? Is that still around? Oh wait, I remember they closed down :(
Anyway right now this is my favourite of her new songs:
What’s your favourite song from Red (Taylor’s Version)? I’ll see you guys soon!