Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department” on April 19, 2024, an album Travis Kelce’s mom said is “probably her best work.”
Two hours after TTPD released, the biggest pop star in the universe surprise-released a second version — a two-record set subtitled “The Anthology” featuring 31 songs.
It quickly became the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify on its way to becoming the first release to hit 1 billion streams in a single week.
And for the record, no, it did not take all seven days to get there.
That, my friends, is how you dominate the culture.
Thirty-one songs is a lot to digest. But now that we’ve been living with TTPD for a week, this is as good a time as any to reflect on Swift’s entire catalog, which started off strong with a self-titled effort released when she was just 16 that hit the Billboard album charts at No. 5 (the only time a Taylor Swift release has not secured the top spot on that chart).
The fact that Swift’s 11th album has already broken streaming records tells you everything you need to know about how brilliantly she’s managed to retain the world’s interest in the course of those 11 albums while still finding time to re-record four early albums after a dispute over the ownership of her catalog.
All four “(Taylor’s Version)” re-recordings also topped the Billboard album charts, as anyone at all familiar with life in the 21st century could’ve guessed. And she’s still got two more to get through.
For this list, I’ve factored in the “(Taylor’s Version)” re-recordings of the albums — and how could you not factor in that new 10-minute version of “All Too Well” on “Red (Taylor’s Version)? — but didn’t break them out as separate items on the list because it would’ve felt ridiculous to do so.
I also considered all two hours of the 31-song version of TTPD because she wouldn’t have released it as a double album if we weren’t supposed to view it as a double album.
If you asked 10 Taylor Swift fans to compile a list of her best albums, you’d be looking at 10 very different lists. And that’s because we all have different things we look for in an album and things hit us differently at different times. I’m sure some of these rankings would change if I revisited this list a year from now. But for now, this feels right.
And for the record, I would highly recommend the album at the bottom of the list.
There’s a song on the latest Olivia Rodrigo album that poses the question, “When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?”
I would imagine Taylor Swift was thinking “You don’t know the half of it,” having hit the streets at 16 with a self-titled album that sent two songs she’d written – “Our Song” and “Should’ve Said No” – to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart while being embraced as displaying a level of talent well beyond her years.
But that’s only because she was great for her age, an overnight success who wrote or cowrote all 11 songs on her seven-times-platinum debut, including one she’d written for her high school talent show. And because she was young, she could speak to the teenage experience with an authenticity that can’t be faked.
It’s not all golden. At times, it feels a bit overly eager to please the suits at country radio. But the best songs show a promise she quickly fulfilled while holding up as great songs in their own right, from “Tim McGraw, a bittersweet reflection on the summer love that got away, to the first of several timeless classics about being stuck in the friend zone, the suitably heartbreaking “Teardrops on My Guitar.”
With “Taylor Swift,” she announced the arrival of a major talent in the making. And then she got better.
In the meantime, “Taylor Swift” spent 24 weeks atop Billboard’s country chart while earning Swift a Best New Artist Grammy nomination.
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“Lover” captures Swift at her most effervescent, embracing her pop sensibilities with a practically euphoric sense of youthfulness at times. The sound is glossier than usual, drawing heavily on the ‘80s synth-pop vibe she first explored on “1989” with Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie guesting on lead single, “Me!.”
“Cruel Summer” is as irrepressible a pop song as she’s ever written, despite the heartache she addresses in the lyrics. There’s a reason it became the album’s breakout single, topping Billboard’s Hot 100 (even if it took four years and its emergence as a highlight of the Eras Tour to get there).
In an interview with Vogue, Swift said she wrote this album as “a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”
And she manages to touch on all those shades of glory, clearly favoriting the more enchanting shades, before leaving the listener with “Daylight,” an unabashedly romantic if bittersweet ballad that finds her shaking off the vengefulness of “Reputation” with “I wanna be defined by the things that I love/ Not the things I hate,” a spoken-word performance that feels like her leaving a voicemail to herself.
Her final words are “You are what you love.” It’s a really sweet ending to a journey whose highlights range from the sugar-coated pop hooks of “Cruel Summer” to her soulful phrasing of the title track.
Swift was a few weeks shy of turning 19 when her second album hit the streets. And you could hear how much she’d grown in the two years since that first release, especially on “Fifteen,” where she looks back on the battle scars of young romance with a heartbroken chorus of “When you’re 15 and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.”
