原文：https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-red/

by Brad Nelson

   在2012年初，Taylor Swift向她的厂牌提交了20首歌，这些歌曲将组成她的第四张录音室专辑，Red。所有作品都远远超过她早些年的pop-country作品——在那些歌曲中她作为一个在纳什维尔寻找自己声音的少女，试图用Tim McGraw来勾勒乔治亚的星空，或是用她自己的视角展现出的对浪漫爱情的失望。她为Red积攒作品时写出的歌仍然关于转瞬即逝爱情，关于像强迫症一样不断膨胀的感情，关于那些仿佛在寻找犯罪脚印一样捕捉到的一个个甜蜜的细节。当她拨动和弦，这些东西就在那里闪烁着微光。这些听起来就是Swift的风格，是对她之前所有专辑的有机延续。

 In early 2012, Taylor Swift turned in 20 songs to her label for what would become her fourth album, Red. They wereall further outgrowths of the pop-country sound she had mastered in her earlyyears, as a teenager finding her voice in the Nashville scene, trying on songslike “Tim McGraw” to reflect the starlight over Georgia and the allure anddisappointment of romantic love through a lens that was unmistakably hers. Asshe amassed a body of work for Red, she was still writing songs about love andits fugitive presence, songs about relationships that swelled like an obsessivethought, songs that picked up and enhanced the smallest pixels of intimatedetail as if they were scanning security footage in a crime procedural. Whenshe strummed a chord, it shimmered and just hung there. It sounded like Swift,an organic progression from her previous records.

      看看Red之前的专辑，很显然Swift一直在追求着一种“无机”，试图用她的音乐穿透现代流行乐的失真并看看到底会有什么样基因重组的恐怖效果。在她跟流行大师Max Martin和Shellback合作的第一首作品“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”中你会很快发现，一种基因突变正在发生。原声吉他发出的和弦仿佛有真空的音效，这一点也不像是为新专辑写出20首霉味十足歌曲的oldTaylor Swift。这是一个全新的、重生的她。            

 Looking at the albums that followedRed, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through thedistortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horrorwould come back. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote incollaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never EverGetting Back Together”—a mutation is happening. A chord thrums from an acousticguitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum.It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new TaylorSwift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. It sounded like a new version of her,being fitfully born.

       Swift在试图把她的音乐带出传统边界，走进一个介于pop和country之间的领域。Pop借着它本身的电子舞曲DNA融了进来。Dubstep，一种另类又较新的舞曲风格，在风靡美国后几乎到了一种令人反胃的程度。Martin和Shellback明白这些流行音乐的变化，在Britney Spears前一年发行的专辑Femme Fatale中他们大量运用过。Red里另一首Swift/ Martin/ Shellback合作的歌曲“I Knew You Were Trouble”用一种pop-rock的风格开场，但细节处理又是dubstep让人迷醉晕眩的颤动。合成器在Swift的声音后电锯一般嘶吼，这也证明她终于找到了跟她的歌词一样犀利的音乐制作——田纳西和乔治亚的湖泊与乡间小路消失不见，取而代之的是一片锯齿状的水晶。对于一首描绘一场你清楚终将把你伤得遍体鳞伤的爱情的歌曲来说是绝对完美的。 

 Swift was trying to push her musicoutside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between popand country. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a oncevaried and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to thestomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Martin andShellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography; they incorporated manyof them into Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. Oneof the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,”starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep.Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. It was as if she hadfinally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, aperfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know willhurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon.

       Red是一张关于消失的专辑，关于所有已经消逝或即将遗失的东西——无终的感情，淡去的声音，曾经的Taylor Swift，每一幅画面都像是在渐渐褪色。哪怕是专辑封面上的Swift也有部分消失不见，宽檐帽投下的阴影将她下垂的眼睛吞没。这也是她在致敬Joni Mitchell发行于1971年的专辑Blue，那张专辑的封面同样是Mitchell的脸淹没在深蓝色湖泊的阴影中。

 Red is an album of disappearances,of things that have gone or are just about to go missing—lost relationships,old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re recedingout of frame. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged in a blue-black lake of shadow.

       Red也是Swift第一次直接表现出来自Mitchell创作风格的灵感，曾经在她的歌中若隐若现的影子现在直接进入我们的视线。与过去音乐中展现出的漫游感不同，现在我们能更多感受到Swift观察的细致和杰出的才华，她选择用一种出自心碎的叙述方式和让人沮丧的交流，而不是像其他歌曲一样发自释怀或是情感上的清晰。Swift早期很多浪漫幻想的歌曲，比如“Love Story” 和“Mine”都有一个走向婚姻殿堂的美好结局。但现实中的故事往往是走向一个艰难又不确定的地方，那些看起来牢固的感情也往往崩坏成散落的玻璃碎片。Swift深知这一点。在Billboard采访中Swift这样谈到Red：“不得不跟一个人说再见的方式各有不同…失去一个人的方式各有不同，每一种遗失，在我看来都不一样。”  

 Red is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a new found patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly; both resolved with marriage. But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Swift knew this; she described Red in Billboard as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone... Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss—it all sounds different to me.”

     所以她找到了不同的制作人和合作人来塑造这些各式各样的遗失。她希望鼓点听起来像Jeff Bhasker用在fun.发行于2012年的专辑Some Nights里的那样，仿佛覆盖着一层蛛网一样柔软温和的跳动。这些在“Holy Ground”里绽放，这首歌里Swift谈到了一小段美好又真实的恋爱，但又因为结尾并不重要所以她直接跳过不谈，“And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/ And the story’s got dust on every page.”她跟Semisonic的Dan Wilson合作的“Treacherous”一开始听起来很像old Taylor Swift，但时间会证明这首歌从编排到歌词的超高水准，不同于Swift的任何一首歌。它开始得相对轻缓，被Swift声音中的张力定格在时间，仿佛只要保持不动她就不会义无反顾地沉醉于这首歌的主人公。紧接着吉他和鼓点融化成黑暗，像下坠的雨点一样发出潮湿的回声，Swift伴着这些将目光聚焦于通向远处的道路：“Two head lights shine through the sleepless night/ And I will get you alone.”

