"New Year's Day" is a perfect album closer on Swift's reputation, released last November. As if plunked on an attic piano whose dust cover has just been snapped off one sun-dappled January morning, it's a gentle, lower-case ballad that Swift and her listeners have earned after the thrilling, electronic cacophony of the LP's previous 14 tracks. It also hearkens back to the so-called "old Taylor" construct, the country-pop ingenue who never actually "died," the girl with just a guitar or piano, singing with aching bittersweetness and specificity about time spent with a boy, a man, a lover. Give it some time, a viral moment or a featured spot on a CW show, and "New Year's Day" should and could, belatedly, become one of her most enduring songs ever – the kind we and our offspring drag out every holiday season alongside the likes of Mariah Carey, Wham!, and Bing Crosby. With the reputation era almost in the rearview ( a Netflix concert special which drops, yes, on New Year's Eve, is presumably the final album product), the campaign to enter "New Year's Day" into the forever holiday canon starts now.