And so, inevitably, we end with…

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[7.27]

Anthony Easton: You know when you’re really young, and the first boy who ever gave you an orgasm, you confused the warmth of physiological response for an emotional response, and you transfered the awesome power of the orgasm, to this sort of murky emotional swamp that is the mix of country radio, tabloid magazines, and what ever reading you did in AP English?
[9]

Al Shipley: This sounds a lot like that other new song she sang at the VMAs. She really doesn’t have a very deep bag of tricks, does she?
[3]

Pete Baran: I think sometimes a successful artist just clicks, and it starts to become difficult for them not to have a hit if they stick to their comfort zone. This is bang in Taylor Swift’s sweet spot, narrative enough for the proto-country fans out there, upbeat enough for pop radio. It would be churlish to accuse her of playing safe; she is a pop star, and this is exactly what her fans want.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Writing about Taylor Swift is like playing capture-the-flag on a minefield. One pole, she’s the brilliant troubadour of this generation. The other, she’s the childish, reactionary emblem of a movement that shouldn’t exist. Heaps of context are packed down into the dirt on either side, not that either side notices as they palooka their way across. You almost forget that Taylor Swift makes music. So without any biographical criticism (although that September line tempts), with no speculation on which famous pop star or actor this is supposedly about, with no comments about Taylor’s image, and knowing this leaves out a significant chunk of the story, here’s the deal. The almost-staccato pacing in the chorus helps break things up, and either Nathan Chapman suddenly became a vocal-production wizard between albums or Taylor was never the bad singer some accuse her of being. But she’s still wading through soporific malaise, same as always. The bridge is briefly stirring, like Taylor or Nathan got bored with their own work and dozed off for a second, but it doesn’t last. I can’t stand this when Daughtry, John Mayer, Boys Like Girls or Colbie Caillat do it. Taylor is not special.
[5]

Alex Macpherson: One of the least interesting songs on Speak Now, but maybe the best. There are few contextual talking points: no deliberate signposts of maturity à la “Mine”, no potshots or calling out, no feminist-baiting – just Swift taking on a classic pop subject in a classic way and bringing it to aching life. In terms of melody alone, “Back To December” might rate as one of Swift’s finest works, her voice rising and falling in waves of sadness; it’s beautifully paced, too, from the halting first verse to the way the dramatic bridge winds slowly, reluctantly, to the devastating resignation of “If the chain is on your door, I guess I understand.” Maybe what makes it so moving is this underlying acceptance that, no matter how much she swallows her pride and bares her soul, it’s an exercise in futility. Taylor Swift may believe in happy endings – but she damn well believes in unhappy ones too.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Hardly representative of the quality and maturity — dare I say bravery? — of its parent album, but right in just about every other way. Taylor’s always done fond well, but here she does conciliatory with as much self-assurance and melodic smarts as she does wounded. Once again she brings the simple poetry of the lyrics to life with her voice, and this doesn’t have the layers or vividness of most of her last album but it has more restraint, more room to breathe, and is all the better for it.
[8]

Renato Pagnani: There’s a reason that Taylor sets this song in December, a month rife with symbolic possibilities. So what exactly is over? Not just a relationship that she messed up, but an entire mentality, an outmoded way of thinking that led Taylor first to heartbreak, but then, crucially, to insight — which is why our humbled heroine keeps going back to an ending. Because only from endings are beginnings possible.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: A song apologising for ending a relationship and asking for another chance. I don’t know if it has anything to do with her life, but as usual with her, it convinces. The pulsing guitar sound helps the mood too, making it tense and uneasy. The whole thing is pretty heartbreaking, and very maturely written.
[9]

Alfred Soto: I can’t shake the sense that the strings remind me of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” but it’s the only blemish on a flawless ballad, a perfect mix of rue and toughness. Credit her voice — stronger and suppler than her critics and live performances have suggested. Unafraid to remind her beloved (in her internal monologue, of course) that she lost her virginity to him (the first time he ever saw her cry, Swift resorts to the honesty of someone who’s got nothing to lose. Sharing happy moments — like she laughed at him from the passenger side — is harder than the sad ones.
[8]

Frank Kogan: A beautiful setting, Chapman and Swift populating the sound with guitar tremeloes and strings that weep without dripping, leaving space for Taylor to present us her vulnerability — this the first song where she puts no steel in her voice. The words are missing the nuance and observation we got in the days when Liz Rose accompanied Taylor in the writing credits, and more distressingly don’t have any of the wrenching parallels that Taylor all by her songwriting self put into “Fifteen” and “The Best Day” (Abigail story/Taylor story, day in school/day with Mom, the balm in the second part of each pair not putting to rest the anguish of the first). And dead flowers are a dead metaphor (though I won’t forget to put roses on their graves). The way the song criss-crosses time, back and forth from summer to September to December to now, has great potential for juxtaposition: I keep wanting the song to be about the boy being there for her tears but she then causing his but not getting to see them, Taylor necessarily now being shut out — we need less attention on her feelings, which we can figure out anyway, and more on the boy’s guardedness. I also think the song should have ended 30 seconds sooner, drifting down sadly rather than reiterating her regret while bells ring too loudly; at most they should be tolling. But earlier, her voice falling to huskiness as she sings, simply, “Fear crept into my mind,” she delivers almost all we need, the whole story in a breath.
[7]

