{"id":873700,"date":"2026-08-27T20:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T20:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873700\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T20:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T20:02:09","slug":"defector-music-club-gets-back-together-for-taylor-swifts-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873700\/","title":{"rendered":"Defector Music Club Gets Back Together For Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is Defector Music Club<\/a>, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week<\/a>, we’re discussing Taylor Swift’s 2012 pop-rock hit Red.<\/p>\n

Patrick Redford: I can\u2019t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there\u2019s a sound at the end of the first synth swell in \u201cI Knew You Were Trouble\u201d that sounds just like the jail-cell door slamming closed in Akon\u2019s \u201cLocked Up,\u201d right?<\/p>\n

Lauren Theisen: I primarily remember the screaming goat remix.<\/a><\/p>\n

Alex Sujong Laughlin: I cannot say I relate, but I will be listening for this when we get there. I have to say, I\u2019m so excited to be doing this today, because it\u2019s the first day of school for the college that underwrites my whole life. There\u2019s just the faintest fall coolness in the air, and I\u2019m sitting outside with a kombucha. It\u2019s still a little too warm for a maple latte, but the vibes are right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patrick: The vibe note is a good lead-in to my main question about Red. I gather we have several Swift scholars here, so I am curious if you could constellate this album within her oeuvre. My sense is that it marks the hinge point between the early country stuff and the pop stuff, while also reaching new heights in the songwriting-as-songwriting stuff. How does that land?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alex: Yeah, I would say that\u2019s right. Real heads know she was already in the process of moving away from country (if you listen to Speak Now in the right headspace, it sounds very Avril Lavigne), but this was the big crossover moment, I think mainly because of the electronic production in \u201cI Knew You Were Trouble.\u201d Also, this is the album where she hits what is probably her lyrical high-water mark in \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d but we will get there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I also think this was the first album where she consciously crafted an \u201cera.\u201d People have drawn comparisons between the album art and the cover of Joni Mitchell\u2019s Blue, which obviously also has a single word primary color title. This was the beginning of crafting a whole persona specifically for the narrative of the album. I’d also like to share that when I was in college, I made a playlist called \u201cPurple\u201d that alternated the songs from Red and Blue back and forth. It wasn\u2019t the best listening experience, but I thought it was clever.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lauren: Yeah, you\u2019re spot on, Patrick. Fearless was a pop-radio juggernaut four years prior to this, at least in my recollection, but Red is her first album that feels pretty much entirely divorced from any kind of Southern country sound. It has more in common with the indie-flavored rock of 2012 than, like, Tim McGraw. I\u2019m curious what people got nostalgic for when they went back to listen to it.<\/p>\n

Rachelle Hampton: I think the thing that\u2019s always drawn me to Taylor Swift is her ability to capture those big, sweeping emotions of youth\u2014the ones ultimately complicated by all the extra shit that adulthood brings. Red is probably the album where she gets the closest to perfection in that regard. The further her wealth, fame, and self-obsession take her away from any sort of universal experience, the worse she gets. I think that\u2019s why her pandemic-era albums were so good: She was stuck inside like the rest of us, and it\u2019s almost like she could hear herself again. Listening to Red again made me nostalgic for a version of Swift that wasn\u2019t anywhere near as caught up in her own self-mythology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alex: Red came out in the fall of 2012, when I was a junior in college. I have such intense sense memories of parking my car at the Red & Black building at UGA, which was on top of a giant hill, hitting play, and stomping down to class in my new suede Madewell booties (the most expensive item of clothing I\u2019d ever owned!!). The charm of her earlier albums for me was that she documented a specific type of white girlhood and teenagerdom that I aspired to, and I think to Rachelle\u2019s point, Red is one of the last times we got that so thoroughly on an album level. My friends were starting to turn 21, we had cars, we lived off-campus, and we all felt so very grown up. It felt like our parasocial pal Taylor Swift was also growing up, and Red was the soundtrack to that time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lauren: I wrote last year<\/a> about how falling in love and unexpectedly fitting into a very hetero-looking relationship totally recontextualized my relationship to Taylor Swift\u2019s music, and that continues to this day. I remember in freshman year of high school being blasted constantly by \u201cYou Belong With Me,\u201d and at the time I was bothered by how harsh she was on the girlfriend in that song. (The meanness toward women she sees as rivals in some of her older tracks doesn\u2019t interfere with my enjoyment today, which makes me wonder if I\u2019ve regressed.) Red passed me by in 2012, when I was a senior in high school mostly obsessed with Kurt Cobain. But I feel grateful that I had not yet turned 22 when \u201c22\u201d came out. Getting to play that song on my and my friends\u2019 22nd birthdays was a nice treat that year. I\u2019d actually avoided listening to it for a long time since because I figured it would make me feel old, so only this weekend I realized that it\u2019s a song about feeling younger, not about acting more mature than you are.<\/p>\n

