Do yourself a favor and put on this version of Style off of the 1989 album all day, every day. I had the privilege of seeing her perform this live during the reputation stadium tour and I was practically frothing at the mouth, especially at the seamless transition to Love Story halfway through. The drummer went so hard on this and I love every moment of it. I also love that she brings her band onstage for a throwback classic - both of the guitarists on center stage have toured with her for years and played this on the Fearless tour.
Swift fans love to speculate on who her songs are about but this one is so literal we didn’t even need to discuss it when it dropped - her ex, the illustrious Harry Styles, is lucky enough to have this song written about him. It’s sexy and mysterious, showing once again her ability to put a melody to a person flawlessly.
Style is an A+ song to perform live, the entire crowd gets so into it which is no exception here. It’s no surprise why Style was such a hit from its singable chorus to its drawn out storytelling verses. On top of that, you really can strut to this one like you’re on a model catwalk (and Swift did during the 2014 Victoria’s Secret fashion show with her ex-bestie and probably ex-girlfriend Karlee Kloss) which makes it that much more of a fun song to dance to in your apartment which I may or may not do regularly.
It’s a very simple song musically - both the chorus and the verses stick to really similar notes and only slightly change structure to indicate the differences. I like to think this is intentional, to show that the song structure doesn’t go out of style. It’s classic and though it stays similar throughout, you don’t tire of it while listening. She switches up the end of verse two just enough to keep you guessing with “He said what you heard is true but I can’t stop thinking about you and I. I said I’ve been there too a few times"
One beauty of Style as a song is she can really play with it when she performs live. The backing vocals creep up on you during the bridge to swell through the end of the song, and she can option that up or down to her hearts content because it’s simple enough to manipulate easily.
I love the bridge because she ties it back into the beginning of the song effortlessly - it’s really just a repetition of “take me home” through different intervals, but it goes hand in hand with the late-night drive vision she introduces in verse one. She gets in the car in the beginning and we take a journey with them, and at the end she wants him to take her home but presumably, we know they’ll take another drive again because they never go out of style. Even the repetitive guitar lick in this song makes you feel like you’re in a moving vehicle with them. It’s predictable but classic and really puts you in the mood of the moment she is trying to help us visualize.
By far this track gets the biggest gold star on the 1989 album for dance-ability (yes, I know that Shake It Off is on this album. I said what I said.) It’s one of those songs I want to sing with the windows rolled down speeding down a freeway. You just want to shout that chorus and when the bridge hits I always feel compelled to built it obnoxiously loudly. It’s one of those songs that just makes you want to move and its place in the mid-section of the track-list serves the rest of the album well. Coming off of Blank Space, it begins to subdue the album so that rushing into Out of the Woods doesn’t feel totally out of place. Both Style and Out of the Woods evoke a rushed feeling, but in different ways, and the pairing next to each other runs seamlessly from one to the other.
My hope for the re-record of this track, and it’s probably a hope without a lot of promise, is that they take a note from the reputation tour live version and up the drums. I think there’s a small chance looking at how they re-produced Red that they could go this direction and make it a little less synth-y but I won’t be mad at them if they stick to a strict originalist re-record. One can dream!
One last pun - this song will never go out of style!