While Taylor Swift was under a lot of scrutiny leading up to the release of her album "Reputation", a new age of badass T-Swift music has been ushered in and I think it is safe to say, it has been well received. Everyone is a fan of the edgy, brave and brutally honest songs that make up the first 14 tracks on the album. But I truly believe she saved the best for last, the 15th track, “New Years Day".
In this song, she addresses the reality of New Year's that people often forget. Everyone is frantic to have someone, anyone, to kiss when the clock strikes midnight. They’re all so focused on having someone just for the first few milliseconds of an entire year. But Taylor’s lyrics remind us that it’s more important to have the person to take care of you on New Year’s Day and help you clean up and then enjoy the year with, rather than just someone to kiss for a few seconds. And more than anything else, she’s expressing a raw longing for someone to stick around for the tough parts after the partying and fun nights of fame are over.
This is clearly the most mature and serious of the tracks on "Reputation". The first 14 are about breakups, cheaters, unfaithful friends and famous feuds. But with this last 15th song, Taylor shows a vulnerable side of herself that is afraid to lose something important and goes beyond the arbitrary aspects of a night out partying or a night at an awards show.
This song is a huge point of change from the past Taylor full of teenage drama, silly crushes and breakup songs, to the new Taylor, empowered, independent and mature.
Taylor uses two extremely impactful lines as the chorus in this song: “Please don’t become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere,” and “Hold on to the memories, they will hold onto you.” The beauty of these two lines is that they can mean something slightly different to each person that listens to and sings them along with the radio.
'The first line is addressing the fact that she doesn’t want her date on New Year's to become, just another guy. She doesn’t want him to fade into the background as guys often do in her life. Not only that, but she is admitting the pain she has felt before when someone so intimately close to her became someone so foreign yet familiar at the same time and I think that’s a very honest statement to make so repetitively.
The second set of lyrics is something that I truly believe every single person has felt at some point in their lives. Memories hold on to you, just as much as you try to preserve them. Sometimes you want to hold on to a moment, and you never can, so you have to cling to memories instead. It’s a very haunting line because it immediately triggers a similar emotion of bittersweet longing in anyone listening despite the fact that they’re all thinking of different memories associated with that feeling.
By creating a sort of flashback to her old style of music with just piano and guitar as the backup, paired with nostalgic and bittersweet lyrics, Swift takes the listener to a vulnerable and honest place and produced a song that we all truly needed to hear. It’s a place for her to stop and reflect at the end of an album full of anger, revenge, and spite.
For the listener, it serves as a place for us to all stop and reflect on the previous year and how we cherish relationships going forward. She bares her soul and her fears in a very vulnerable ballad and for that, I commend her and will continue to sing along to this song at the top of my lungs for quite a long while.
