Boys, boys! Won’t you leave Taylor Swift alone? Can’t you see the poor girl already has too many teardrops on her guitar? Too late—all over her fantastic second album, the country phenom gets bedeviled by the boyfolk, making the thrills and spills of a two-week teen romance sound as torchy as one of Patsy Cline’s marriages. She is put together to fall apart, the kind of gal who applies her mascara with great care because she plans to cry it all off in the parking lot. In “Fearless,” she wails about getting caught in the rain “in my best dress”—like she’d wear anything else to go ride around in a storm. This girl likes to make a scene.

Since she’s only 18 and has been a hard-working full-time country megastar for the past two years, it’s a marvel she has so much romantic roadkill under her wheels. But Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as hard as gems like “Tim McGraw” and “Our Song” from her smash debut, and, once again, she wrote or cowrote them all. The music drives hard enough to keep up with her tingling pheromones—when she slows down for the drippy piano ballad “You’re Not Sorry,” she reminds you what a smart job she normally does of keeping the tempo jumping.

As for her boys—oh, the carnage. She makes mincemeat out of these hapless critters. She wipes her boots with boys who treat her kind and, uch, “talk business with my father” but don’t get her hot (“That’s the Way I Loved You”), and with boys who get her hot but don’t treat her kind (“White Horse”). She even meets a boy who falls in love with a different girl (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers”), but rest assured, that doesn’t happen often. “15” takes a big-sisterly tone to advise younger girls not to get hung up on marrying their freshman-year boyfriends, but that’s as much adult restraint as Swift allows. In “Hey Stephen,” she coos, “All those other girls, well they’re beautiful/But would they write a song for you?” Not as good as these songs, that’s for sure.

DOWNLOAD “Love Story,” “Hey Stephen,” “You Belong With Me”