Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm in the studio with Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield.

And we are finally going to talk about Taylor Swift and her new album

Lover. This is a case where we were actually getting requests and questions about

why we had not done it and then when finally my cover story came out this week, literally people were like, oh, that's why you waited and yes, that's why we waited.

And what a cover story it is, Brian. That is like a classic Rolling Stone interview. I love how it's the Rolling Stone interview.

Just unadorned Q&A, it's beautiful.

Like I said, it's like the ones we used to do with Pete Townsend

every year and a half, basically.

Well, thank you very much.

And it follows your cover story with Harry Stiles, which is also a very old school

Rolling Stone cover story, so we're just keeping it old school is what we do.

But I have two of the most knowledgeable Taylor Swift experts on earth with me today and what I thought we do is once again go song by song through Lover.

But before we start that, you were talking about your rankings of lover within the canon.

I'm not a critic I don't really think in terms of rankings there are times when I do think that this is her best album

But it's not an opinion I've given a lot of thought to I've just

been listening to a lot and I think it's really fantastic and we were talking

about the fact that people are a little confused about how to respond to it on a

critical level because their responses to reputation

were so muddled. As Rob said, there did seem to be people who had written the

review before it came out and then like quickly revised it once they

realized it was really excellent.

So people are still reassessing and understanding reputation, which was a fantastic album.

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