 So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to fun.’s 2012 pop album Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. They bloom beneath the skinof “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowingand true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s notimportant: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got duston every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson,initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time likenone of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangementto lyric. It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all thetension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fallfor the song’s subject. Then the guitars and drums melt into dark, wet echoeslike pelting raindrops, as Swift’s focus narrows toward a driveway in thedistance: “Two headlights shine through the sleepless night/And I will get youalone.”

       哪怕是她跟Nathan Chapman——前三张专辑和收录进专辑最初20首歌的制作人，一起录制的风格也有所增强，有的声音听起来就像是来自一个空旷的剧场。在开场曲“State of Grace”中，吉他像声呐一样射出，仿佛在测量Swift的情感：在一段恋爱的早期感受到一些前所未有的东西时那种脸红心跳。“We are alone/ Just you and me/ Up in your room and our slates are clean,” 她唱道，把画面装进一个个回忆的小格子，“Just twin fire signs/ Four blue eyes.”

 Even the songs she recorded withNathan Chapman, the producer of her first three records and the initial 20songs she turned in for Red, are expanding, sometimes sounding like a bloom ofsound from an empty arena. On opener “State of Grace,” guitars chime likesonar, as if trying to measure the diameter of Swift’s feelings: the earlyblushes of a relationship, when you seem to recognize something in someone elsethat you’re not certain anyone else has seen. “We are alone/Just you and me/Upin your room and our slates are clean,” she sings, wiring images into a latticeof memory, “Just twin fire signs/Four blue eyes.”

       如果说Red在冒险的混血体验中仍然保持着整体性，那这都多亏了Swift对回忆、失去以及时间对前面两者所起效果的留意。在专辑前言中Swift引用了Pablo Neruda的诗句——“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”——同样的，Red里的歌曲就像“遗忘”一样绵长。“Sad Beautiful Tragic”像是沙漠中的海市蜃楼一样飘摇不定，一首Taylor Swift 式的slowcore，又隐约有4AD的影子。“Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,”她轻轻唱着，伴随着就像是分别后磕磕绊绊匍匐不前的时光，温柔的和弦将一秒拉成一个小时。

 If Red holds together at all as itrockets through hybrid genres, it’s in the attentive way Swift dwells on memoryand loss and the effect of time on both. In the liner notes, Swift borrows aquote from a Pablo Neruda poem—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—andaccordingly, the songs on Red stretch to the length of their forgetting. “SadBeautiful Tragic” sways like a slowcore desert mirage, a Taylor Swift song onthe verge of signing to 4AD. “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,” shesings, while the music simulates that stuttered crawl of days after a breakup,a soft melt of chords that make seconds feel like hours.

      “Time won’t fly/ It’s like I’m paralyzed by it,” Swift在AllToo Well——这首Red的精华，甚至也可能是她整个职业生涯的巅峰，唱到。这是她自己的“Tangled Up in Blue”。就像Bob Dylan一样，她飘流在时间中，进入一幅幅用“时间”松散拼凑起的画面。“There we are again in the middle of the night,” 她唱道，“We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” 她对那些亲密时光温柔的处理让一切重新活了过来。没有对过往的回应或是批判，她选择再现，去重新探索那些一个人离开后，当他们的影子也渐渐淡去时，还遗留下的巨大空白——曾谈笑风生的话题，曾给予对方的关注，曾有过的争论，以及那个曾紧紧相拥的房间。

 “Time won’t fly/It’s like I’mparalyzed by it,” Swift sings in “All Too Well,” the centerpiece of Red andpotentially her entire career. It might be her own “Tangled Up in Blue”; likeBob Dylan, she sweeps up drifts of time into loosely-chronological piles ofimages. “There we are again in the middle of the night,” Swift sings, “We dancearound the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The tenderness with which sheobserves this moment of intimacy makes it come to life; she reanimates afeeling instead of reacting to it, exploring all the howling negative space aperson leaves behind when their shadow recedes—the things you talked about, thekinds of attention you gave each other, the arguments you had, the rooms whereyou held onto each other desperately.

      Swift在第一段verse里埋下的一条契诃夫式的围巾再次出现在最后一段verse (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/ ’Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”)，它作为两人间剪不断联系的隐喻，哪怕不再有意义，这种情感也会持续下去。贯穿Red她似乎都在诉说着没有什么会不留痕迹地消失，而在“AllToo Well”中她自己也就成了一个痕迹——“I was there,”她在chorus中唱到。“I remember it all too well.”就像所有人一样，Swift也是自己过往经历的人质，但是她却能去见证这点，能够去看透一段情感——哪怕这些已经淡出了她的视线——去发现它本身，而不是去惋惜它没有成为的样子。

 A kind of Chekhov’s Scarf thatSwift sheds in the first verse reappears in the final verse (“But you keep myold scarf from that very first week/’Cause it reminds you of innocence and itsmells like me”) as a metaphor for the continuity of their connection, howfeelings persist long after they’ve lost their use. Nothing dies withoutleaving some trace of itself, she seems to say throughout the length of Red,and in “All Too Well” she becomes one of those traces—“I was there,” she singsin the chorus. “I remember it all too well.” Swift, like anyone, is a hostageto her own experience, but she’s also capable of being a witness to it, able tosee a relationship—even as it shrinks further and further away in hervision—for what it was rather than what it couldn’t be.