Taylor Swift, page 4
Never Go Out Of Style
While the pop thrills of ‘Shake It Off’ announced Taylor’s comeback to the world, 1989 mostly showed a new maturity to Taylor’s writing, as she told NPR in 2014. ‘In the past, I’ve written mostly about heartbreak or pain that was caused by someone else and felt by me. On this album, I’m writing about more complex relationships, where the blame is kind of split 50-50.’ Songs like ‘Wildest Dreams’, ‘Bad Blood’, ‘Blank Space’ and ‘Style’ offer dissections of love and lust that are more considered and reflective than before, offering fans a more adult take on relationships.
Role Model
‘I live in a world where I know for a fact that my grandkids will get to Google what I wore today.’
Taylor Swift
Taylor has always been aware of being a role model to her young fans and she feels a strong sense of responsibility when it comes to the influence she has on them, saying in 2012, ‘I could get drunk and run around Nashville naked. But I won’t because I want to set a good example for my fans. I think they deserve to have a role model.’
2017 saw one of the strongest examples of Taylor setting an example to her fans when she won a sexual assault case against David Mueller, a former Colorado radio DJ. Back in 2013, Taylor had posed with Mueller for a photo after an interview. While it was taken, Swift says, Mueller groped her. Swift privately reported the incident to the station at which Mueller worked, and he was fired. Two years later Mueller then sued Swift for defamation and loss of earnings; she countersued for a symbolic $1 – and, when the case went to trial in August 2017, she won.
Speaking to Time after the trial in 2017, Taylor reflected, ‘I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances and high stakes, imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance… You might be made to feel like you’re overreacting, because society has made this stuff seem so casual. My advice is that you not blame yourself and do not accept the blame others will try to place on you.’
Taylor has continued to use her platform to speak out on social issues, from urging fans to check that they were registered to vote ahead of elections to supporting LGBT organizations to encouraging support for the Equality Act to being publicly critical of white supremacy and racism in the US. She may have avoided political matters early in her career, but increasingly, Taylor has stepped up and inspired many to feel that they can make a difference.
Mad Love
Despite her mega-stardom, Taylor still found time to connect with her hardcore fans, giving them the opportunity to hear 1989 first. ‘I did this thing called the 1989 Secret Sessions way before the album came out. I had spent months picking fans on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter – people who had been so supportive and had tried and tried to meet me, had been to five shows or however many events but had never met me before. And so I picked these people. And in every single one of my houses in the US and my hotel room in London, I would invite 89 people over to my living room, play them the entire album, tell them the stories behind it. And I’d say, you know, you can share your experience, but please keep the secrets about this album a secret. Let’s not talk about lyrics before the album comes out. Let’s not talk about song titles. And if you see anybody leaking music, please let us know.’
Reputation
‘I did a little stuff with Taylor, who’s probably the fastest songwriter I ever met in my life … she’s like bam bam bam. She’s [a] bit of a prodigy, [a] bit of a songwriting prodigy.’
Ryan Tedder of One Republic
On 10 November 2017 Taylor unleashed Reputation, her sixth studio album. The biggest departure from her original sound in her entire catalogue, the album saw Taylor embracing electronic music like never before, using elements of EDM, hip-hop, dubstep and trap music to create a darker and heavier set of songs than ever before, with synths and drum machines to the fore.
Taylor addressed the intense media scrutiny that followed 1989’s success in Reputation’s lyrics and opted not to promote the album with any interviews. However, talking abut Reputation to ET Canada two years later she revealed that much of the album saw her playing an alter-ego, explaining, ‘It was just so fun to play with on tour – the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.’
She later suggested to Entertainment Weekly that the comparatively dark sound of the album meant that people had the wrong idea about it. ‘Reputation was interesting because I’d never before had an album that wasn’t fully understood until it was seen live. When it first came out everyone thought it was just going to be angry; upon listening to the whole thing, they realized it’s actually about love and friendship, and finding out what your priorities are.’
…Ready For It?
Despite the shift in direction, Reputation was another enormous success for Taylor. Lead single, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ – a fierce, bass-heavy, snarl of a song – hit No. 1 on the US Billboard chart and UK singles chart and the video has over 1 billion YouTube views to date. The album became Taylor’s fourth consecutive album to debut at the top spot on the US chart with first week sales of over 1.2 million and was the second biggest-selling album in the world that year, shifting over 4.5 million copies.