Her words cut even deeper when she hits the verse about her best friend Abigail giving “everything she had to a boy who changed his mind,” a line she follows with a totally believable “And we both cried.”
There’s a vulnerability to the delivery that underscores the heartache in all the right places, from “Fifteen” to the richly orchestrated “White Horse,” where she sings of pacing back and forth all this time “’cause I honestly believed in you.” And if other songs feel more like they were written by a teenager, the fact that those are the exceptions may be more to the point.
This album sent three singles to the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, including “You Belong with Me,” which even now remains her most contagious pop song, casting Swift as a wallflower stuck on the bleachers while her dream date is off making time with the cheerleading captain.
“Fearless” picked up Album of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Grammys, where it also won Best Country Album.
It’s a lot to process, a sprawling double album that passes the two-hour mark as the 31st song, “The Manuscript,” is putting the album to bed with one last bittersweet reflection on a heartbreaking relationship.
It’s the song that ties it all together. On the bridge, she explains, “The professor said to write what you know.” Then she signs off with a verse about the album: “The only thing that’s left is the manuscript/ One last souvenir from my trip to your shores/ Now and then I reread the manuscript/ But the story isn’t mine anymore.”
The 31-song manuscript is ours now. And it’s an often fascinating journey.
The key to managing the sprawl of a double album is to change it up enough from track to track to keep things interesting. Swift’s collaborators here — primarily Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner — rarely rise to that challenge with an unexpected detour, the maddeningly upbeat electronica of “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart” being one welcome exception.
But the lyrics make it worth your while to hang in there as Swift finds inspiration where she often turns for inspiration — heartache, in this case the end of a six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn and a rumored rebound fling with boorish British rocker Matty Healy, cast as the “miracle move-on drug” whose effects were temporary; and love, in this case her relationship with Travis Kelce.
There’s even a song taking overprotective Swifties to task for thinking she’s too good to date the likes of Healy. “I’ll tell you something ‘bout my good name,” she sings in “But Daddy I Love Him,” a song whose title references “The Little Mermaid.” “It’s mine alone to disgrace/ I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.”
Most of these lyrics are more likely auto-mythology than torn directly from the pages of a tear-stained diary, but you could say the same for almost any breakup album worth a second listen. And for all the undue grief she’s gotten for the album title, there are wonderful hints of self-awareness here, including this gem from the title track: “You’re not Dylan Thomas/ I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/ We’re modern idiots.”
Swift was out for blood on “Reputation,” an album conceived in self-seclusion in reaction to the tabloid scrutiny that ramped up in the aftermath of “1989” and a very public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian that boiled over after West released a song that infamously bragged, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.”
As she told the Guardian years later, “I was literally about to break.” In that interview, she talked about having adopted a “bit of a persona,” calling the edgier, hip-hop-inspired production “a complete defense mechanism.”
Working with Jack Antonoff, Max Martin and Shellback, the singer arrived at a much harder sound, surprising listeners with the heavily distorted low-end throb of an opening track called “Ready For It?”
By that point, we’d already met her new persona on the single she dropped in advance of the album’s release, “Look What You Made Me Do,” which features the outgoing message, “I’m sorry/ But the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now/ Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead.”
Dark Taylor proved a little much for some to handle. But a woman I work with told me this is in her Top 2 favorite Swift releases because of how it taps into female rage. “Look What You Made Me Do” topped Billboard’s Hot 100, breaking sales and streaming records, while the album spent four weeks at U.S. No. 1.
By 20, Swift had experienced another huge artistic growth spurt, following “Fearless” with the even more compelling story songs and more assertive melodies of an album that crashes the gate with the effervescent country-pop of “Mine.”
Released as the album’s lead single, “Mine” finds her bracing herself for goodbye “’cause that’s all I’ve ever known” while “the best thing that’s ever been mine” assures her they won’t make the same mistakes her parents did.
And that was just the first of five Top 20 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 from “Speak Now,” including “Mean,” a song that’s meaner than the negative review that made her write it, and “Back to December,” a richly orchestrated breakup song that finds her wishing she could go back to the night she broke it off with someone.
“I’d go back in time and change it, but I can’t,” she sings. “So if the chain is on your door, I understand.” It’s a moment guaranteed to leave a mark on many listeners. And there are other moments just as poignant.
