My favourite Taylor Swift album is Red.

It contains some of her most popular singles (22, I Knew You Were Trouble, etc.), but it tends to be relatively rare as a favourite among fans. Following the release of the synthesised 1989 in 2014, and again with the harmonious folklore in 2020, there was a shift in what listeners looked for in Swift’s music: a preference for albums in which everything is organised, coherent, and neatly slotting into its own ‘era’ (pun intended).

I’m not quite sure that Red does that. There are the overplayed pop songs that everyone knows, but beyond them there’s so much more– the experimenting with different sounds and drawing influence from other genres like country, indie, even rock. Everyone’s main gripe with this album is its lack of cohesiveness, but what I adore about it most is how real, messy, and inconsistent it is, and how this makes it feel so much more real.

In the prologue to the album (for its original release, in 2012), Swift describes her inspiration for this album as love, and every aspect of it. Not only straightforward, simple love, but the type of love that disturbs your emotions, makes you temporarily insane, and functions in extremes – everything you learn from being young and experiencing desire for different people, some that are wrong for you, some that you can look back on wistfully. She discusses the journeys, the mistakes, the impulses; how there is something to be said for ‘being young and needing someone so badly, you jump in head first without looking. And there’s something to be learned from waiting all day for a train that’s never coming’. 

For me, Red has always felt like an amalgamation of different states of desire: falling for someone, falling in love, experiencing temporary relationships, experiencing breakups. The opening track State of Grace is one of my favourite songs ever, about the early stages of desiring someone after having had your heart broken before. It focuses on finding peace in someone else, against the backdrop of a big city where everyone exists without sincerely knowing or connecting with each other.

‘I’m walking fast through the traffic lights,

Busy streets and busy lives.

And all we know 

Is touch and go’

(Taylor Swift, State of Grace)

Swift so perfectly encapsulates the feeling of meeting someone you like, love, who makes you want to escape the cycle of ‘touch and go’, the feeling of being so utterly transformed and altered by someone. But she makes us so aware of the potential lack of permanence, whilst simultaneously showing that even though it might end (even, that it probably will), this doesn’t diminish the fact that it is still a ‘State of Grace’. She creates an odd comfort in singing about having had your heart broken before and still being drawn in by a new potential love or desire. It’s an opening track that in turn sums up the general concept of the album in its entirety: an album about love, self-discovery, human connection; an album about the impermanence that goes hand in hand with experiencing all of these things.

Swift puts this into words so wonderfully in the line, ‘We learn to live with the pain, / Mosaic broken hearts, / But this love is brave and wild’. She makes the potential for losing love seem much less scary; it’s just something we live with, all of us existing with imprints of everyone we’ve loved before and still being willing to keep going back for more. It always reminds of this scene from Sex and the City, where Carrie, discussing her breakup, says ‘When you break up with someone, where does the love go?’, and Samantha exclaims ‘To their next girlfriend!’. It’s mostly a joke, but I think she’s right, in a way; a lot of life is just about love (platonic or romantic), and finding where to put it. When you break up with someone, it feels so impossible that the love will just shift form, like a bubble or a cloud. But it will: it will transform, move, and change within you, until it’s in exactly the right form to be given to someone else. 

It’s hard to remember, sometimes, why we choose to put our emotions at risk in offering up love to someone else. It’s hard to remember why you’d ever want to casually date when you’re doing it. But something about Red as an album had always felt like an embodiment of how I’d imagined experiencing being in my twenties: living in a big city, meeting people, experiencing love and heartbreak and all the messy emotions that come with it. Feeling these things was something I longed to experience when I was young and listening to the intense emotion shown in songs like All Too Well. There is something so beautiful about experiencing the feeling of coming undone as a result of desire. Desire is all we have, sometimes; in a world of logic and argument and instruction, sometimes all we can do is rebel in other ways through the messy, unplanned, and uncontrollable feelings that result from the desire for someone else. 

With impermanence comes possibility. You can always stop, start again, do something different, break up with someone, start dating someone else, move cities, move countries. And I think that’s the overwhelming feeling I get when I listen to Red. That anything is possible. That we’re all just human and wanting human connection, that we’re all as lost and clueless as one another, that we’re all just seeking something we’re not quite sure of. That you can experience this vivid love she discusses in State of Grace and be completely fine, that you can at once ‘never be the same’ and be at peace with the fact that love is simply ‘a ruthless game’.

It’s the same with one of my other favourite songs from this album, Holy Ground, which begins with Swift looking back on a past relationship: ‘I was reminiscing just the other day, while having coffee all alone… it took me away, back to a first-glance feeling on New York time’. This song draws together so wonderfully the setting of the whole album, or at least how I view it: I picture her in this coffee shop, writing an album that epitomises her existence throughout her early twenties, the loves she’s had and lost. Swift goes on to describe this beautiful and transformative experience of desire, but it’s an overwhelmingly positive, bittersweet reflection. It’s been, it’s happened, all you can do is experience it. And you can reminisce on a love that transformed your life while doing the simple act of ‘having coffee all alone’, surrounded by strangers in a café in New York. 

I love how Swift writes about the human experience, and for me, Red is the best example of that. She captures how I feel about so many things, manages to encapsulate both love and the current transient nature of human connection and breakups and intimacy in a singular song. It’s so human and real. And it makes everything feel lighter, knowing everyone else goes through the same things. Mosaic broken hearts. That’s all we are, really.

*This article’s title was inspired by the article, ‘States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta’ in The Paris Review. I’d recommend it a lot: nothing to do with Taylor Swift, but one of the quotes in there (‘When you’re attracted to someone, everything about them becomes salient. We pass hundreds of people walking on the sidewalks of a big city, and we don’t even notice who they are, what they look like…’)  reminded me so much of the opening lines of State of Grace, mentioned earlier in this article (‘I’m walking fast through the traffic lights, / Busy streets and busy lives / And all we know, is touch and go’) that it formed a connection between the two in my mind. It got me thinking about desire, the process of knowing someone that stems from desiring them, particularly in the context of dating in a big city. All of this to say –  I credit that article for this article’s title.