Taylor Swift’s album Speak Now has long been thought of by fans as a whimsical fairytale. From the cover, showing her spinning in a sparkly ball gown, to the track “Enchanted,” a song that sounds straight out of Cinderella, the initial perception makes sense. But, when really listening to Speak Now, it makes little to no sense to view it as an album rejoicing in fairytales and princesses rather than an album mourning the loss of them. The album is less about fantasies and more about the violent loss of girlhood, and the last few moments a woman spends clinging to innocence.
Speak Now was released when Taylor Swift was twenty years old, entirely self-written between the ages of eighteen to twenty. The only exception is “Sparks Fly,” which was written when Taylor was sixteen and then reworked to fit into the album. Her first two albums — Taylor Swift and Fearless — had been written between the ages of twelve to sixteen and sixteen to eighteen respectively, and focused on relationships that sometimes did not even exist, first love, first heartbreak, and a longing for a movie level romance that feels attainable only in adolescence. In Taylor Swift, the subject matter feels mostly created to appease the 2006 creeks and pick-up trucks country music audience while calling in a demographic of young girls that had not yet been invited to have their voices count. She sang about boyfriends, fitting in at school, and boys…
