I like the idea that “Fifteen” is “distant and vague and guarded” — it seems to me to be a song about thinking you have everything figured out and slowly starting to understand how much you have yet to learn. Which describes me pretty well at 15, certainly; there’s something almost didactic about the song, Taylor almost overplaying her naivete because she’s a little embarrassed by it. When you’re fifteen you don’t know who you’re supposed to be, sure, but you still are someone; lots of people would love to disown themselves at this age, or pretend they acted differently than they did, and Taylor does that a little in the song. It’s like looking through your old photographs and overreacting negatively to a picture of yourself; maybe you can’t really see yourself in that picture anymore, and maybe to your friends the resemblance is obvious, which can be unnerving to the (let’s say) twentysomething taking the look back. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found that the Zone of Overreacting Regret has increased in age, too — I’m perfectly comfortable taking a somewhat harder look at myself at 15 than I am taking a harder look at myself at 19, at which time I couldn’t stand to think of myself at 15.

It’s true that Taylor could sing about non-relationship angst (Ashlee certainly does), but her subject matter doesn’t change the depth of how her characters feel — boys are a muse, not an end in and of themselves. It’s a common enough confessional trope — boys as stand-in for the mess that is life; I don’t think the politics of this stand-in are self-evident (or self-evidently bad), just depends on what you do with it. The fact that Taylor is getting dad’s approval to be married doesn’t tell us much about what the song is doing — but whatever it’s doing, Taylor isn’t talking about the “ultimate goal of every teenage girl” (and neither are we men, who like it or not have actually listened to enough Taylor Swift to have an idea of what she is saying) — she’s singing about a fantasy, one that’s quickly second-guessed and dismantled a couple songs later. (Not my fault that others, e.g. movie trailer makers, like to use complex songs simplistically to strip away less-obvious readings — see also “Born in the USA” as Republican presidential anthem.)

I don’t like MBI’s analysis, since she’s projecting ugliness onto Taylor that isn’t there, and reducing Taylor’s complexity to simplicity in order to feel superior to her and to feel that she has nothing to learn from Taylor. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d dislike MBI herself, if she’d stop the scapegoating.

I don’t like my own analysis, for that matter, where I say, “there are plenty of kids at age 18 (her age when she released Fearless) who question and battle stereotypes even when the stereotypes run to their advantage, and who consider themselves as culpable and confused after breakups as the person they were dating, and understand that when people change their minds it’s because they don’t know what they’re about yet, and so forth.” Well, in “Breathe,” which comes five songs after “Fifteen,” she does feel culpable and confused after the breakup and explicitly says that she understands that people change their minds. And three songs on in “The Way I Loved You” she’s turning “You Belong With Me” inside out, ’cause she’s leaving the sensitive nice boy in the lurch in favor of the wild boy who gets her mad and into screaming fights at 2 AM, and she loves him insanely. So her songs cover a range of experience and impulses, the experiences and impulses not melding into one set attitude.

I love Deana Carter and gave Story Of My Life a rave review, but “Tim McGraw” delivers the bittersweet a lot more effectively than “Strawberry Wine” did.

Abigail’s “giving it all” is a lot vaguer than Taylor getting stuck on the back roads with a guy in “Tim McGraw” — sex is maybe impied, but it’s not clear at all that this is exactly what she’s talking about. The key line there, though, is not “giving it all,” but “we both cried” — the girls faced with dramatically re-configuring their assumptions and expectations for this period of their life — Taylor didn’t know who she was supposed to be, but each experience tells her something about who she *is*, whether she likes it or not.

As for the cuteness — well, I just disagree completely. Taylor is fierce, angry, often bitter, but she rarely has much of a sense of levity or cuteness about what she’s talking about. Usually it’s the end of the (well, “a”) world!

I really don’t get what you people are listening to here. We know absolutely nothing at all about what happens to that senior boy with the car that Taylor dates, just that it ended, but she feels free to tell us about how Abigail’s most painful secrets, because it’s sure easy to be honest and confessional about shit that happened to someone else. A cautionary tale about having to console a *friend* who screwed up does nothing for me.

I mean, let’s face it, Taylor Swift is not ever going to write a song about how she gave it up at age fifteen. Taylor Swift lives in a Norman Rockwell world where she perpetually has just kissed a boy for the first time last week. For the first time, one of Taylor Swift’s songs strikes me as calculated and guarded, and for the first time her ridiculous adolescent naivete really grates at me. And while she has the perspective to admit that fifteen-year-olds sure are stupid, she doesn’t have the courage to admit that she or Abigail had sex not because they were tricked into thinking they were in love, but simply because they’re silly hormonal teenagers who wanted to have sex, and for that reason Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine” strikes me, if not the more honest song, at the very least the more interesting one, and certainly the superior one. Taylor’s got potential, but seriously, call me when she goes through two divorces and starts hitting the booze and starts making some actual country music.