When Taylor Swift released her fifth album, 1989, in 2014, she made a point to announce that it was her first all-pop project. But the writing was on the wall for her genre transition long before then.
In a new interview about her re-recorded 2008 project Fearless (Taylor’s Version) with Audacy (formerly Radio.com), Swift says the newly released “From the Vault” song “Mr. Perfectly Fine” made it crystal-clear that she had more than country music on her mind.
“‘Mr. Perfectly Fine’ is a song that I wrote alone,” she says of the track, which she recently co-produced with Jack Antonoff — a now-frequent collaborator whom she first worked with on 1989 — but was written back in her Fearless days. “It was definitely an early indicator of me creeping toward a pop sensibility. I’ve always listened to every type of music, and even though Fearless is a country album, there were always these pop melodies creeping in.”
Of course, Swift’s crossover to the mainstream really kicked into gear with the original 2008 release of Fearless, which spawned two of her biggest Pop Airplay hits to date — chart-topper “Love Story” and No. 2 hit “You Belong With Me” — and garnered her first album of the year win at the Grammys.
In addition to the pop vibes of “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” the song is also a pretty good indicator of Swift’s teen sensibility at the time she wrote it. “I think the lyrics are just wonderfully scathing and full of the teen angst that you would hope to hear on an album that I wrote when I was 17 or 18 or on that cusp,” she says.
“Mr. Perfectly Fine” was one of the most-talked-about previously unreleased Fearless songs thanks to fan theories that it’s aimed at Swift’s ex Joe Jonas.
Listen to the full Audacy interview, in which Swift breaks down more songs on Fearless (Taylor’s Version), below.
