The Queen of the Jukebox’s crown slips ever so slightly…

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Al Shipley: I always felt like Swift’s attempts at folksy girl next door narratives felt xeroxed from cheesy rom coms, so it’s nice of her to spell it out by cribbing a title from a Rob Reiner flick (and not even one of the good ones — minor Reiner!). And don’t even get me started on those spoken word announcements.
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Pete Baran: There is something off here, it should work well, another Taylor Swift relationship fumbling country rocker. She can shit this stuff out in her sleep (she shouldn’t, but I reckon she can). And yet I am starting to worry if she is protesting too much; her made-up tragedies lose their lustre particularly over the relentlessly upbeat backing. But then I realise the real problem. Never ever name your songs over failed Rob Reiner films, particularly ones where Bruce Willis tries to do a bit of acting.
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Isabel Cole: Vocals that are sweet without being simpering race through a melody that (with the exception of a dull middle eight) twists and settles in all the right places, while a few key inflections — the sardonic squeak on “lucky,” the plaintive fade on “should’ve held me,” the pleading catch on “pretending” — add a layer of further interest to a solid piece of high-energy pop. If I liked all Taylor Swift songs this much, I’d be a Taylor Swift fan.
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Edward Okulicz: It wasn’t what I was expecting, but Taylor Swift has managed to put out the best Veronicas single ever. The chorus is as good an example of power pop as you’re likely to hear on the radio. As good as that is, maybe that’s all it is – as a story it lacks the wallop of “You Belong To Me” or “Back To December” – but her impish Shania-esque asides see her through. Oh and it’s a quality tune as well; catchy, propulsive and delivered with the charm that’s endeared her to country, pop, Disney – any audience you can name, really. Still, the girl’s lucky she’s not at college and being graded on a curve.
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Alfred Soto: The only song on Speak Now with this inexorable a chorus is “Mean,” and this song rivals it for pathos. The way in which it apes a late nineties Mutt Lange-helmed production like The Corrs’ “Breathless” makes sense: its polyurethane coating protects the heart and brain. I knocked it down a notch because the verses are just okay.
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Chuck Eddy: When Speak Now came out, I unquestionably would have taken “Mean” over this, no contest. But now that they’ve both been competing for airplay minutes over the past couple months, I’m not so certain. “Mean” clearly has a way more interesting lyric — in fact, the song here is all but non-existent; it communicates barely anything. But where “Mean”‘s music is as pat country-so-what as anything on the album (at first I just thought of it as Taylor’s “Miranda Lambert song”), “The Story Of Us” has that chorus, with its impossibly catchy/pretty melodic twists that make me wonder where or how Taylor could possibly have come up with them, the way Greil Marcus used to wonder about “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys. And in fact, just like I thought from the beginning, “The Story Of Us” still sounds to me like nothing but a chorus — the verses just bide time between. So I was probably right that “Mean” is the greater track. But I might actually change stations on this less.
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Michaela Drapes: I love how Taylor Swift songs — the production, the too-clever lyrics, her vocal stylings — bludgeon the listener. But, you know, it’s an awesome bludgeoning; I almost always unequivocally submit to it. That being said, the breakneck speed at which this song progresses gets superfluous and exhausting around time the last chorus begins at the 3:30 mark, and I find myself wishing, for all the ecstatic release of the coda, that she’d just wrap it up already.
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B Michael Payne: The song is the storytelling equivalent of an episode of How I Met Your Mother, but that may be more a condemnation of CBS’s pablum than this song. Actually, the song’s focus on the way tiny miscommunications can erupt into cacophonous misfortune is more reminiscent of Seinfeld than any other TV show. And of course, that may say more about what it means to be an adult (popularly conceived) than about Swift’s music, itself. The two are related, though. What I find pernicious about Swift’s music (exemplified by “Story of Us,” of course) is how it’s a narcissistic tidal wave of self-regard. Romeo and Juliet has a body count: It’s a tragedy. Lacking the courage to flirt with your crush is not a tragedy. I simply disdain everything about this song. Its music has the confidence of catchiness without any of its other positive qualities. Its lyrics should bear the label “Now with 50% more cliche!” Even the video, a visual mashup of Gossip Girl and Harry Potter, plays down to the lowest common without any of its attendant (and still repulsive) populist tendencies. It’s just a cheap ploy to get the world to root along with her own triumphalist march over the hearts and minds of those young or foolish enough to indulge her.
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Zach Lyon: This is the point where I admit to officially being tired with Taylor’s lack of lyrical breadth. This reads like a thesis statement for a good 90% of the songs she’s already written, and it certainly doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been for three albums. While I love Speak Now‘s directness and after-the-fact confrontational spark, I’m going to have serious problems with the next album if it doesn’t start to branch out more (which means I’m going to have problems with the next album). But this doesn’t make “The Story of Us” a bad track; it sounds exactly like a wonderful track stuck in a world with very little freedom. The lack of country sound isn’t a problem when it’s replaced with a very mid-80s mix of new wave and… J. Geils? and just a shit-ton of energy. Taylor is admirable in that she devotes herself to the track completely, performing it without a trace of “performance,” which is really the highlight of any good Swift track. But still: COME ON.
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Jonathan Bradley: Even though Swift has a playbook more enviable than most any singer-songwriter working today, she calls a few audibles on “The Story of Us” — and, no, I don’t mean the inter-verse ad libs, which are forced here to work as connective tissue. Extended metaphor and intertextuality are classic Taylor, but she’s used similar framing devices more naturally on tunes like “Love Story” or “Our Song.” Here, the storybook conceit seems forced. It’s enough to almost distract from the telling observations Swift includes in her songs as a matter of course. She is a visual writer, and “See me nervously pulling at my clothes and trying to look busy” exemplifies her ability to escape her own head and capture the emotional tenor of a scene as if she were filming it rather than experiencing it. “I’m standing alone in a crowded room” is beginner level paradox, but “I’m dying to know is it killing you like it’s killing me?” is more devastating than the pop-rock chug accompanying it is willing to allow. As compact, concise and charming as this tune is, Swift’s best songs make room for her ideas to occupy center stage. Here, they exist as asides.
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Alex Ostroff: I’m genuinely shocked that it took this long for ‘The Story of Us’ to get released as a single, because when I first gave Speak Now a spin, it was the one song that immediately jumped out as the hit. More pop than even ‘You Belong With Me’, the only touches of country remaining are the quiet occasional strums of mandolin. It’s nothing we haven’t seen from Taylor before: structured narrative, intratextual album references (sparks fly!), the final chorus meaningful rephrasing, the Shakira-esque awkward similes (held your pride like you should have held me), the bridge as song highlight. But then suddenly ‘The Story of Us’ is all guitar riffs and disco drumbeat, and Taylor is letting loose with a infectious chorus, belting cliche and elevating it to pop glory, and nothing feels more emotionally true than “We’re standing alone in a crowded room and you’re not speaking.” As a bibliophile, I approve of the titular metaphor; it bobs and weaves and gets muddled as college students make out in the stacks, ex-lovers land on different pages, and Taylor tosses her hair in the middle of libraries, but when she insistently exclaims “Next chapter!” I can’t help but smile. (Plus, Taylor has never looked better than she does in this video, the moment where she’s dancing and fixing her hair is hilarious, and the dude drumming along to the song in the middle of study hall is completely adorable.)
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