There’s a lot to love about Taylor Swift from her heartbreaking lyrics to seamless storytelling. Personally, my favorite thing about listening to Taylor’s albums is the way they tell a cohesive story from song one all the way through till the end. For example, her 2017 album reputation takes listeners through a journey of falling esteem and finding yourself despite how the public perceives you. Folklore, released in 2020, is cohesive sonically, lyrically, and thematically telling stories from multiple perspectives, passed down like folktales. I have frequently heard it said that Red, originally released in 2012 and re-released in 2021, is Taylor’s least cohesive piece. Yet, every time I sit down and listen to it, I am struck by quite the opposite. In my opinion, Red is actually her most cohesive album to date.
If you listen carefully, Taylor tells you exactly what journey she’s taking you on throughout the album. In the title track, “Red,” she sings about how every emotion feels like a different color: “Losing him was blue like I’ve never known/ Missing him was dark grey, all alone/ forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you’d never met/ but loving him was red.” From this moment forward, listeners of Red know that the album is chock full of emotions. One song may be red while the other may be grey.
This concept of changing emotions is further explored in the song “22.” Taylor says, at age 22, she’s feeling “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.” These lyrics provide an explanation for one song on the album being sad and regretful, while the next is happy and carefree. The third song on the album, “Treacherous,” examines the slippery slope of falling for someone. Sometimes it feels terrifying and dangerous, but in the best way. The fourth song on the album, “I knew you were trouble,” shows us the complete opposite emotion. Taylor looks back at her relationship, the one with the treacherous slippery slope, and claims firmly that she knew it was never going to work out from the start. A lot of us can relate to these conflicting feelings—it’s easy to look back at a memory and say you knew all along how it would end. However, those feelings we are reflecting on are the same feelings that made us excited in the first place. New perspectives change how you look at a situation.
This sort of back-to-back conflict of emotions occurs multiple times on Red. Track 7, 8 and 9 and 10 contradict each other in the titles alone: “I almost do” comes right before “We are never ever getting back together” which plays right before “Stay, stay, stay” which is followed by “The Last Time.” In “I almost do,” Taylor sings about the urge to call an ex-lover all the time: “I wish I could run to you and I hope you know that every time I don’t I almost do.” Then, in “We are never ever getting back together,” she swears there is no hope for a rekindled flame. She jumps right from I think about calling you all the time to there is absolutely no way I would ever talk to this dude again. Then, to give us whiplash once again, she talks about wanting a lover to stay forever in “Stay, Stay, Stay.” Finally, she sings about begging a lover to put “put my name at the top of your list” before it’s too late. Clearly, Taylor doesn’t really know how she feels about this ex-lover. sings about. She can’t decide if she hates him, loves him, wants him in her life or far from it. She can’t decide if she’s grateful he’s gone or wishes he never left. She’s feeling it all—and I think most of us can relate to it.