Big Machine Records







One song from the new album, "Better Than Revenge," hangs on the lines "she's an actress / but she's better known for the things she does on the mattress." (Yes, there is already speculation on the identity of the actress in question.) Although Swift has done a great deal to distance her public image from mattresses, and the unspeakable things done thereupon, it's worth noting that she's a singer and actress, and she's better known for her involvement with various heartthrobs who are popular with her target demographic than she is for, say, her vocal range. The hype around the new song "Dear John," a nearly seven-minute-long odyssey through the seas of petulance, is based pretty much entirely on the idea that she might have slept with John Mayer. Swift cashes in on her associations with men even when they're not intimates. "Innocent," a power ballad about the Kanye West incident at last year's VMAs, devotes over five minutes to an interruption that clocked in at about thirty seconds. But it had built-in marketing opportunities: She got to debut it at the VMAs, thus assuring herself of another spotlight moment and reminding everyone of the sales-boostingcontroversy.

Which isn't to condemn Swift totally, or to say that her much-publicized dating life or much-published feelings are entirely artificial. It's just hard to believe that the most important emotional moments in Taylor Swift's life line up, so very closely, with the most important moments in her tabloid narrative. Yet her songs seize upon them unfailingly.

Early in her career, Swift embraced social media in order to build a fan base; now, she's tapped into one of the most troubling problems facing the music industry. The Internet has given us an unprecedented amount of access to personal information about celebrities, creating the very hunger for information it aims to satisfy, yet it's also decimated record sales. Swift, as others have noted, has become "her own TMZ." You can hear that she may have dated John Mayer anywhere, but for the real, true, unfiltered tell-all, buy Speak Now! Available wherever fine music and/or gossip is sold! Remember: If you pirate the album, you'll miss out on the top-secret coded messages in the CD booklet! It's ethically questionable (pity Joe Jonas, forced to take to his own MySpace blog to explain to an audience of angry, sheltered tweens that "maybe there were reasons for a breakup") but it sells.

Still, there is nothing like listening to Speak Now to make you appreciate Carly Simon. Speaking in 2005 about "You're So Vain," she said that she didn't see the point of naming the subject. "If people knew who it was to begin with," she said, "it might not have become a hit."
