Latest Release
- 3 OCT 2024
- 7 Songs
- THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY · 2024
- folklore · 2020
- THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY · 2024
- Lover · 2019
- Lover · 2019
- 1989 (Taylor's Version) · 2023
- Lover · 2019
- Midnights (3am Edition) · 2022
- 1989 · 2014
- reputation · 2017
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums When Taylor Swift announced that 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was finally seeing release, she mentioned that, of all the albums she’s faithfully re-recorded in her quest to retake her master tapes, this one was special. “The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways,” she wrote on Instagram. “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind.” From “Now That We Don’t Talk” (on which, wowee zowee, she sings, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht/With important men who think important thoughts”) to “Say Don’t Go” to “Is It Over Now?”, one gets a real feel for the ferocity and focus with which she was writing at the time, a new audience in sight. It’s not just that any one of the newly uncovered songs here is more than strong enough to have been included (or strong enough to have launched the career of a less prolific artist); it’s that, even on material previously deemed inessential, Swift sounds comfortable bordering on imperious—like she’d been making lush, montage-ready pop music all along. Nearly a decade later—and at the tail end of a 2023 in which her every move seems to have determined pop-cultural weather—it’s weirdly easy to forget that in 2014, she was still approaching (nah, engineering) an inflection point in her life and career, reintroducing herself (at just 24) as the all-conquering, planet-like presence we know today. She’d already started adjusting the ratio of country to pop on 2010’s Speak Now and 2012’s Red, working with Swedish superproducers Max Martin and Shellback on the latter. On 1989, Swift did away with the idea of ratios entirely—just launched them into the ocean, and went all the way. Musically, it wasn’t just her embrace of big beats and shiny surfaces, but a sense of lightness and play as well. Where 2008’s Fearless and Speak Now take their dramas to Shakespearean heights, 1989 celebrates a newly liberated life of flings (“Style”), weekend getaways (“Wildest Dreams”) and the kind of confidence a younger Taylor Swift was too passionately involved to grasp. So while “Welcome to New York” is her way of letting everyone know that she’s at least momentarily done with country music and Nashville and the constrictions they put on her image and sound, it’s also a song about turning your eye outward and surrendering to the possibilities only a city like New York can offer. And where she may have taken things personally in the past, now she’s just trying to have fun (“Shake It Off”). “Blank Space” even manages to make light of her gravest and most well-protected subject: Taylor Swift. Like Shania Twain’s Come On Over or even Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, 1989 is an instance in which an artist deliberately defies expectations and still manages to succeed. Swift didn’t exactly grow up with the synthesised, ’80s-inspired sounds that producers like Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder and future bestie Jack Antonoff help her create here; as the album’s title reminds you, she wasn’t even born until the decade was ending. But just as she played with the traditions and conventions of country music on her early albums, Swift uses the nostalgia of 1989 not to look back, but to move ahead.
- After re-recording her 2008 album Fearless as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes—or at least create new ones—Taylor Swift presents Red (Taylor’s Version), an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. “Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. She wrestles with change on “Nothing New”, an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers; contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”); and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. Long-time fans will be especially glad to see an extended cut of “All Too Well”, the project’s emotional centrepiece. It features new production from hitmaker Jack Antonoff, but Swift’s original lyrical genius is still remarkable. “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she sings. It’s the line she’s always said she’s most proud of from this album and era. Ten years on, it still cuts deep.
- In 2019, Taylor Swift announced plans to re-record her entire catalogue to that point, an ambitious move sparked by the sale of her original label, Big Machine Label Group, along with all of her masters. Swift’s first entry into this reimagined canon is a new take on her landmark 2008 sophomore LP Fearless, which, among many other accolades, took home the coveted Album of the Year trophy at the 2010 Grammy Awards. Swift first teased the “Taylor’s Version” of Fearless with the release of a new recording of one of her biggest hits, the ode to youthful romance “Love Story”. That version stays remarkably true to the original track, though it’s hard not to notice how Swift’s voice has strengthened and matured in the 13 years since. (But in this updated version mixed in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, the difference is clear: more warmth, more intimacy, more clarity with which to appreciate the deceptive ease of Swift’s songwriting.) Elsewhere, she revisits other juggernauts like “Fifteen”, “Forever & Always” and, of course, “You Belong With Me”, another of her biggest-selling songs.
- A mere 11 months passed between the release of Lover and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, folklore finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new st,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channelled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan”, which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile”, a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven”, the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.
- This glittering pop deity yanks you into her world with both hands.
- Bringing the drama and intimacy to the screen.
- The end of an era. ✨ Taylor Swift’s earth-shaking tour comes to a close.
- Find your state of grace with some of Taylor’s most inspiring tunes.
- Taylor picks the perfect songs to get you through the bargaining stage.
- The fourth stage of loss calls for sad songs. Taylor’s chosen her saddest.
Live Albums
- A Taylor Swift song that wasn’t an instant hit?
- The song that announced her pop takeover.
- Celebrating four years of her surprise album, folklore.
- A pop plot twist that unleashed her genius.
- This already iconic collaboration was a childhood dream come true.
- Celebrating our Artist of the Year and a special day in 1989.
- 12 stories about 12 days from Taylor’s incomparable year.
More To See
About Taylor Swift
The country world feigned surprise when, after three albums of Music Row-indebted songcraft, Taylor Swift formally embraced pop on 2012’s Red. But no one should have been shocked: Any 14-year-old capable of persuading her parents to move from suburban Pennsylvania to Nashville for her career clearly has ambition to burn. And the thrill of following Swift’s rise has been watching her execute it flawlessly, largely because her melodic intelligence is equal to that ambition. Her early, youthful love songs heralded 2010's newly self-possessed Speak Now—which showed off her scathing wit—and evolved into knowing, ironclad pop fare that held its own against boisterous Max Martin production on 1989, her fifth album, titled after her birth year. Throughout, her songwriting has blurred the lines between the public and private, burying enough real-life clues (about, say, scarves and Starbucks) to make clear that only Swift can own her narrative, thank you very much, while still retaining a lyrical elegance. Though 2017’s reputation might have been perceived as a gorgeously constructed piece of dramatic theatre—its attendant heroes and villains all real-life characters from Swift's public feuds—all that spectacle proved an attention-grabbing cover for her most romantic album yet. She turned up the romance even more on 2019’s Lover, but it was 2020’s folklore and its companion, evermore—ruminative, relatively lo-fi albums written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic—that earned her the Apple Music Award for Songwriter of the Year. She followed those up in 2022 with Midnights, which she wrote and produced with Jack Antonoff, and described as "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life." In 2023, Swift undertook one of the most ambitious road shows of all time: the multi-year Eras Tour, which saw her presenting new and classic material across more than 100 locales worldwide. It was just one of many reasons she was named Apple Music's Artist of the Year for 2023. Swift returned to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of Midnights for her 11th album, 2024’s THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. A study in extremes and heightened emotions, the record—which features guest turns from Post Malone and Florence + the Machine—is her most specific, candid and unsparing work to date.
- HOMETOWN
- West Reading, PA, United States
- BORN
- 13 December 1989
- GENRE
- Pop