Don’t Read The Last Page

Taylor Swift “New Year’s Day”

The first music critic I read consistently was the New York Post’s Dan Aquilante, mainly because the Post was always around my house because my dad loved the sports section. Aquilante had an idea that would pop up in his writing now and again, and it’s stuck with me over the years: the final song on a record was usually an indication of where the artist would go on their next record. I don’t really agree with that; in fact it can be tricky outside of certain patches of The Beatles discography to find solid examples of this. But I actually hope it’s true of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, a record full of uninspired “pop” production and weak drum programming that ends with “New Year’s Day,” a song that both calls back to the craft of her earlier work while showing a deeper, more adult point of view.

“New Year’s Day” strips away the most grating elements of Reputation – the production choices that signal a need to fit in with radio trends rather than dictate them, the obsession with her own media narrative, the coldness and defensiveness and petty spite. I don’t dismiss those choices; I think they’re probably a very accurate summary of where this artist’s head has been out for a while. Artists have to get things out of their system, and you don’t always have to like it, even if you like them overall. But the song isn’t good because it’s not like the other songs, but rather because the simplicity of its arrangement and the sentiment of the lyrics seem like an epiphany for her. It’s all in the details – the slightly muted tone of the acoustic piano, the way the live-in-room tone of her main vocal contrasts with her overdubbed harmonies, the sparing use of acoustic guitar. The lyrics follow the form of the music, with her reflecting on small, specific moments that add up to something bigger, but also kinda fragile. The Taylor Swift we’ve known over the past few years, the version of her that maybe comes to the end of an arc on this record, was all about larger than life drama. The woman singing on “New Year’s Day” sounds like she’s over that, and has moved on to a more life-size version of romanticism.

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