Patrick: I\u2019m not a nostalgist, generally or in the specific case of this album, which I hadn\u2019t ever listened to in full before this week. It puts me in the somewhat impossible position of judging an album that\u2019s extremely 2012 and performed by an extremely different version of Taylor Swift. I was not 22. I was not there. I do not remember it all too well.<\/p>\n

The thing that does stand out is her songwriting, which is also not something I go for all too often. There\u2019s an internally coherent cosmology. I don\u2019t mean this in the sense of how this album fits into the Tolkien-level legendarium of all Taylor Swift songs and all the referentiality built into the broader Eras-style phenomenon. I mean it in a much smaller sense. This is a breakup album, and she hits every facet of what that feels like. What do you think the best-written song on this album is?<\/p>\n

Lauren: Probably \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d like Alex already hinted at, but to be frank I still feel a visceral exhaustion when I hear the chorus, because when Swift released the 10-minute version it pretty much played nonstop in my then-apartment for weeks (not my choice).<\/p>\n

Patrick: And at Defector karaoke nights, thanks to Luis and Kelsey! (\u201cAll Too Well\u201d is also my pick.)<\/p>\n

Alex: And at one of the first Normal Gossip afterparties (my choice)!<\/p>\n

I think \u201cAll Too Well\u201d is objectively one of her best songs, lyrically. I mean: \u201cAnd you call me up again just to break me like a promise \/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest \/ I’m a crumpled-up piece of paper lying here \/ Cause I remember it all, all, all \/ too well.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d like to give a shout out to \u201cThe Lucky One,\u201d which is one of my sleeper favorites on the album. It might be the first time Swift contends with her ambivalence about fame in her songwriting, and even though we obviously know how this story ends, with Swift literally choosing Madison Square over the rose garden<\/a>, I am really compelled by the moment captured in this song of someone who knows they\u2019re on the precipice of bigger-than-big. You get lyrical motifs that will come back in future albums, like \u201cYou had it figured out since you were in school \/ everybody loves pretty, everybody loves cool,\u201d which sounds an awful lot like some tracks on Folklore.<\/p>\n

This is also one of the first times she plays with what I guess I\u2019d call historical fiction in her songwriting, where the song is based on the life of a real person. \u201cThe Lucky One\u201d is about Joni Mitchell, and there\u2019s a song two tracks later called \u201cStarlight\u201d that is about Ethel and Bobby Kennedy. Always an overeager tryhard, I\u2019d say Swift was doing a little too much with both of them in terms of trying to cement herself in a narrative lineage of American pop culture, but these songs set the stage for works like \u201cThe Last Great American Dynasty,\u201d which I also loved.<\/p>\n

Rachelle: I guess I\u2019m going to be controversial and say that I think the opening track, \u201cState of Grace,\u201d is at the top of my power rankings. I love \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d but I also find it slightly too literal. And this is technically cheating, but I think Taylor\u2019s best-written song comes from deep in the bonus tracks on Red (Taylor\u2019s Version); her duet with Phoebe Bridgers on “Nothing New” is one of the smartest tracks in her entire oeuvre. It\u2019s also one of her few duets with a female artist that doesn\u2019t reduce her co-vocalist to some oohs and aahs. Her \u201ccollaboration\u201d with the Chicks was, given her country roots, one of her most anticipated, and it’s actually criminal how little they contribute to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alex: Ugh, \u201cNothing New\u201d is just the best. As much as I wish it had been on the original album, it\u2019s so perfect with the Phoebe Bridgers feature.<\/p>\n

Lauren: \u201cState of Grace\u201d was by far the non-hit from this album that got me the most energized. To stay on Reds Week<\/a> theme, it reminded me of the War On Drugs song \u201cRed Eyes\u201d\u2014musically, it captures this feeling of driving to an exciting destination. What a perfect opener!<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about the big hits now. My favorite three seconds on this whole album is the way she sings \u201cTrouble, trouble, trouble,\u201d and the four-ish really enduring (to my mind) songs on Red just pop in a way that makes the back-half filler tracks sound unfortunately gray in comparison. (That might also be a reflection of the fact that I really do not like either of the male guest singers: Ed Sheeran and Snow Patrol Guy.)<\/p>\n

Alex: Now that you\u2019ve invoked the screaming goats version, it\u2019s all I can hear when I think of this song.<\/p>\n

Patrick: You know, now that I think of it, \u201cLocked Up\u201d and \u201cI Knew You Were Trouble\u201d: also quite lyrically similar. \u201c22,” \u201cBack Together,\u201d and \u201cTrouble\u201d are all such perfectly spherical objects to me: frictionless, engineered for clean impact, assured of their trajectories. This is what a pop song should be, so even if they don\u2019t have any jaggedness or idiosyncrasies to burr into me, on the level of form, I do appreciate their utter faithfulness.<\/p>\n

