Lost Classic: Taylor Swift’s debut album is a triumph of self-awareness

Now we know Taylor Swift as a multi-grammy winner, four-time billboard artist of the year and stadium touring artist. The artist’s humble first album is often forgotten, consigned to the depths of the back catalogue of her career. But her debut album, self-titled Taylor Swift (released in 2006)  explains how the country-star turned pop-icon came to dominate the music industry for over 10 years.

Critics tend to see Swift’s career through the lens of change. The debut album features country fiddles, banjos, twangy guitars and a litany of references to pick up trucks and blue jeans. By the time we got her latest and sixth album, Reputation, late last year, she had been transformed into an urban performer using layered synthy choruses and vo-coded reverbs. At some point in her career Swift swapped literal bright-eyed innocence – “He said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame that night” with something altogether more adult – “I just wanna be, drinkin’ on a beach, with you all over me.”

The debut album is the work of a younger artist, obviously.  But there’s a subtle continuity that holds her work together, whether the backdrop is country banjos or synth keyboards. Swift’s debut gives us our first and best insight into the pervasive themes of her songwriting, and explains the otherwise hard to grasp authenticity that solidifies her appeal.

The standout track from the debut is Our Song, a meta-exploration of how we preserve relationships through music. The lyrics explain, through the medium of a conversation between a couple, the course of their relationship – “our song is a slamming screen door, sneaking out late tapping on your window” – preserving their interactions as lovers. The last line “I grabbed a pen and an old napkin and I wrote down our song” then introduces the self-reflexive act of writing a song about a relationship. It typifies Taylor Swift’s greatest strength – her constant awareness of her role as the songwriter.

Swift’s biggest critics rely on the trope of her supposed lack of self-awareness as a pop star – all she does is sing about boys, play the victim and refuse to acknowledge her context as a pop superstar. But this fails to understand the nuance she introduced in her debut, and carried throughout her career.

In Should’ve Said No, Swift opens with this familiar motif: “It’s strange to think the songs we used to sing, the smiles, the flowers, everything: is gone.” And even more on the nose – the track Tear Drops on My Guitar, released as the second single from the debut, is about Swift’s heartbreak over unrequited love, understood through songwriting – “He’s the reason for the teardrops on my guitar.”

The debut foreshadows her writing style as it develops over the course of six albums. In one of her most praised heartbreak anthems (from her 2010 album) – Dear John – Swift sings bitterly about a former boyfriend, cataloguing his various flaws (Swift is also a master of the resentful take-down). As she used to sit wondering “which version of you I might get on the phone” Swift fast forwards to the present: “Well I stopped picking up, and this song is to let you know why.”

Again, Swift is using the process of songwriting to explain and preserve a relationship. In Begin Again she sings about a new romance, and tells a boy that she bets he’d never meet someone “with as many James Taylor records as you.” In We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, from the album Red (2012), the music halts and in a mocking tone she talks about her ex who should just go and listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” She acknowledges her position as a songwriter, and comments on her public perception – that she is basically not very cool, although she is.

Her authenticity and appeal rest on her being consciously un-zeitgeisty. Swift’s music is never a reflection of fashion or trends. It is rooted in the process of understanding her craft and contextualising her music via her position as its creator.

The greatest feat of her songwriting is exactly what critics say she is lacking in her music – intelligence. That she refuses to be on trend, marks her out as something completely different from the rest of the current megastars. Ariana Grande was perhaps the biggest pop culture figure of this year, but her self conception is one that reflects exactly the mood music of 2018. Hyper commercial, social media obsessed and always ready for political intervention, Grande typifies the pop stars of late.

Swift has never done that – and on her debut album, Taylor Swift, sows the seeds. It points the way and establishes her as a star with timeless appeal.