Over 13 million in album sales, multiple Grammy awards, media saturation unheard of since Britney Spears’ heyday, and Taylor Swift still wants us to see her as the proverbial girl up the block. “We got bills to pay / we got nothing figured out,” Ms. Swift laments on first single “Mine,” and if there’s a few of us in the audience rolling their eyes, who am I to blame them? That’s always been the first step in accepting Swift as a legitimate artist and not a prefabricated Top 40 icon, that realization that, for all this girl’s justified success and eye-popping numbers, it’s just this down-to-earth, eerily relatable quality that makes Taylor Swift, well, Taylor Swift. Lady Gaga may have stolen the pop crown by doing everything in her power to mask herself under a veneer of shock fashion and shock statements, but Speak Now has Swift doing just what she does best: being herself, and Swift has come far enough as her own artist to make Speak Now the best pop record of the year.