http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-wGMlSuX_c

This is where I think a song like “Love Story” should be recognized in its time & with the language we usually reserve merely for hindsight. Its form is shamelessly framed by the structures of a well written suspense tale, its little nuances coming at perfect times to accent its meaning & climax with an impeccable sense of what it means to tease a listener (one of the finer moments of the song is the little “Huh, huh” just before the second chorus kicks in; it’s the sound of expectation, excitement, & young desire). And as a more taste-oriented point, I agree with you that the girl has a fantastic set of pipes for what she’s pulling off – that slight pop-country twang is inevitable but hardly noticeable except as an after thought, & her range is meant to pull just the right emotions out of the listener rather than just show-off (something that Mariah Carey, for example, had in her hey-day, but lost quickly with time).

As a last note, I’ve heard the name Lily Allen, but I’m not sure who she is or what she sings?…

You’ve hit on the core of that song — besides having a vocal which has a from the lungs power that many teendivas are lacking, the core of Swift lies in really in the composition. Since I make my daughter look up the writers of her favorite songs, I’m blessed with the knowledge that Taylor Swift actually wrote the song, which is really uncommon these days. I also know that she composed the song in the method I favor myself — by starting out with a fragment of melody and lyrics, and slowly working out what the story surrounding it was — in her case it was the line “This love is difficult, but it’s real” — which is actually the core theme of the song, and what gives it it’s resonance.

Yet that line, which is really the crux of the argument of the song, doesn’t appear until right before the bridge. And actually the progression there is really interesting too — there are ways in which the use of verb tenses remind me a bit of some of Tom Waits stuff:

That you were Romeo, you were throwing pebbles
And my Daddy said stay away from Juliet
And I was crying on the staircase
Begging you please don’t go

The tenses there make that a scene more than a narrative. Like most art, you can tell it’s good, because if you rewrite it it loses something:

That you were Romeo; you threw pebbles
And my Daddy said stay away from Juliet
So I cried on the staircase
And begged you not to go

It’s a minor thing, it’s still a strong segment without the tense shift, but there’s so many little things like that in this song. I actually learned to play the song on request of my daughter, it’s a relatively common chord progression, but the interaction of the melody with the chords really creates this sense of inexorable build.

I’ll tell you what — give me a CD of Taylor Swift and one of Devendra Banhart and a long car ride, it’s likely I’d go with the Taylor Swift.

There I said that, on record.

I also think the Lily Allen stuff is quite good, although she’s not writing it per se.