Why Taylor Swift Re-Recording “Fearless” Has Us All In Our Feelings
"It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone"
Taylor Swift has always had a way with words. While her lyrics have matured over the years, she has always hit home. Her words resonated with my young teenage self when she released her second album, Fearless. With the release of her re-recordings of this iconic album, a lot of fans have found themselves screaming those lyrics all over again and reminiscing on their crushes of the era.
Taylor's Fearless era brings back a certain kind of golden nostalgia. For fans in my age group, it brings us back to the pivotal years where you slip into being a teenager and into your early high school years--the last years where crushes were simple, even though at the time they felt anything but. The Fearless era was yearning for a boy across a classroom that didn’t quite know you existed and being distracted the rest of the day. It was the time when crushes were innocent and based on someone’s cute haircut, the one time they picked up something you dropped, or simply that unexplainable feeling that meant butterflies when they walked by. You didn't really know why it happened--the feelings were just there. No motivations, no plans, no idea what you even wanted besides their attention. Fearless is nostalgia for what crushes used to be when you were younger; before feelings could get serious, and before you had to think about compatibility or complications. It was the simplest era of love, even though it often felt overly complicated in our worlds which were so small at the time.
Maybe that's why it can be easy to think back fondly on those crushes. Times were simpler. Taylor evokes a nostalgia for things that never were, which is what can make them so sweet to look back on. There was no mature, dramatic fallout in those days; crushes not working out were just side effects of growing up. There's a certain kind of magic to those days where feelings were easy and unexplainable. Unrequited crushes from that age keep a sparkle to them because they remain uncharred by the flames that take down later relationships. I think we can all remember the last crush we had before life got complicated. Maybe the memory has a golden haze around it now, because you've experienced worse since then. The drama of early teen life is something we might all welcome over the days of hearing about cheating, divorce, and conflicting values. The people from that era of our lives have seen us and appreciated us before things got too complex.
We don't express our feelings as simply as we did back then. Sometimes we still want to draw a big X over someone's photo and scream about it. We generally don't do this in our twenties, though. We're expected to behave a little better, and to bitch about it appropriately on Twitter instead. While this is probably for the best, I know plenty of us will be screaming the lyrics to Fearless and reliving our best days. And hey, maybe we could use a little dose of feeling fearless in our adult lives.
“Wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now”
Personally, listening to this re-recorded album also helped me realize how much I’ve grown since that era. What I know about myself now makes me thankful for the changes that come with growing up and the situations that didn’t work out. Listening to Taylor sing “Fifteen” again and knowing how she’s matured between the two recordings is like listening to her mentor her younger self--and our younger selves--through those days when our tween selves thought life and love were so hard that we might not make it through. We made it, and we accomplished great things along the way--much greater things than dating the boy on the football team.
The image of the perfect fairytale ending fades away with age into something more realistic, and also more sustainable. Crushes have matured into looking for a partner over a pretty face, and Taylor has been there to guide her fans through all of the eras in between. But for now, we're all popping a bottle of wine to scream along to “You Belong With Me” like we're fifteen, and I'm loving it.
