Listening to Taylor Swift

Listening to Taylor Swift, it appears she had some very bad luck when it comes to boys. They do not see her shy looks from far away. They don’t apologize to her when they take her for granted. At times when they are too perfect, she is bored.
“The Best Day,” is the album’s best song. It’s a musical valentine detailing how great Dad and Mom are. It is understated to the point that you almost don’t notice it, until you realize that the song doesn’t sound like anything else that appears on “Fearless.” Following an entire album full of wide open choruses, the simple story told by Swift is very refreshing. If the melody does not stick with you, at least the message does speak to the heart.
This all happened before she was 19 years old.
It turns out that youth is the greatest asset for this rising country star. However, it’s her ability to honestly dissect it that helps to separate Swift from the horde of other teenage starlets who tend to rely on Disney shows, song writers and big name producers for their musical careers.
Swift is a rare young genius who actually plays her role as well as her guitar. At the age of eighteen she is hopeful, naive and wide-eyed, which is actually the way she sounds on her new album “Fearless,” released by Big Machine Records, an indie label. The album is her sophomore effort following up on her 2006 debut Taylor Swift, a sleeper hit album that sold over 3 million copies as well as earning her a nomination for the Grammy award of Best New Artist.
However this time Swift’s aspirations are even greater. Her songs blur the lines of Top 40 radio with commercial country. Actually, a lot of the album “Fearless” sounds like a page torn right out of “The High School Years” by the Dixie Chicks. For each fiddle or mandolin, there is also an electric guitar wailing or strings awash to swell up the chorus. There is just a slight drawl creeping into the vocals of Swift, the definition for some of country music.
For the most part, however, the charm of Swift is in her songwriting. Swift knows how to definitely write a hit song. In the first single, “Love Story,” Swift casts herself in the role of Juliet pining away for Romeo, her starstruck lover. The video for the song features Swift all dressed up in Victorian wear along with the model boyfriend of Miley Cyrus, Justin Gaston, on loan playing Romeo.
Swift receives some songwriting help from Colbie Caillat and Liz Rose, however the most interesting songs on the album are the ones that Swift wrote by herself. You can almost see lyrics for the song “Fifteen” scrawled in her diary, detailing Swift’s high school freshman year.