Today’s pop music is a lot of beat and very few good lyrics and feelings behind the word.  Taylor Swift brings the country theory of “Three chords and the truth” to her venture into pop music. There is something about Taylor’s music that is missing from the pop world, which is universality. Everyone no matter who you are can relate in some way to her music.

People were worried about her foray into pop music, but this album proves they had no need. In Rolling Stone‘s review, they write,  “Deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic, 1989 sounds exactly like Taylor Swift, even when it sounds like nothing she’s ever tried before. And yes, she takes it to extremes. Are you surprised? This is Taylor Swift, remember? Extremes are where she starts out.”

Taylor took the past two years to write this album and you can tell she is at a very different place in her life than she was in 2012.  She has been involved with fewer people, moved to NYC, and has stopped caring (as much) what other people think about her.  All of these are evident on 1989.

Taylor has never stopped being Taylor and her fans are among the most loyal in the world.  When the album leaked earlier in the weekend, Swifties world wide refused to listen and took to social media to speak their minds about the leak.  Listen and enjoy.

After the break read some other reviews of 1989. 

“By making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars — aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach — even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who’s waging, and winning, a new war, one she’d never admit to fighting.” — Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

At her best (2010’s ‘Dear John,’ 2012’s ‘All Too Well’), she’s the most vivid songwriter of her generation, able to summon the storm clouds of every heartbreak you’ve ever had with one couplet and then sweep them away with another. But too often on ‘1989’ she’s trying to win at somebody else’s game, whittling her words down to generic love stuff over flowy synthesizers. That’s because pop, as a musical genre, is most precisely defined by what it isn’t: not country, not rock, and not rap. Swift isn’t any of those, but she isn’t 100 percent pop, either — she’s still too unique, too identifiably herself.” — Adam Markovitz, Entertainment Weekly

Executive-produced by Swift and [Max Martin], two of the all-time biggest hitmakers, the LP could have been an overstuffed Frankenstein of battling ideas. But instead it’s Swift’s best work — a sophisticated pop tour de force that deserves to be as popular commercially as with Robyn-worshipping bloggers; an album that finds Swift meeting Katy and Miley and Pink on their home turf and staring them down.” — Jem Aswad, Billboard

“Swift breaks with the past, skirting victimhood and takedowns of maddening exes, critics and romantic competitors. Instead, there’s a newfound levity. Not only is Swift in on the joke; she also relishes it.” — Sam Lansky, TIME

“As a songwriter, Swift has a keen grasp both of her audience and of pop history. She avoids the usual hollow platitudes about self-empowerment and meaningless aspirational guff about the VIP area in the club in favor of Springsteenesque narratives of escape and the kind of doomed romantic fatalism in which 60s girl groups dealt.” — Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

“A mere seven weeks from her 25th birthday, Swift has put out an album that, in substance, seems more regressive, teenage and girlish than ever. However radio-savvy and hook-obsessed it may be, it’s her flightiest and least substantial work to date. Which is saying something.” — Jim Farber, New York Daily News

“‘1989’ is Swift’s declaration of independence from the country music industry that inspired and nurtured her, but was never really a natural home. Always more of a pop singer/songwriter at heart, she teams with expert tunesmiths in that genre — in addition to Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder and Jack Antonoff — to craft songs that, as the title suggests, nod to a previous era, when the term electro-pop didn’t evoke the R&B- and club-based grooves of EDM.” — Elysa Gardner, USA Today