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"Red"
Taylor Swift (Big Machine)
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'Love is a ruthless game unless you play it good and right," says Taylor Swift on her latest, "Red." The same sentiment could be said for Swift and her unstoppable career.
Forget everything you know about Taylor Swift. Forget it.
Swift is not country. She is global. And Swift has her sights on nothing less than world domination ... and she might get just that with "Red," her biggest, brightest, most uncompromising and most non-country record to date.
Not only is the idealistic, doe-eyed, lanky blonde a better singer than she was on 2010's "Speak Now," Swift is a better songwriter. And, at a mere 22, not only is she a master of song-craft, Swift is an expert of romance. She even pairs up with Swedish Svengali producer Max Martin (the man behind Britney Spears' "... Baby One More Time," Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" and Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl") for a trio of irritating but soon-to-be pop chart-toppers.
Besides the fact that her diary must be the size of a full set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias, Swift, who puts more time into her prologues than most artists put in their whole catalog, nonchalantly quotes Pablo Neruda like other so-called country artists namedrop George Jones and Johnny Cash. On her latest diatribe on amour, Swift pontificates on a "love that was treacherous, sad, beautiful and tragic" and describes sparks-flying, star-aligning, future-affirming "red relationships" going from zero to a hundred (or going from courting Hollywood hunk Jake Gyllenhaal to cradle-robbing Hyannis Port hottie Conor Kennedy...
