Taylor Swift's 'Lover' is a dreamy and thrilling adventure

Midway through Taylor Swift’s exciting and excellent Lover, we come upon the perfect "Cornelia Street," a gorgeous ode to both the tentative first moments in a relationship, when "we were a fresh page on the desk / filling in the blanks as we go," as well as the creeping fear that the blissful memories may be tainted forever when the love dissolves: "I’d never walk Cornelia Street again / that’s the kinda heartbreak time could never mend."

All the elements Swift does best are in play here: lyrics that zero in on small, specific details that once she sings about them feel universal; a pointed pen that makes thoughts about hope and longing feel special and intoxicating; a chorus you know you’re going to hum for the next year; and emotional central questions that drive so much of her music because it drives so much of our feelings: What happens now? Is this real? Can I put it all back together again? What if?

"Cornelia Street" is just one of many high points on Swift’s stellar seventh album, which she described as "a love letter to love." The singer seems so at home here in her message and her melodies. She’s playful and sensual, coyly suggesting a man worship at the altar of her hips at one moment and reminding a frenemy that actually, she doesn’t think about them at all anymore in another: "It isn’t love / it isn’t hate / it’s just indifference." You can hear the shrug and the smirk through the earbuds.

Bops? She’s got 'em. Try the thumping beat on "Cruel Summer" (written with St. Vincent and Jack Antonoff) and picture riding shotgun with your hair undone as the scream-y, wild bridge blasts through the speakers, or Swift rocking out with some 2003-esque pop-punk on the wordplay-heavy "Paper Rings." Just attempt not to grin as she kicks things off: "The moon is high like your friends were the night that we first met / I went home and tried to stalk you on the internet" she cracks as the intro gives way to the chant-y "kiss me" pre-chorus that is going to absolutely dominate on tour.

Get a few tracks deep and it becomes very obvious that Taylor is blissed out and loved up with her London Boy, happier than ever.

"Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? I take this magnetic force of a man to be my... lover,” Swift sings on the title track with just a hint of that long-ago country twang. Savor the silence before the key word, like Swift choosing to let fans in on her special secret.

You can't talk about relationships and love without talking about regret, so between the joy notes the concept bubbles up in interesting ways all across the album. The singer movingly explores breaking up as death by a thousand cuts, and looks inward on a pattern throughout her twenties of pushing people away before they can hurt her. "Put you in jail for something you didn't do," she shares at one point. "I never grew up, it's getting so old," she notes at another.

And she saves her biggest emotional wallop for the absolutely devastating "Soon You'll Get Better," featuring the Dixie Chicks, reflecting on her mother's ongoing cancer battle and wrestling with her insistence that things are going to improve soon. "Desperate people find faith so now I pray to Jesus, too," she confesses matter-of-factly.

The 18 tracks of Lover find the singer past a crossroads and onto the rainbow on the other end -- a snake to a butterfly, in her parlance. The public-versus-private tension from reputation is more relaxed here, with the driving force being a celebration of romance and feelings, and sonically cohesive feelings at that. (In addition to Swift, Antonoff's fingerprints are all over.)

Lover is the singer letting go of expectations and settling into loving herself. There aren’t lyrics about turning-30 faves like self-care and face masks, but just like "22" celebrated the on-your-own feeling of being “happy, free, confused, and lonely," here Swift revels in the comfort of being at peace with who you are and letting go, skipping down 16th Avenue, overdramatic and true. She's holding power like a man, and in her feelings like Drake. As millions of her fans look to an older decade alongside her, Lover feels like a light post shining a way forward, packed with hard-won stories (and plenty of romance and winks) for the road.