Modify tier labels, colors or position through the action bar on the right. The album finds Swift living up to all of the praise she earned for her songwriting earlier in career. 1 as it best represents the evolution of Swift and her music. The rest of the record sees relationships rise and fall like once-great empires reduced to dust, each an individual tragedy set to incessantly hooky choruses. In recent years, shes also become a music business game-changer: most notably for re-recording her first six albums in order to regain control of her masters, which has seen Swift release the Taylors Version of both Red and Fearless. Standout songs on the album include "The 1," which sets the tone of the album; "The Last Great American Dynasty," a folk song-esque storytelling in Swift's signature style; and "Exile," two perspectives on a broken love story (the lyric video shows off the mirroring narratives well). "Fearless" might just be the best opening guitar riff of her applicable albums (Taylor Swift, Speak Now, and Evermore's are less so) fringed with a summer's day twang and immediately infecting the listener with a blissful dose of euphoria, like a spoonful of syrup taken between smiling lips. Standouts like "Teardrops on My Guitar," "Picture to Burn," and "Cold As You" capture the essence of this album, which is "explicitly country-oriented," as Billboard music critic Jonathan Bradley wrote in 2017. What once felt (or possibly still feels) like the end of the world is, on "Taylor's Version," also a testament to resilience we'll make it to the other side, and we'll do it again and again. The difficulty (and, perhaps, the beauty) of attempting to order her albums is that 1) she's been so consistently good, and 2) whichever albums harbor your affections most can change by the year, month, day, and even hour depending on your headspace and heartache. this includes her entire catalogue/discography and eras debut to evermore. It's a dreamy pop album, though not fully aligned with that subgenre thanks to more of Jack Antonoff's signature production, which injects Midnights with a pulsing, mounting aura in hypnotizing new tracks "You're On Your Own, Kid," "Mastermind," and Spotify play count heavyweight champ "Anti-Hero." But folklore is more a shuffled series of vignettes than a throughlined story, planting the lyrics with easter eggs recurring motifs (a favorite cardigan), places (cobblestone paths), and events (pulling up in a car, professing love on the porch) to offer conflicting perspectives of a love long ago lost. folklore in comparison merely flirts along the edges of pop mantras on songs like "the last great american dynasty" and the deeply affecting "mirrorball," while veering straight into indie-folk influence on "illicit affairs" and the finger-plucked "invisible string," among others. But clearly, Taylor is capable of much more, and her nine subsequent albums are proof. She's since genre-jumped from country to proper pop, to electro R&B and bare-backed folk. Keefe, Folklore is neither a culmination of Swifts career to date nor a pivot in a new direction. Perhaps even more impressive is Swifts mastery of song structure. Released in 2012, "Red" is a clear departure from Swift's country days, though she holds onto her signatures, like tragic tales told with beautiful lyrics and upbeat, catchy hits, pivoting easily between the two. Drag and drop items from the bottom and put them on your desired tier. Red is filled with top notch tunes: the brilliantly snarky We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Swifts first ever Billboard 100 Number One) and fizzing 22 are stone-cold smashers. So it is written in "State Of Grace," beginning the album with a percussive prologue la U2, warning that we "fall in love 'til it hurts or bleeds or fades in time" before proclaiming, almost joyously, that she'll "never be the same." that have almost childish lyrics to soft, heart-wrenching ballads about love and loss like "Soon You'll Get Better.". After spending the last two years re-recording some of those early releases, including Fearless and Red, Swift has returned with Midnights, her first album of new material since 2020s Evermore. Although the first glimpses we heard from it (the musical theatre-style Me! and the stomping You Need to Calm Down) didnt do the record justice, listen to Lover in full and youll find moments of pure joy. I don't love the way the writer described some of the albums (saying Taylor sounds like a stay at home mom? Debut. But for every purely excellent song off 1989 ("Out Of The Woods," "Clean") there's invariably a hollow foil track, the worst offenses, of course, being "Shake It Off" and "Bad Blood." If the black-and-white cover art didn't let you know this one would be different, the first song she released off the album, "Look What You Made Me Do," says it all. If Teardrops on My Guitar from Swifts debut album was her breakthrough song, it was Love Story, the ballad from its follow-up Fearless, that cemented her name in the pop history books. Though she was praised for her songwriting right out of the gate, what Swifts self-titled debut truly shows in hindsight is how diligently shes worked to hone her craft over the years. This is based on A. The worlds defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking whats new and whats next since 1952. Painting the picture of an unravelling relationship, it gradually crescendos, climaxing in the gut-punch couplet of And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest. He's right "Folklore" further cements the fact that Swift is in a league all her own and cannot be placed in a stylistic box when it comes to her music. Its admirable that she tries to incorporate more sophisticated elements into a few of the songs here, but dancing with or kissing someone in the rain is a default image that crops up with nearly the same distracting frequency as references to princesses, angels, and fairy tales. The catalyst was lead single "Tim McGraw," but this ticket to the country radio airwaves turned out to be a red herring with the advent of other ironclad, infinitely repeatable songs that remain fan favorites, even in lieu of our now excess of options. Ten albums, a mantelpiece of awards and over a decade later, Swift has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Theres a free-wheeling, carefree attitude to the collection. Sure, this album has its highs and lows and is filled with impressive tracks, but it ranks below others because although it feels like many things she does here (like haunting lyrics and pop beats) are things she's done before and a bit better in her previous releases. All in all, reputation is by far Taylor's most misunderstood work though its criticisms aren't without merit. So, the savant of promotional whimsy announced an