In 2010, newly anointed as a Grammy winner, Taylor Swift released “Speak Now,” her third studio album and her first without a single songwriting collaboration.
Her 2006 self-titled debut and 2008’s “Fearless” had inspired both acclaim and criticism for her bold bridges and keen lyricism — these are masterful country-pop songs, critics argued, but surely a teen idol wasn’t responsible for them. Swift proved her detractors wrong on “Speak Now,” an album that arrived just before her pivot from country’s youngest hope to pop’s freshest voice.
“You hear a youngness when you listen to these songs,” says musicologist Lily Hirsch, author of “Can’t Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono.” “It's all about these romantic relationships. The world hinges on all of that, which is so typical of that age. So, it is interesting hear the re-recordings bring a more mature voice to those earlier preoccupations.
“Insults are everywhere in music, and men don’t get the same flak for it,” Hirsch says, in reference to “Dear John” and “Mean.” “There’s this idea that women especially are supposed to take the high road, turn the other cheek and all of that, and men can get away with the low road, and they certainly do in music. It’s a kind of double standard. Women are labeled ‘catty’ when confronting bad behavior, like in ‘Dear John.
Scala sees a throughline between this album and its successors, with “Dear John” as a precursor to “All Too Well” and “Mean” as prescient to “Blank Space,” a song that parodies how she’s been portrayed in the media.Much online chatter surrounding the re-recording of “Speak Now” has centered on “Better Than Revenge,” a pop-punk song that takes aim at another woman instead of the man that wronged them both.
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