what having "new old Taylor" means for us
Between the release of her seventh album and the news that she’ll be rerecording her old music, it’s been a momentous week for Taylor Swift, her fans (including diehards and us more reluctant ones who just need to give in already and let “Cruel Summer” drag us back under) — and also, as The Ringer’s review of Lover explains, an entire generation of music listeners:
What makes Swift’s back catalog valuable is, of course, the gazillion dollars it stands to generate; what makes it invaluable, to her especially of course, is that every record is a very specific snapshot of a very specific person at a very specific moment in her life. They are time capsules she buries in each and every one of our heads.
As every Swiftie knows, you can’t truly appreciate a new Taylor album without the context of her past work — so the idea that adult Taylor will soon be professionally revisiting all those high school heartbreaks and early-20s thrills as part of the next era of her career makes Lover all the more poignant.
It’s the capstone to the coming-of-age narrative arc that she’s been crafting and we’ve been following for more than a decade. And it’s why, in our humble opinion, Taylor is such a singular storyteller for our generation: in cataloguing every relatable whim from her youth and then being able to reflect and build on it all, she moves us to do the same.