Tune in at Yahoo Live to watch Taylor Swift’s 1989 Secret Session with iHeartRadio on Monday at 7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 p.m. PT!

Remember the girl with the teardrops on her guitar? On Taylor Swift's hotly anticipated fifth effort, 1989, there are few tears. And even fewer guitars.

She's alternating between sounding ebullient and battle-hardened — a nice combination if you can get it. Anyone who thought Swift played the victim in some of her breakup songs on previous albums will have a hard time finding any evidence of that in this largely un-devastated collection. Even some of the tracks that recall distant or recent heartaches have her sounding almost blithe, with lyrics that show her becoming much more sensible or even hard-boiled about love. Executive producer Max Martin is on board to ensure that even tracks that read like tender confessionals in the lyric booklet into huge, anthemic singalongs that make massive use of pre-EDM electronics.

If you're looking for the album's prevailing attitude in a nutshell, you might look to one of the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition, "New Romantics." It seems that Swift's new and improved take on romanticism involves giving up obsessing over why seemingly serious commitments go sour, and instead acting her frolicsome, mid-twentysomething age. "We are too busy dancing to get knocked off our feet," she sings in that track, adding: "The best people in life are free."

In another song, "I Wish You Would," she reconsiders a flighty ex and sounds like she might be open to a BFFs-with-benefits relationship. Her more practical-minded take on love on 1989 is a long way from the fairytale romance of "Love Story"… even if she hasn't completely graduated from "Romeo, take me some place we can be alone" to "Romeo, take a hike."

There's really only one moment that rings false on 1989, and it's the lyric in "Shake It Off" that has the singer archly echoing her antagonists: "Got nothing in my brain — that's what people say-ay-ay." Two or three years ago, that might have been an accurate assessment of a prevailing sentiment about Swift in playa-hater-dom. But in the year 2014, aren't even her detractors conceding that she's the smartest pop superstar we've seen in our lifetimes? We're talking the kind of savviness that has her conjuring up her own Fortune 500-worthy marketing plans… but also the kind of smart that knows sometimes that the savviest thing you can do is just put yourself nakedly in front of people and open up a vein. To put it in 1989 terms (the year, not the album), she kind of makes Madonna look like Paula Abdul.

If you can handle a few more spoilers, here's a track-by-track guide to 1989:

"Welcome to New York" — Or: Dorothy, I don't think we're in Nashville anymore. Talk about setting your suitcase down in new territory: This collaboration with Ryan Tedder sports the album's most pleasingly bombastic production. As an ode to Manhattan, it wields such a sonic sledgehammer that you could call it her "Rhapsody in Black and Blue." While country music is filled with stars busily establishing their small-town bona fides, Swift has joined the small but considerable cadre of genre figures who've uprooted themselves to take Manhattan — Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, and Chely Wright among them. Speaking of Chely: "Boys and boys, girls and girls," Swift sings, extolling gay-friendliness as just one of many selling points for the big city… a small gesture that will have huge meaning for hundreds of thousands of fans. Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine many young people of any persuasion making their first visit to New York any time in the next 10 years without this bouncing through their heads as they come out of the Holland Tunnel.