Lauren: I also enjoy the eye roll of \u201csome indie record that’s much cooler than mine\u201d on \u201cWe Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,\u201d which is a better and funnier dig than, say, pointing out that a hated bride\u2019s gown is \u201cshaped like a pastry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachelle: \u201c22\u201d is a perfect pop song. It\u2019s entirely irresistible. I think it does that thing that Swift does so well of turning an entirely unoriginal experience (falling in love, falling out of love, turning 22) into something that feels magical. I remember that for years after Red came out, I\u2019d call my friends on their 22nd birthday to sing this song into their ear.<\/p>\n

Lauren: On \u201c22\u201d and \u201cBack Together,\u201d the choruses hit like a sledgehammer, and they\u2019re better for it. A line like \u201cYou go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me\u201d reads as plain and uninspiring on the page, but in the studio there\u2019s a blunt forcefulness to it, like a chant or an invocation. They’re superficially shallower than Swift\u2019s best songwriting, but they’ve got an explosiveness that was powerful enough to help millions of people form an identity that incorporated them.<\/p>\n

Alex: I agree with all of this, and yet \u2026 I barely ever listen to those songs when I spin through the album. It might be that they were just so inescapable during those years that they don\u2019t bring me to a specific moment the way some of the quieter songs on the album do. It\u2019s worth noting that \u201c22\u201d and \u201cBack Together\u201d are the two songs on this album co-written with Max Martin and Shellback, the producers she would collaborate with on 1989 to make some of her most infectious pop songs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lauren: When I want quieter songs from Swift, I tend to fast-forward to the COVID era. If her first couple CDs are sleepover staples, and 1989 through Lover are like her poised, manicured, international pop-star persona, Red stands out to me as a late-puberty classic. It\u2019s a record for screaming about a guy who makes you feel like you\u2019re about to be ripped in half.<\/p>\n

Patrick: I wonder how that temporal specificity translated when she redid the album a few years ago. How did the established, world-bestriding version of Swift sound when singing songs about turning 22 while awash in the maelstrom of heartbreak?<\/p>\n

Alex: Oh man, I found the re-recording to be so inferior, especially in terms of Swift\u2019s vocals. They\u2019re actually much stronger in the 2021 version, but so much of the charm of the early albums comes from hearing how thin her voice is. You get the vulnerability of being a grownup for the first time so much more viscerally. I will say that the vault tracks from Red (Taylor\u2019s Version) are my favorite vault tracks of any of the re-recordings. We mentioned \u201cNothing New\u201d already, but getting a Taylor recording of the Little Big Town single \u201cBetter Man\u201d (which she wrote) was so fantastic, and \u201cI Bet You Think About Me\u201d is a delicious and spiteful addendum to \u201cBack Together\u201d that works so much better after a decade of fans pestering Jake Gyllenhaal about giving Swift her scarf back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lauren: I like listening to the re-recorded Speak Now and Fearless, because they make me feel less like I\u2019m 12 years old. But I agree with Alex that Red didn\u2019t work for me as a redo. I really want to keep it stuck in that cusp-of-adulthood era.<\/p>\n

Patrick: I guess you really can only be 22 once!<\/p>\n

[Editor’s Note: Ray’s internet went out right before we did this, so he sent over his thoughts separately.]<\/p>\n

Ray Ratto: This marks the first notes we have ever knowingly listened to from Taylor Swift, and as such we do not come here to castigate her skills or the ears of those who find her pleasurable. We could, of course, but that would reveal a level of interest in her work we neither possess nor wish to obtain. Based on the one listening we acceded to, we found that her audience neither includes nor should include the likes of us tin-eared baboons. It would be standard-issue condescension to say things like “She has a decent voice,” or “The music seems competent enough,” and sentences designed to move her prototypical fan like “Maserati down a dead-end street,” or “This slope is treacherous I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I like it” hit us like an index card in a gentle breeze.<\/p>\n

We did listen to all 16 songs, even the one with Ed Sheeran. The other collaboration, with someone named Gary Lightbody, was even less noteworthy since we had no idea who he was, and a cursory search of him on the demon internet actually revealed a photo of blind comedian Chris McCausland, whose closest brush with Taylor Swift would surely be his 2024 victory in Strictly Come Dancing, which for us is a far greater achievement even though we have also never seen an episode of Strictly.<\/p>\n

If we had to pick a song we would consider hearing again, and let us caution you that we almost certainly wouldn’t, it would probably be “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” for its upbeat contempt that borders on emotional cruelty, two admirable concepts in their own right. We had higher hopes for “22,” if only for the repeated phrase “miserable and magical,” which we originally took to be a portent of everything to follow. It was neither, but all honor and glory to everyone who enjoyed it and her entire discography, because we negotiate enough arguments without starting one here with people whose only crime seems that they enjoy music. In summation, we invoke the words of David Mitchell, who said when asked about Lady Gaga’s hit “Poker Face,” “I’m not sorry it stopped.”<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-873700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}