Ten years ago today (Oct. 27,) Taylor Swift put a resounding end to the media discourse surrounding her country music bona fides. Her fifth studio album, 1989, swapped out plaintive banjos for pulsing synthesizers and big-city dreams. With its opening title track, “Welcome to New York,” 1989 marked much more than a geographical shift. It was the first of many artistic reinventions in a career that has come to be defined by them.
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10 years ago taylor swift released 1989 aka the pop bible pic.twitter.com/mpUkce3PHa
— Zain (@cowboylikezain) October 26, 2024
In retrospect, 1989 was our first glimpse of the Taylor Swift we see dominating the charts and selling out stadiums today. And on a much less objective note, it’s the album that sent me spinning full tilt into Swiftie-dom. Keep reading to find out exactly which song won me over.
[RELATED: Review: Taylor Swift Brings Back the Glittery Optimism of ‘1989’]
How Taylor Swift Converted Me
Like Taylor Swift, I was born in 1989. There’s just something poetic about the album named for our shared year of birth being the one to win me over. As a teenager and young 20-something, I regrettably fell into an all-too-familiar trap. “Ugh, can she sing about anything else besides boys and breakups?” I wondered, often out loud.
Then I heard “Out of the Woods.” Using dizzying electro-pop synths and vivid lyrical imagery (But the monsters turned out to be just trees), Swift and co-producer Jack Antonoff expertly captured the anxieties that come with the kind of romantic rollercoaster many of us know well.
Swift told ABC in 2014 that she drew inspiration from the “extreme anxiety” and “endless questions” she experienced during a tumultuous relationship.
“And this song sounds exactly like that frantic feeling of anxiety and questioning,” the 14-time Grammy Award winner said. “But it stresses that even if a relationship is breakable and fragile and full of anxiety, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile, exciting, beautiful, and all the things that we look for.”
She added, “One of the goals I set out to accomplish when I wanted to make this album is, I wanted to make sure that these songs sounded exactly the way that the emotions felt when I felt them.”
“Out of the Woods” isn’t Taylor Swift’s highest-charting track by a long shot, peaking at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100. But I’d argue that nothing else in Swift’s expansive catalog accomplishes that goal quite so completely. It sounds like pure anxiety and uncertainty. But beneath that, “Out of the Woods” sounds like wild, irrational hope. And personally, that’s something I could always use more of.
Featured image by Phil McCarten/UPI/Shutterstock
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