The following year’s tour was Taylor’s most successful to date. Grossing $345.7 in revenue, it became the third highest-grossing concert tour by a female artist of all time and the highest-grossing tour ever in the United States and North America. Praise for the shows was unanimous, with Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield calling Reputation Taylor’s ‘most astounding tour yet’ and The Spinoff’s review suggesting, ‘There may not be an artist in this lifetime who quite manages to connect to thousands of people on a rainy night as well as Taylor Swift can – and that’s the reputation she will be remembered for.’
New Love
The Reputation tour was a success in another way – it provided inspiration for Taylor’s next move. Having fought against the media perception of her when writing that album, touring it, she realized that her fans felt altogether differently about her, as she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019: ‘I would look out into the audience and I’d see these amazing, thoughtful, caring, wonderful, empathetic people… When I go and I meet fans, I see that they actually see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. That – as contrived as it may sound – changed [me] completely, assigning humanity to my life.’ Once the tour was finished, she harnessed that energy and her next album, 2019’s Lover, came together in just under three months.
During the same interview, she elaborated on the differences between Reputation and Lover: ‘This time around, I feel more comfortable being brave enough to be vulnerable, because my fans are brave enough to be vulnerable with me. Once people delve into the album, it’ll become pretty clear that that’s more of the fingerprint of this – that it’s much more of a singer-songwriter, personal journey than the last one.’
‘Growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn’t mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I’ve just added more things to my list.’
Taylor Swift
Easter Eggs
With her fans waiting eagerly for news of her next move, Taylor began to hint at the direction in which her sound was travelling. On 14 March 2019 she posted on her Instagram about the Southern California butterfly migration and later that evening attended the iHeart Radio Awards wearing a pink and pale blue sequinned outfit with pink butterfly heels, which she also drew attention to on her Instagram. Fans knew Taylor well enough to realize that she was dropping some major clues – the aesthetic was a far cry from the snake motifs that were used around Reputation.
Sure enough, the following month Taylor released ‘ME!’, the first single of the Lover era – a sugar-rush of a pop hit that celebrated self-worth and was accompanied by a wildly colourful, unapologetically fun video that couldn’t have been more different from the vampish doom of the ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ promo. Talking to Rolling Stone around the album’s release, Taylor described the album’s aesthetic as she saw it: ‘Completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.’
‘No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.’
Taylor Swift
Lover
‘When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears. If you really take it in at the end of a song and you hear that many people screaming, it will make you cry.’
Taylor Swift
Lover certainly felt like a reset for Taylor, as she continued, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also, moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments – older in terms of when I used to use them.’
The songs on Lover are less preoccupied with the way Taylor thinks the world might see her and more of a celebration of the things that she loves – her family, her boyfriend, the feeling of being in love. It’s not quite the return to her country roots that she may have suggested – Lover flits between genres audaciously: the 80s electro-pop of ‘I Think He Knows’; the effervescent punk-pop of ‘Paper Rings’; the elegant synth epic, ‘The Archer’; the swooning pop majesty of ‘Cruel Summer’.
The album’s special guests summed up Taylor’s freewheeling approach to music, with guest vocals from The Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks) on Taylor’s heartbreaking song about her mother’s ongoing cancer battle, ‘Soon You’ll get Better’, and from Brandon Urie of emo-pop band Panic! At The Disco on that lead single, ‘ME!’.
Afterglow
Lover was Taylor’s first album on Republic, her new record label after she fulfilled her Big Machine contract. Yet the change didn’t disrupt her hot streak – Taylor was named the best-selling artist of 2019 and the album became her sixth US No. 1. All 18 tracks from Lover charted simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 and Lover outsold all of the other 199 albums in the Billboard 200 chart in its first week. That chart dominance in the US was mirrored worldwide as it hit No. 1 in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Mexico, Spain and the UK, among others.
The sales translated to accolades – Lover won Favourite Pop/Rock Album at the 2019 American Music Awards, where Taylor was also crowned Artist Of The Decade, and she won four MTV Video Music Awards the same year. It was ranked fourth in Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums Of 2019 list and No. 3 on Billboard’s The 50 Best Albums Of 2019 feature.
On 17 September 2019 Taylor announced Lover Fest, a tour set to storm the stages of Europe, South America and the US in the summer of 2020. The dates included the prestigious headline slot at the UK’s Glastonbury Festival, but the COVID-19 pandemic meant that all of the shows were cancelled. Suddenly, the usual ‘album followed by tour’ routine was disrupted, leading to a set of circumstances that would see Taylor embark upon one of the most creative periods in her life.
‘I see this massive audience that’s so connected with her and I can see that relationship going on before my very eyes and I feel in love with that audience because of what they are giving to her.’
