The original 1989 album was an album of new beginnings, of change. The original 1989 album was about taking control of one’s own narrative, and reinventing oneself. Taking the circumstances in which Taylor Swift re-recorded the albums, I believe 1989 (Taylor’s Version) even more so about those topics. My soundtrack for this year would include these songs: Welcome to New York All You Had To Do Was Stay This Love New Romantics New Romantics would be the opening song. To me, New Romantics is about finding joy in the unexpected, finding joy in the bad. And I’ve had to do that a lot this year. It was either let everything that’s happened this year that I had no control over consume me, or adapt. I chose to take everything as a lesson. I chose to not take it personally. Sometimes life just sucks and you can’t control anything except how you react to situations. As a song, I believe New Romantics has that very theme, and since it’s a theme I’ve let color my reactions to many events in my life this year, it should be the opening song. All You Had To Do Was Stay is a song about letting go of things and not turning back. As I got closer to leaving for college, I had to learn to let go of a lot of things. It’s hard. It takes guts. I had to hold my ground. I did it, though. Whether those things were toxic people who refused to get better or objects I would never use in the dorms, I had to let go of a lot of things. This Love is the next song. I give it to my family, honestly. I’ve thought so much about family this year as I got ready to leave for college, and especially as I got to college. I realized I love my family so much. I love them more than I could’ve ever realized before I left. My life is no longer intrinsically tied to them, but I will keep coming back again and again because I love them. Yes family dynamics can be messy sometimes but for me, that mess is part of the experience. It’s part of why I love them so much, because without the chaos, I don’t think I’d be able to appreciate the steady bond between us as much as I do. Welcome to New York would be the ending song for the soundtrack. Honestly, college has been something I’ve always looked forward to. I’ve dreamed of it in ways so romanticized that I’ve been terrified it would never live up to my expectations. Now that I’m here though, it’s somehow more than I could’ve ever imagined it could be. And I know that’s not everyone’s experience, but I think that’s what makes Welcome to New York so perfect for this. Maybe I’m still romanticizing college, and it’s really not as good as I think it is or maybe I’ve gotten incredibly lucky in my experiences, but that’s what’s been said about this song too. New York is rarely as great as Taylor Swift makes it out to be in the song, but it’s her dreams coming true, and maybe she’s allowed to be excited about it. It’s also such a happy, hopeful song, one embracing change, and that’s my overall goal for me currently and in the future. I hope I always look for the good in things. I hope I’m always so excited about new experiences, and I hope that I can continue to find a way to embrace change.

“They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow Yeah they all say that it gets better, it gets better but what if I don’t?” I grew up in a small town. Well, for a few years, it was, and then it started expanding, rapidly. It is now one of the most rapidly growing cities in Arizona. My city is constantly under construction, schools are overflowing, our stores are always out of stock. We’re not equipped to handle the growth we got and are continuing to get. My teenage years were packed with the perceivable struggle of a town that didn’t get better, didn’t grow as stuff grew around it. In quite the literal sense, these lyrics embody my struggles in high school, attempting to get to school when all the roads were closed due to construction, yes. But it’s so much more. Something people forget to take into consideration is the attitudes of small town people when their city starts to expanding. Small town people don’t like change. They don’t like growth. My entire life, I’ve been surrounded by small town people who were pessimistic about change. Who liked their quiet lives and liked the status quo. That’s perfectly okay for them, but I very quickly learned, around the time of my teenage years, that it wasn’t okay for me. I knew I couldn’t stay where I was. I couldn’t stay stagnant. I needed to grow. And the growth that was available for me if I didn’t actively reach for more wasn’t enough. With my teenage years came the desire to do more. But I knew I had to start small. I couldn’t grow too fast for the rest of me to catch up. Because just like with my small town, it would cause problems that would compound on each other. I took a very unconventional approach of quite literally choosing who I would become. I knew what personality traits I wanted to embody. I knew which traits I needed to have to grow like I wanted to, so I took that and I forced myself into situations just out of my comfort zone that would push me in the right direction. But still, I feared I wouldn’t change as much as I needed to. I feared the attitudes of my small town would catch up to me. I’d learned to embrace change but how long will that last? For a while, I feared that I’d changed too much. I’d feared I’d lost sight of who I truly was. Maybe the lyrics at this point aren’t about not being able to grow enough, but what if they were about growing in the wrong way? I needed to take a step back, so I did. I took a summer to search for my wants, my goals, my fears, my weaknesses, my strengths, everything. Who I wanted to be, away from outside forces. Did it work? I don’t know. What is adolescence but a flurry of confusion and self-reflection only to repeat the cycle until you finally, maybe, settle on something. Until you latch onto something. So I did. “They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow Yeah they all say that it gets better, it gets better but what if I don’t?” The fear that has plagued me my entire adolescence has become less intimidating when I got people to share my hopes, fears, and goals with. We help each other get better, and we hold each other accountable when we don’t.

