In the past, Taylor Swift has not owned her master recordings to her previous albums, but recently, on Aug. 23, 2019, Taylor Swift released her first album with her owned masters, “Lover.” The album includes deep messages such as feminism, self-expression and hate in her pop songs, leaving her signature acoustic style for tracks about sickness and breakups. 

Starting off, there was controversy when she released her first song of the album, “ME!” earlier in the year due to the music video’s “childish” colorful effects and lyrics such as, “Hey kids, spelling is fun!” When Swift released the rest of the album, she removed the previous line from the song, pleasing me and many other fans. Despite the controversy, the album turned out well, mixing Swift’s old style of love ballads and fun romances with her new adult lifestyle. It gives you a glimpse of Swift’s life in the present. For example, “London Boy” is about her current boyfriend and her life in the past while “Cornelia Street” is about her old rental in the West Village of New York City. 

This new album is more socially involved than her previous albums; both “You Need to Calm Down,” an LGBTQ+ alliance song, and “The Man,” which implies a message of feminism through the catchy song lyrics, are examples of this. They include public statements that remain true to Swift’s experiences of being torn down by hate, applying it to the LGBTQ+ community as well, giving an overall message of self-expression and acceptance, and her experience of having to do extra work to catch up in life because she is a woman.

As for the rest of the album, another angle is shown in “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince,” which is a dark, grown-up perspective of her teenage years. Her collaboration with Dixie Chicks, “Soon You’ll Get Better,” was highly anticipated, but the song is sad and hard to listen to because it talks about Swift’s mom’s cancer treatments. The song “False God” is a new sound for Swift, with a feel of a chill vibe given off by both the mellow beat and the subtle saxophone in the background of the song. Overall, my favorite songs to listen to, which I feel are the most energetic of the album are “Paper Rings” and “I Forgot That You Existed”. With Swift’s “Lover” album, she ties together her personal life updates and the social issues she is fighting for to make a pop album with plenty of variation of styles in her songs.