By Hanna Ellington

Glittering, angsty, sparkling, and effeminate, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is an ode to girlhood and the unrestrained emotion that comes with growing out of it.

I sit here coming to you in my apartment in a big city reminiscing on who I was when Speak Now came out for the first time. Dark curly hair, ambition beyond the confines of Kansas, and an affinity for the unbridled twang of Taylor Swift. At 11, I had already paid my dues as a Swiftie with my copy of Fearless and her debut album tucked in the growing CD collection shared with my mom.

Now at 24, I am preparing to return to Kansas City—albeit not to the childhood home I experienced Speak Now in for the first time. For the first Eras Tour stop in KC, Taylor performed a newly owned “Long Live” and “Never Grow Up”. Though I live more than 4,000 miles away from home, I still feel like she may have played those just for me. Sometimes I wish I had headed her advice about staying young, but the words carry more weight at 24 than they did at 11.

Speak Now has long been my Taylor album (as much as one can take personal ownership of the global phenomenon that is Taylor Swift). As my mom moved out of the home I grew up in, she asked if there was anything I wanted to keep from the pile of things forgotten with time. “I need my holographic blue Wonderstruck perfume,” I demanded. Though crusted with age and probably close to empty, I couldn’t give up the sickly sweet fragrance from another timeline. It’s a portal into how everything is wonderful and shiny as you transition out of adolescence.

I’ll never forget the ripple of fireworks during “Sparks Fly” above Arrowhead Stadium back in 2011 when I saw Taylor spin and twirl surrounded by 40,000 people sharing the same giddiness in our chests. Glittering, angsty, sparkling, and effeminate, Speak Now is an ode to girlhood and the unrestrained emotion that comes with growing out of it. Relationships fade, people grow, and things change, but passion persists.

While the songs remain the same—apart from six new ‘From the Vault’ tracks—the production and delivery in Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) lost the raw intensity of youth. Taylor re-recorded this album at 32 years old. Angsty anger can be hard to hold on to, and this rerelease feels diminished as a result. The 22-track album is polished and manicured, as opposed to the uninhibited and tender place it was written.

In the rumbling ‘Haunted’, during which Taylor pleads with her lover to “finish what you started”, the tone has shifted from distraught exasperation to light indifference. While the lyrics still carry the same weight, Taylor’s delivery comes off more hollow than haunted. 

The same goes for ‘Better Than Revenge’, a song driven by teenage retaliation and poisonous spite, which loses its full sting due to a lyric change in the chorus. Taylor swaps “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” for “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches”—and in doing so rewrites her history and feelings. It’s a dual-edged sword of self-sacrifice and past erasure that makes me wonder what will stop her from continuing to alter her works in future recordings. 

The irony in this lyric regression is furthered by a vault-track feature by Paramore’s Hayley Williams on “Castles Crumbling”, a poetic ballad detailing the anxiety and isolation of a platform built on the world’s stage. Hayley formerly abandoned playing the 2007 hit “Misery Business” due to ‘unfeminist’ lyrics but has since readopted performing it—antiquated lyrics and all—going so far as to include fan participation on stage. If outdated songs can be reinspired and reclaimed—as Hayley has done with hers—it would seem that the untouchable Taylor Swift should be able to do the same.

While unexpected for alt-rock songbird Hayley and emotion-fueled Taylor to tone down their emotional carnage for their duet, the two stars poeticize their fears in harmony fits. The track even carries a retroactively rosy tint as the duo is set to take on Europe together next year for the Eras Tour.

Relationships fade, people grow, and things change, but passion persists.

“Mean” and “Never Grow Up” take new meaning as we as listeners progress and age alongside Taylor—deftly showing us things can and will change in time. Positive in some regard and negative in others, the tracks and album as a whole serve as a time capsule into our previous individual and collective experiences. The passionate grandeur of “Sparks Fly” and whimsically imaginative “Enchanted” still reflect adolescent giddiness, while “Innocent” and “Back to December” dig into forgiveness in a mature way beyond the years it was originally produced.

The album tracks the pendulum of extreme emotions with woeful optimism painted in “Mine” and “Ours”, dramatic yet upbeat tragedy in “The Story of Us”, and adoring admiration in “Superman”. The new tracks add to this range, with “I Can See You” hinting at Taylor’s eventual transition into flirty pop prose. “When Emma Falls in Love” points the camera at a friend (Emma Stone? Roberts? Watson?) and the lived experience of others, while “Foolish Ones” delivers hard-to-hear-but-wise sisterly advice. “Timeless” closes the album in a quintessentially Taylor way with a harmonious storyline capturing her feeble optimism in a love transcending time, space, and every odd.

The dramatic and spirited teenage Taylor that pranced and performed in Arrowhead Stadium for 11-year-old me may be left in a previous timeline. The album is innately Taylor and shows her progression into new spaces in the seven albums that follow this. From lyrical repetition to chord sampling to theme progression, Taylor continues to cement her legacy by rebuilding it from the ground up. Even though it may lack some of the brash intensity of youthful passion, that doesn’t mean 11-year-old me could ever forget the feeling.

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Header photo by Kelcie McKenney

P.S. Love Taylor? Read Hanna’s review of Midnights.