@just.someone.bros

It was a November afternoon. I had gotten home from one of the last rehearsals for a whirlwind of a school play. We were attempting to condense our normal 2.5 months of rehearsals into a month. A month with many breaks from school scattered throughout. In total, we had 11 rehearsals. Tensions were high all around. People were yelling at eachother. It was a mess. I got home exhausted. I had so much homework to do. I was in AP US History and AP Literature. We only had one semester for each class, so both classes had a lot of homework. Notes in 15 pages of the textbook for APUSH each day, and constant essays for AP Lit. I had also gotten tickets to the Eras Tour during the presale earlier that month, so I was streaming taylor swift like crazy. Who knew what she's gonna play on the tour? I had to learn every single word to her entire discography. I played 1989 on shuffle. I wanted to do my homework and study my lines while listening, so no youtube, and I refuse to pay for spotify premium. The first song that played was style. I love that song. It's a beautiful song. The second song though. The second song was I Know Places. It shouldn't have worked. This song, my all conventional means, shouldn't be an amazing song. It's not relatable to the average listener. It's very much famous people problems. Her relationship is being watched and strutinized and attacked by the media. That's not something people can relate to. What people can relate to, though, is wanting to hide from chaos. Instead of taking her experiences to write a more generic narrative like she had done in a few other songs in this album, she had written the raw experience, used a bunch of metaphors because she's Taylor Allison Swift, and left it to her fans to relate to it however they want to. And the production. The production is so dramatic. It adds so much to the song. It's chaos in the verses where the action is happening. It's drama in the chorus where she's planning to run and hide. The yelled "AND WE RUN" right before the bridge is absolute perfection too. It's like, hey, they need to run right now. The bridge is like a scene in a movie where it cuts between the protagonists running in slow motion, and the enemies gearing up to try to find them. Its a drum just continuing the simple beat in the bridge. Then it's peaceful during the first part of the last chorus. Taylor and her lover are finally hiding. But then, it becomes chaotic again. They were found. But it's less chaotic than before because they find refuge in eachother. It's like, it's dark outside, they're in the middle of the woods, and they're surrounded by the press and helicopters, and searchlights, but theyre holding eachother so they're their own haven. The only issue I have with this song is it not having a music video. So, I sat there in the midst of the chaos from my everyday life, and that song became my reprieve. Yes, we will always try to find peace but maybe we can't. The chaos around will always creep back in, but if you can find someone or something to hold onto, it'll be alright. That is why I Know Places will forever be my favorite song on 1989. Although it's so incredibly specific, the emotions behind it are so incredibly relatable.

Future me is someone who broke the barriers, who defied all odds and came out victorious, someone who doesn't stop just because it will be difficult or because it's not been done before, because future me is a trendsetter, an icon, a role model for those taking on a difficult, unrealistic path, and is someone who helps others realize that they need to live for themselves, not for other people, because other people had their chance to make a difference and they didn't take it, so we must instead.