Taylor Swift Review

Take away the production and there is a real songwriter here. Our Song is built on a conceit a professional would have flattened, two teenagers with no song of their own inventing one out of a screen door and a phone call, and it is genuinely clever. Tim McGraw does the thing she would spend her career perfecting, hanging a whole relationship on one shared detail. Picture to Burn is funny and mean.

The trouble is everything around the words. Nathan Chapman's arrangements are stiff, the banjo and fiddle are decorative rather than structural, and the vocal production thins out a voice that was not strong yet. Several tracks, Stay Beautiful and A Place in This World among them, are competent filler of a kind she never bothered with again. Historically it matters enormously and it is the least played record in her catalogue for good reason. A promising notebook with a bad band attached.