upcoming album in August, cloaked her website in a cryptic countdown reading "Meet me at midnight," posted the premise of "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life," and ceremoniously revealed the track titles from an antique bingo machine in a TikTok series. The record's tales unfold into imagined personal histories, with what Swift calls the "Teenage Love Triangle" songs (suspected to be "Cardigan," "August," and "Betty") painting three vivid portraits of an interwoven affair at different points in time. First contact is a shock, a singe that lingers and radiates energy, next a scab, hardening as it heals, before calming into a scar you carry, listening to, forevermore. Her earlier works' fanciful twang and youthful daydreams still linger on tracks "Speak Now" and "Mean," but where Fearless was purely starry-eyed, Speak Now instead wields a wonderstruck vernacular like a cherished childhood locket and scorches a hole in the heart-shaped photo. Dark, biting, sassy, and straight-up cool, in this track, Swift makes it known that she's here to play and no one can take her down: "But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time / Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time. She also notably upgrades the production, as a Professor of Commercial Music explains to EW, with subtle shifts towards a fuller-bodied musical accompaniment (no longer a one-dimensional country backing), re-layering instruments along with slight switch-ups in tempo. 8 Taylor Swift (2006) Written during her freshman year of high school, Taylor Swift's debut eponymous album was young Swift trying to find her real voice. This record at last acknowledges that, yes, a pop star idolized by young girls can also be a sexual being, singing of dirty daydreams and undressing with your eyes (the chorus on "Dress" even blatantly mimics the cadence of a mounting orgasm). But her mounting success undoubtedly stands on the shoulders of Speak Now's case studies of condensing complex inner dilemmas seeing your parents' failed marriage as a prophecy, wishing you'd never grown up into an album still adorned with hope. On 2012s Red, Swift began her transition from country crossover artist to creating glossy, mainstream pop; on its 2021 re-record we were reminded just what a superb songwriter Swift has always been. She's an artist defined by eras (as is the name of her heavily anticipated upcoming tour) a Reputation era for self-defense, a Lover era for romantic solace which her adoring fans latch onto and assign to their own life stages with fervor. When "Midnights" was first announced, Swift described it as "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life" and invited fans to meet her at midnight the night the album dropped. Keefe, In the run-up to the release of her sixth album, Reputation, Swift was excoriated by fans and foes alike for too often playing the victim. Taylor Swift's 10 seminal albums, ranked In honor of her instant-classic, record-breaking new LP Midnights , here's EW's ranking of Taylor Swift's 10 studio albums from her illustrious career. Released in 2014 and named after the year she was born, "1989" was inspired by the pop music of the mid-1980s. this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines. Whether it's a song about an ex or someone else who wronged her, Swift's clever, catchy "revenge tracks" have only continued to improve from here. But before expanding on her honeymoon phase, we're treated to the tour-de-force track "Cruel Summer" (not a Bananarama cover), a buzzer-beating, angst-wielding anthem that's among the greatest pop songs her auteur has ever crafted. But none are more affecting than "champagne problems," a first-person post-mortem after rejecting a marriage proposal a classic "it's not you, it's me" scenario with simple piano chords accompanying the guilt of walking away and the peril of being mentally unwell ("'She would've made such a lovely bride' / 'What a shame she's fked in the head,' they said"). As J. English penned for NPR in 2017, this album really helped solidify Swift's identity in the music world. Rather, their relative simplicity only adds to Fearless' charm, bridging the old with the new a woman's voice singing a girl's anthems to make a once good album now great. It's synth-pop with depth energetic beats with lyrics that linger in your mind and soul-baring moments softened with catchy choruses ("It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me"). Welcome to the Taylor Swift song sorter. The album's comedown is a moment of quiet reflection carried by a piano's lone lullaby, when the festivities are over, the partygoers are gone, and all that's left is a lover for the long haul ("I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day"). Many artists lucky enough to enjoy their 15 minutes of fame peak at the onset, delivering one or two tokens of pop culture product before a dwindling stream of less impressive ventures. "Entirely self-penned, sans the collaborations of the previous albums, it's an enormous breakthrough in songwriting maturity, while hardly forsaking the childlike lack of pretense that made earlier efforts such guilt-free ear candy," wrote Willman. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. 1989 is a masterclass in how to make a timeless pop record. When you pose the question of why Taylor Swift is among the most distinguished artists in popular music, the strength of her narrative songwriting is among the best answers. Her narrators often seem to lack insight because Swift writes with the point of view that hers is the only story to be told, which makes songs like Dear John and Better Than Revenge come across as shallow and shortsighted. Taylor Swift's folklore rose from quiet shadows at the peak of isolation and uncertainty, written and produced in quarantine and released during the first COVID summer. How Marvel went big with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Certainly, it matters that the two albums were born of the protracted isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and that collaborators like Bon Iver and the Nationals Aaron Dessner figure prominently on both. At the time of publishing, we're just over two weeks past our first listen, still internalizing the record's themes of loneliness and loathing, insecurity and insomnia. As ever, Swift deftly pivots from upbeat tracks to sad ballads with devastating bridges that make you want to cry your eyes out. Npr in 2017, this album really helped solidify Swift 's identity in the music.... Feelings that somehow all fit together in the end eyes out that may or may not meet accessibility.... 'S identity in the music world of Swift and her nine subsequent albums are proof songwriting earlier career... 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