Taylor Swift: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) — our critic changes his mind on the pop star’s magnum opus

         Taylor Swift: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) —

 our critic changes his mind on the pop star’s magnum opus

Reader, a confession. I made a mistake with Taylor Swift’s magnum opus. Not a nightmarishly terrible one, in truth: I gave her fifth album 1989 a broadly positive write-up when it came out in 2014. But the three-star rating that I awarded it has gnawed at me ever since. I should have given it the full five. We all get things wrong, of course. “All I ever do is learn from my mistakes,” Swift wrote in 1989’s liner notes. The blunders in its songs are chiefly of the romantic variety. There’s the boy who realises he shouldn’t have left his ex in “How You Get the Girl”, and his photographic negative, the woman who resolves not to let an erring man back into her life in “All You Had to Do Was Stay”. “You look like my next mistake,” Taylor sings with a sparkle in “Blank Space”, rolling the dice in the game of love. Some mistakes are fun to make. Others are not. The biggest one for Swift, in a career during which she has hardly taken a false step, is the record deal that she signed at the age of 15 with the Nashville label Big Machine Records in 2005. It granted the label copyright ownership of the master recordings for the six albums she made with it. This is a common occurrence in the music industry and much resented by the talent — especially so in Swift’s case when Big Machine was sold in 2019 and with it her masters. They’re now owned by a Californian private. 

Taylor Swift performing in 2014, the year she released ‘1989’ © Christopher Polk/Getty Images for iHeart Media