Andrea Swift
Mastermind
‘Grow a backbone, trust your gut, and know when to strike back. Be like a snake – only bite if someone steps on you.’
Taylor talking to Elle, 2019
Though Taylor fulfilled her contract with Big Machine by recording six albums, the last of which was Reputation, her relationship with the label had become rocky. Taylor held the publishing rights to the songs she wrote and released in her time with Big Machine, but not the master recordings.
Taylor claims that she had been trying to buy her masters for years but Big Machine had made unreasonable demands. She said the only offer she received was a chance to earn her masters back one album at a time, so that she would have to release an entirely new album through Big Machine in order to obtain the masters to just one of her old albums. What’s more, knowing that her music accounted for 80 per cent of Big Machine’s earnings, she was afraid that even if she did agree to those terms, once she did, the label would be sold.
When Taylor refused, the label was sold anyway, for $300 million to music mogul Scooter Braun, who had previously managed Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. ‘This is my worst-case scenario,’ Swift wrote in an emotional Tumblr post published on the day of the sale. Braun, she declared, was an ‘incessant, manipulative bully,’ and now he owned all of her masters. In September 2019 Taylor told Rolling Stone, ‘These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of Scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.’
After a series of disputes, including Big Machine blocking her from using her old music in the 2020 documentary Miss America, Taylor announced that she would re-record her entire Big Machine back catalogue, thus rendering the old versions obsolete in the eyes of her fans. In October 2020, Braun sold Taylor’s masters to the Disney family’s investment firm, Shamrock Holdings, on the condition that he’d continue to earn a slice of the profits generated by the masters. Shamrock then approached Taylor with a bid to go into partnership. She refused and repeated that she would be releasing new and definitive versions of the albums. Again, Taylor had proven that she wouldn’t be pushed over, inspiring artists everywhere.
Surprise!
‘People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.’
Taylor Swift
During the early onset of the pandemic Taylor had been quiet, with no indication that she was working on new material. Then, on 23 July 2020, nine photos were uploaded to Taylor’s Instagram that formed a photograph of her in a forest. Later that day she posted a surprise statement: ‘Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen. And that thing is my 8th studio album, Folklore.’
Locked down like the majority of the world, Taylor built a home studio with help from engineer Laura Sisk. She then enlisted the help of producer Jack Antonoff, who had worked on all of her albums since 1989, and Aaron Dessner, guitarist of The National – a new collaborator for Swift. The three worked remotely in secrecy and the songs flowed easily. The songs were mostly subdued and autumnal, Taylor’s gift for infectious melodies finding a new home in an alternative-rock and folk-inspired setting. Lyrically too, she turned over a new leaf, stepping away from diary entries to create poignant short stories of songs, with many linked throughout the album. Dessner would later tell Billboard that he believed that the freedom of not having to create hits spurred Taylor on to new creative heights. ‘To make the record that she made, while running against what is programmed in radio at the highest levels of pop music–she has kind of made an anti-pop record.’
The 1
In many ways, Folklore was Taylor’s most mature, subtle and experimental work to date, but fans certainly showed they were ready for a new stage in her career. It caused a sensation, breaking the Guinness World Record for the biggest first day on Spotify for a female act, topping the charts worldwide and becoming the highest-selling album of the year in the US.
While Taylor had enjoyed plenty of positive reviews for her previous work, nothing could’ve prepared her for Foklore’s reception. It was voted as the album of the year in Billboard, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and Time, while it narrowly missed out on the top spot in NME (No. 2) and the BBC’s (No. 3) lists. Meanwhile, Taylor was nominated for five awards at the 2021 Grammys and Folklore won Album Of The Year, making her the first woman to win the award three times and only the fourth artist to do so overall (the others being Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon).
More Surprises!
The experience of working on Folklore, and its huge success, inspired Taylor to keep on writing, as she explained to Zane Lowe of Apple Music in December 2020. ‘My world felt opened up creatively. There was a point that I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs that I felt it was unsustainable for my future moving forward. It felt too hot of a microscope… On my bad days, I would feel like I was loading a cannon of clickbait when that’s not what I want for my life.’ She added that her new-found ability to ‘create characters in this mythological American town’ in the Folklore material opened up a whole new world of songwriting for her.
According to Swift, she and Dessner continued to send each other ideas until it became apparent to them that the material they’d amassed was a full follow-up album. Taylor’s ninth album, Evermore, was released on 11 December 2020. Again, fans were given very little notice – Taylor repeated the trick of posting an enigmatic series of images on Instagram, followed by an album announcement for midnight. She explained to her fans: ‘To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs. To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice – to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in... I’ve never done this before.’