Jer Fairall: I maintain that those who carp about her vocals miss the point of what Elvis Costello once referred to as singing in the “author’s voice”, and are slaves to conventional attitudes towards female performers besides. But “Back To December” does illustrate how hers is not one particularly suited to orchestral sweeps, as the more aggressive ones here threaten to drown her out, something that a hopefully-inevitable acoustic version somewhere down the road should correct. As a lyricist, though, she remains rather startlingly wise and observant on the kinds of adolescent traumas we jaded adults think ourselves as having outgrown, her greatest strength (though her sharp melodic instincts run a close second) residing in her giving a plain but pretty voice to what many of us might now regard as trifling banalities. Just watch as “It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missing you” becomes many a young girl’s post-breakup Facebook status for months to come.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: This melody is such an exemplary piece of text painting, you almost don’t need the text. She hovers around a very narrow range here — the first half of Verse 1 and most of the chorus span just four notes (C# to F#). She’s constraining her usual ebullience to convince whatshisname (I envision Taylor Lautner, fwiw) that she means business, that she really wants to make things right. The insistent chorus rhythm is her determined form of penance. But at key places she breaks out: her voice glowers low on “burned in the back of your mind”; she reaches wistfully for “thaaat night”, wishing she’d behaved differently, put the roses in water or something. Second verse she’s got her foot in the door, so she widens the tune’s range coquettishly, trying to remind whatshisname how great she can be — only to snap back shut for the chorus. To get him back she’ll forswear freedom, so much that she even assumes a chain on his door, subconsciously associating it with her voluntary imprisonment. Bonus: she and Nathan Chapman forswear power chords, leaving space around her voice. OK, maybe she’s as brilliant as you all say. Docked a point because the bridge doesn’t do anything for me.
[9]

David Moore: This isn’t really the place to take out my frustration with Speak Now — it’s a nice song and it’s not hurting anyone (it’s vaguely wistful, though implied more through the vaseline on the lens than what anyone’s saying). But I would like to note how Taylor Swift’s sense of complexity through economy has degraded this time out. Pluck one detail from the memory stream — she’s in the car with her boyfriend and notices him laughing: “I think about summer, all the beautiful times / I watched you laughing from the passenger’s side / And I realized I loved you in the fall.” Now compare to: “Just a boy in a Chevy truck / That had a tendency of gettin’ stuck on backroads at night / And I was right there beside him all summer long.” That line’s from the first verse of her first single, “Tim McGraw”, and it’s been quoted a lot in my own corners of the rockcritverse as a refutation to Taylor’s alleged “sexlessness” (in fact, it took her till album three to tut-tut about someone else’s lack of “saintliness”). But here I just want to point out the detail in that older line. We have a description of the car itself, the players, their behavior, their motives and machinations, the mood. And from those details we start to imagine others — the windshield fogging up, crickets chirping, little crunches from the sidelines that might be a squirrel or another couple or your parents hunting you down. There’s flirtation, danger, coyness, possibility; and that line is really only there to set the scene — the rest of the song flashes forward a year to longing and bitterness and then doubles back to nostalgia. In this one, I learn next to nothing about her, him, or anything that might make this relationship even remotely interesting, except that it’s not-so-secretly referring to some celebrity I don’t care about. But it gets a couple of points for plain and pretty.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Points for ambition: the lyric juggles several different conceits without mixing metaphors, and if the arrangement inevitably recalls “Novemeber Rain,” well, there are worse acts of pop/rock hubris to emulate. But the result is a rather lumbering, unwieldy, and wordy song without the clean through-lines and emotional transparency of her best work. She’s learned to write; now she needs to learn to edit.
[6]

Zach Lyon: This isn’t vintage, but it feels like new territory for Taylor, who is still wonderful at being a 20-year-old who singularly crafts better narratives than most country veterans. It’s simple, but the lyric “turns out freedom ain’t nothin’ but missin’ you” tells us so much, where a less-talented writer might have spent an entire boring verse documenting every excuse for the breakup. Taylor’s priorities are in the right place with the emotion of the song, and she has a good grasp on the priorities of her narrator. The chorus actually sounds like an above-average teenage Livejournal entry set to music (it sounds like she’d stumble over the words in a live setting), and it loses points for initially characterizing the ex by his “tan skin and sweet smile” and for the lazy orchestrations, but I’m probably just expecting too much.
[7]