Mine, Mean, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, This Is What You Came For, Better Man, Shake It Off, Blank Space, Bad Blood, New Year’s Day, Me!, You Need to Calm Down, Lover
Together with her great mate Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift has been one of the biggest white acts of the 2010s. Like Ed, she knows how to conquer territories; unlike Ed, she uses her femininity to sell concert tickets.
My mum went to see her show in Hyde Park and said there was too much talking. Around the 1989 era – which ended with a GRAMMY for Album of the Year – Taylor invited famous ladies onto the stage with her. They included Lena Dunham, Idina Menzel, Alessia Cara, Miranda Lambert, Charli XCX, Selena Gomez, Avril Lavigne, Lisa Kudrow, St Vincent, Alanis Morissette, Natalie Maines from Dixie Chicks, Ellen, Uzo Aduba, Mary J Blige, Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, Little Mix, Fifth Harmony, Lorde, Gigi Hadid, the US Women’s National Soccer Team and Serena Williams. For obvious Kanye-related reasons Kim Kardashian didn’t pop up…
Taylor is still known as the woman who beat Beyonce’s Single Ladies video at the MTV Video Music Awards which led to Kanye West storming the stage and ruining the moment. In 2009, when it happened, Taylor was already on her way to winning the CMA Entertainer of the Year award. She was a country starlet and her third album Speak Now was completely written by her with no co-writers. Mine was the first single, a nice bit of country-pop fluff about being young and in love, while Mean was addressed to the haters, specifically Bob Lefsetz, one of her more acerbic critics.
Come 2012 there was nothing to criticize any more. Outgrowing country music, Taylor went pop on her fourth album Red. Teaming up with Max Martin and Shellback, she put out the incredible We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which has so many hooks a fish would wave the right flag and just chomp on. It remains one of the decade’s finest pop songs, and daringly includes as a middle eight the voicenote from the writing session. It is both defiant and melodic, which is the Swift sound.
Taylor began her Imperial Period with Red, from which I Knew You Were Trouble and 22 (both Martin/Shellback/Swift compositions) also came. The former is a slinky track with more hooks and a spiky guitar part, while the latter celebrates being young and having fun. Stunningly, Taylor was 22 years old when she wrote the song.
How did she follow up Red? With something even more successful. Albums do not go diamond any more but 10 million people bought 1989. Perhaps because Taylor decided not to make the album available for streaming, they were forced to pay for one of the pop albums of the decade. If Britney Spears hadn’t fallen by the wayside and suffered horrific mental agony, she would have made 1989; Max Martin was at the mixing desk while other top writers (Ryan Tedder, Jack Antonoff, Imogen Heap) helped Taylor with her artistic vision of making great pop music to dance to.
Shake It Off was the album’s first single, a fine pop song about dancing that again mentioned the haters (who are ‘gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate’). Next came Blank Space, another number one on the Hot 100, knocking Shake It Off from the top and meaning Taylor was the first woman to replace herself (The Beatles replaced themselves in 1964). Blank Space is a fine production and suitably it was nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the GRAMMYs. Only Thinking Out Loud and Uptown Funk could, and did, outperform Blank Space, which I think is her greatest moment in her great era. The pen-click sound effect before ‘And I’ll write your name’ is a smart production device. The middle eight is a piece of advice to ladies: ‘Boys only want love if it’s torture…’
Bad Blood was a video blockbuster, with several of her ‘squad’ defeating the evil men but letting Kendrick Lamar, of all people, take the verses on a remix which sent the song to number one. The chorus is infectious and syncopated, and the production is again unstoppable. The mood points to the doomy production of Reputation, of which more in two paragraphs’ time.
Like Ed Sheeran, Taylor was able to gift tracks to others. After using a pseudonym, it was revealed that it was Calvin Harris’ ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift who wrote Rihanna’s smash This Is What You Came For, a track that intersected pop and Calvin’s brand of dance music. Obviously Taylor had learned well from Max and Shellback, with the ‘you-ou’ post-chorus being particularly addictive and the melody being straight-up pop.
Taylor was inspired to write Better Man about her relationship with Mr Harris, and gifted the song to country quartet Little Big Town, whose vocalist Karen Fairchild delivers a song of regret suitably ruefully: ‘I just wish you were a better man’ goes the chorus, which has a real melodic kick that Taylor displayed in her country repertoire.
There’s a bit of a melodic kick in Reputation, an album for which Taylor did no interviews whatsoever. She let the music speak for itself, produced once again by Max Martin. I didn’t enjoy the album on first listen as it sounded too dark and claustrophobic, but over time I grew to appreciate the melodicism of I Did Something Bad, End Game (featuring both Future and Ed Sheeran), Delicate and the magnificent closing track New Year’s Day (‘hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you’). Taylor’s fans were able to stream this album, which meant there were no diamond sales. It’s like Fleetwood Mac following Rumours with Tusk, with one monster being bigger than the other.
In 2019 Taylor returned with a magical song called Me! With Brendon Urie from Panic! At the Disco. In 2018 she changed record labels, moving from Big Machine to Universal (to which the likes of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Rihanna are signed) and creating a storm when she spoke out against Scooter Braun, Kanye’s representative, when he bought her old catalogue from Big Machine. (Why Universal didn’t buy Big Machine, heaven knows, though it could have been due to the equally ugly saga of artists and their estates suing for loss of property after the reporting of the 2008 warehouse fire.)
The farrago over Taylor’s masters reminds the world that music is a business, as Taylor, the daughter of a banker, knows only too well. It rather took the sheen off the announcement of Lover, album seven, and the release of the album’s second single, You Need to Calm Down, which featured a video in which Katy Perry and Taylor kissed and made up while Taylor promoted equality for all, regardless of gender. The album’s title track, a sweeping triple-time love song whose middle eight is set at a wedding, has a sweet chorus with a proper melody, which makes it stand out on radio, which Taylor used to dominate.
With the 2020 elections for US President occurring during the promotional run for Lover, Taylor’s political views will be aired – she’s from Pennsylvania and lived in Nashville, so can speak for both sides of the aisle – but it should not detract from an impressive catalogue from one of America’s top artists this decade.