Taylor Swift announces album Lover and drops new single
Taylor Swift returned in April this year with the sugary upbeat pop track ‘ME!’, a collaboration with Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie. The American pop star now announces that her seventh studio album is titled Lover and will be out on the 23rd of August. To celebrate this news, she decided to drop another new single, ‘You Need To Calm Down’.
Swift co-wrote and co-produced this electronic pop song with longterm Lorde collaborator Joel Little, who also worked with Khalid and Shawn Mendes. ‘You Need To Calm Down’ has an uplifting vibe in the chorus and is so damn catchy, but also has a message for us all. In the first verse she confronts her ‘haters’ who post hateful stuff online, in a similar manner to most of the material on her Reputation album, mentioning the ‘snakes’ once more. In the second verse however, she focuses on homophobes who show up at Pride parades with signs. She mentions GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), tells the people who worked on their signs ‘all night’ to ‘take several seats’ and concludes: “Shade never made anybody less gay!” Also note how she subtly changes the lyrics in the chorus to ‘Can you just not step on HIS gown?’, instead of ‘my gown’ in the first chorus.
Swift has even more to say. In the middle-eight she addresses the online fan culture in which female pop stars are often insulted in favor of another favorite. Taylor is not having any of it. “We figured you out, we all know now we all got crowns”, she states. Taylor Swift gives us a meaningful bop, with lyrics that are admittedly a little on the nose at times, but it works. This is not as good as the highlights of 1989 or even Reputation, but it is a step up from ‘ME!’.
Video review:
Taylor came up with another star studded video that underlines the message of the song. In a colourful video taking place in a trailer park, we see Ellen DeGeneres, Hayley Kiyoko, Laverne Cox, Queer Eye’s ‘fab five’, RuPaul and heaps more fabulous lgbt+ stars. The video concludes with Taylor in a fries costume and Katy Perry in a burger costume hugging it out after years of rivalry between the pop stars. A cake fight happens around them. Now that’s a trailer park we would love to live in! This new video is a strong statement against homophobia and for women in the music business having each other’s backs.