An ambiguous song about nothing in particular…

[Video]
[6.75]

Dan Weiss: In which Taylor has sex, or at least obtains a very impressive hickey. Maybe those who think she’s the problem don’t know it exists. The female orgasm, I mean.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Taylor Swift has written a song about either sex or, more likely, actually going up for a cup of coffee. Thousands of listeners are now trying to parse the exact state of her virginity with the same aggregate rancor in which they scoured the Web for her undergarments; thousands more will earnestly slot this — just the song they needed — into their good/bad feminist/Christian/role model rundowns. Me, I still doubt sparks, fireworks or alleviated pain were involved in Swift’s memory, or that she’s so enamored that her coalescing lust can form pulsing new descriptions instead of freezing into Nicholas Sparks cliches, or that you’ll ever be able to distinguish her songs on sound alone.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Do you realize that Swift has released at least ten songs with the word “rain” in them? She uses rain like Shania uses exclamation points. She uses rain like Ke$ha uses glitter. She uses rain like Train uses their pact with Satan to continue scoring chart hits. In “Sparks Fly,” a couple has sex the way Hollywood thinks people have sex: that is, during a rainstorm, after a hushed staircase ascension. Oh, and the girl’s kind of damaged, and the boy’s ragged but he’s right. The lead vocal is doubled to shore up Swift’s delivery, but maybe a second songwriter can be enlisted to draw a little fire out of her. We may have to park that crying fiddle figure, but sometimes growing up hurts.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: “Drop everything now,” Taylor insists, and Speak Now gets its first arresting moment of drama and bliss. It’s cinematic more than realistic, but you can draw a pretty straight line between the success of frothy pop songs like this to feel-good romcoms. Done right, they thrill the senses and touch the heart. Taylor knows how to do both, and because her tricks are cheap, she’s got plenty to throw around.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Swift aims this one at skeptics who still think she can’t sing; rushing through the jangle-happy verses, she slows down for a coquettish sing-song on the chorus. An album-track delight, but as a single, the rather pedestrian lyrics get an unflattering airing.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Taylor Swift has long had a fondness for Tuesdays, two in the morning, and kisses in the rain, but she’s found a new appeal in pyrotechnics. “I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town” is her kiss-off on “Dear John,” and here, she finds herself struck dumb when her relationship heads in a newer and more physical direction. “I’m captivated by you, baby, like a fireworks show,” she whispers to her beau when he gives her “something that’ll haunt” her when he’s not around. As is Swift’s habit, it’s a well-worn simile to which she’s adding her own twist. The spectacle, in this case, is not the point, and nor is the explosion; her awed response is the concern. “Sparks Fly” is about the antsy lead-up to this moment. Like Dashboard Confessional’s “Hands Down,” it narrates a romantic ideal (complete, yes, with a kiss in the rain), but Swift dispenses with Chris Carrabba’s demure chastity and replaces it with a fevered hunger. “You’re the kind of reckless that should send me running,” she sings, but the bell-clear guitars ring as bright and true as Swift’s blissful, transcendent surety. Brilliant.
[10]

Josh Love: It’s been several months since I last played Speak Now, but hearing this song again made me put on the album so fast I almost gave myself whiplash. The importance of “Sparks Fly” as a milestone in Swift’s burgeoning artistic sexuality has been acknowledged plenty, so I’ll just focus on some of my favorite details, like the love-drunk way she pronounces “full-on rainstorm” and “meet me in the pouring rain,” or the mixture of teenage giddiness and something more coyly self-assured in how she sings, “I’m even better than you imagined I would be.” Not to mention the song’s best line, “give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around,” the delivery of which might be Swift’s most sonically beguiling moment to date.
[9]

Andy Hutchins: Taylor does sexy sweetly; “give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around” is one of the hotter come-ons in radio pop of late, but it’s not nearly too explicit to trip parent radar. But “Sparks Fly” waits far too long to drop the busy production for a quieter moment that really fits the boudoir patter. There will be trips to cheap motels soundtracked by this song, though.
[6]

Michaela Drapes: The wall I hit when thinking about this is, is it okay that Taylor’s telling her huge fanbase of impressionable teenage girls that it’s okay to sleep with a guy you know is bad news, even if he is hot and if the chemistry is massive? Sure, people make mistakes about this kind of thing all the time, but she doesn’t exactly sound rueful about it. Would I forgive this message if “Sparks Fly” wasn’t one of the weakest tracks on Speak Now, if it wasn’t a velvet-draped sledgehammer devoid of subtlety and dynamics? Probably not.
[4]

Zach Lyon: It’s good news that Taylor wrote a sex song, even if implications of sex in Taylor’s world are still massively subtle compared to those in everyone else’s. The song is way too colorless and desolate for me on a pure aural level, though, and it sinks any potential lyrical quality. And it still isn’t enough to get over how tired I am of her apparent inability to write less than 98% of her songs about the same damn thing.
[5]

Anthony Easton: So when exactly did critics go from loving the innocence of Swift to deciding that it was faux, and if it was faux, when did they decide they were tired of the schtick? I am genuinely curious. 
[4]

Ian Mathers: After liking Fearless quite a bit and then mostly ignoring Speak Now (fatigued by the various backlashes and thinkpieces, really, and slightly underwhelmed by some of the singles), it’s nice to hear a single from Swift that reminds me why I liked her in the first place. Sociopolitical issues aside, this is another wonderfully appealing, precision crafted piece of over-the-top pop romanticism, and it’s going to sound wonderful on the radio. I don’t begrudge other people thinking deeper thoughts about her, and many of them are doing important work, but I’m happy just to have the song.
[8]