reputation Tracklist
Three years after the release of 2014’s 1989, and following several public spats with celebrities like Kanye West, Taylor Swift aims to clear her name and inaccurate public image on reputation. At a fan event that took place in June 2018, Swift described the record as a story of “finding love throughout all the noise,” referring to how the album transitions from discussing her persona to falling in love with British actor Joe Alwyn.
On its first day alone, the album sold 700,000 physical copies, and it debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, having sold more copies that week than the other 199 listed albums combined. Within a month, the record was certified triple platinum, becoming RIAA’s top-certified album of the year, and even a year after its release, it was deemed the biggest album of 2018 on the Billboard charts.
The album was announced after Swift removed all previous social media presence and uploaded three videos of a snake’s tail, body, and head in August 2017; most considered this a reference to the “snake” nickname she was given after it was revealed she wrote Calvin Harris' “This Is What You Came For” after their breakup, which worsened during public fallouts with Kanye West and Katy Perry.
To promote the album, Swift teamed up with Target to produce two exclusive magazines which feature poetry, paintings, handwritten lyrics, and a behind-the-scenes look at the music video for lead single “Look What You Made Me Do.” She worked with UPS leading up to the album’s release, and partnered with Ticketmaster to help dedicated fans be the first to score tickets to her 2018 tour.
“reputation” Q&A
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Translations
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Is there a special deluxe edition of the album?
Yes! Taylor has once again teamed up with Target, this time to release an exclusive 72-page booklet with handwritten lyrics, commentary, and more.
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How well is the album doing chart/sales wise?
It’s official! According to Billboard, the album sold a total of 1.2 million copies in its first week!
That sum – reflecting the tracking week ending Nov. 16 – is the 10th-largest sales week for any album since Nielsen Music began electronically tracking sales in 1991 and Swift’s fourth million-selling week. She is the only artist in Nielsen Music history to achieve four million-selling weeks. (Previously, both Swift and Adele had three million-selling frames.) Reputation is Swift’s sixth studio album and was released on Nov. 10 through Big Machine Records. Swift earlier earned million-selling weeks with the debut weeks of each of her last three studio sets: 1989 (1.287 million in 2014), Red (1.208 million, 2012) and Speak Now (1.047 million, 2010)."
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What does Taylor's family think of the album?
According to a fan who attended the London Secret Sessions, Taylor’s dad, Scott, said reputation is his favorite album of hers.
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What has Jack Antonoff said about the creation of the album?
Jack told Entertainment Weekly:
It’s an intense album, and that’s what I care about. In the course of a day — in the course of two minutes — you can feel like you can conquer the world, or you can feel like the biggest piece of garbage that ever existed. An album or song should feel that way too. It should have the whole gamut of what it actually is like for the artist to be alive at that moment. The sessions were just her and I. She would come over to my apartment, and we would talk and eat and talk more, and the things we talked about turned into songs. She is great at remembering the heart and soul of the process. Some people forget it — sometimes something works and everyone starts to rewire it. But she’s really great at knowing what it’s about: talking about what the hell is going on in your life and somehow finding a way to take that exact emotion and make a song out of it. That was the theme of those sessions: ‘Let’s just tell this story, whatever that story is, because that’s the whole point.’ […] 1989 was different. I would send her tracks, and she would write to that. We did reputation sitting in the room together. There were lyric ideas or things like that [that she would bring], but I would say the majority of it came from scratch. Things would just happen in the room. It was a special time.
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What has Taylor said about the creation of the album?
Taylor told Rolling Stone:
Creating reputation felt different to any other album I’ve ever made because it felt a lot less fragmented in its storytelling. It was about a journey, from one emotional place to another. Other albums I’ve made have felt like a scrapbook of different memories, but there was something overarching about the theme of this album for me. I wanted it to sound like losing something you thought you wanted, and in the end, gaining something you really needed.
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Were any songs inspired by pop culture?
Yes! Swift told Entertainment Weekly that much of the album was influenced by HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones.
These songs were half based on what I was going through, but seeing them through a Game of Thrones filter. ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is literally Arya Stark’s kill list. ‘King of My Heart’ was influenced by Khal Drogo and Daenerys. It’s even got this post-hook of drums — I wanted them to sound like Dothraki drums […] ‘I Did Something Bad,’ I wrote after Arya and Sansa conspire to kill Littlefinger.
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Did this album receive any certifications?
reputation is certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA.