On “Dear John,” a song inspired by her short-lived romance with December Boy John Mayer, she asks him, “Don’t you think 19’s too young to be played by your dark, twisted games when I love you so?” then answer her own question with “I should’ve known.” “Never Grow Up” is as beautiful a meditation on the pros and cons of growing as I have ever heard.
It’s not all weepers, though. The title track is sure to have you pulling for the girl who crashes someone else’s wedding and runs off with the groom.
Swift’s third album sold a million U.S. copies in a single week and spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart along the way to going six times platinum.
A second surprise release of understated indie-folk laid to tape while the world was shut down for a global pandemic, arriving less than five months after “Folklore,” “Evermore” is a suitably haunted affair.
Like “Folklore,” it features her working primarily with Aaron Dessner of the National, recording most songs at his Hudson Valley studio. Another member of the National, Dessner’s brother Bryce, contributes to the writing and production of a track recorded with the National called “Coney Island” that offsets the vulnerability of Swift’s delivery with the brooding gravitas of Matt Berninger’s gravelly baritone.
Swift has called the two releases sister albums, while reviewers heard this one as a sequel or companion piece. It’s all those things and more.
The title track features Bon Iver on vocals. The members of Haim show up on the noirish revenge song “No Body, No Crime.” Another highlight, “Gold Rush,” was co-written and produced by Antonoff, whose presence somewhere in the credits on a Swift release was pretty much a given by the time she got to “Evermore.”
It opens with “Willow,” a song she says she chose to set the tone because the music felt witchy and magical, which it does, at times like something Stevie Nicks would have contributed to “Rumours.”
Other highlights range from “Champagne Problems,” a heartbreaking character sketch of a woman who turns down a marriage proposal as Christmas approaches and how “sometimes you just don’t know the answer ‘til someone’s on their knees and asks you,” to “’Tis the Damn Season,” a bittersweet tale of two former flames having a seasonal fling that they both know means more than that.
There’s this wonderfully written scene in the bridge where she sings of going back to L.A. to “wonder about the only soul who can tell which smiles I’m fakin’/ And the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own / To leave the warmest bed I’ve ever known.”
The prevailing tone is sadness, which plays to her strengths as both a singer and a lyricist. She’s really good at making people feel the sadness in their soul. If this one doesn’t make you shed at least a few tears, chances are you’re heartless.
This concept album finds Swift returning to the glossy synth-pop stylings and self-referential lyrics she’d abandoned on those sister albums she recorded during the pandemic, telling “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” as she revealed on Instagram.
It opens with “Lavender Haze,” a suitably hazy, hip-hop-flavored love song whose title is something she picked up from “Mad Men,” used in the ‘50s to describe the sensation of being in love. Of course, this being Taylor Swift, the lavender haze is threatened by the bothersome realities of being Taylor Swift in love.
She’s “under scrutiny,” feeling the pressure to get married because “the only kinda girl they see is a one-night or a wife” and she’s having none of it.
On “Anti-Hero,” the biggest-selling song of 2022, she sings “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror,” a line she follows with a self-effacing “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” But Swift had rarely stared directly in the mirror as exactingly as she does here. She even sings of “scheming like a criminal” to make the kids who didn’t want to play with her when she was little love her.
It’s that growing sense of self-awareness that makes “Midnights” such a fascinating listen. That and the production (Exhibit A in any case for ignoring the backlash that greeted her latest release and keeping Antonoff’s name on her shortlist of potential running mates).
“Midnights” set a new record for Spotify streams in a single day on the way to becoming the year’s best-selling U.S. album and enjoying the largest vinyl sales week of the century so far. It also filled the Top 10 on the Hot 100 — the first time any act has occupied all 10 positions.
Hoping to experiment with sounds beyond the context of her country-leaning comfort zone, she enlisted the aid of several outside producers and songwriting partners, including Max Martin, Jeff Bhasker and Shellback.
It worked like a charm.
Lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” became her first chart-topping entry on the Hot 100 for a reason. You can feel her swinging for the fences like the Reggie Jackson we all needed. The delivery was surprisingly playful for Swift, who brings her best Valley Girl voice to the table, especially coming out of that first chorus, where she follows “We are never ever ever getting back together” with “like, ever.”
The second hit single, “Begin Again,” isn’t nearly as playful, a heartfelt country ballad with an aching pedal-steel part that ends the album on a hopeful note with “I’ve been spending the last eight months thinking all love ever does is break and burn, and end/ But on a Wednesday in a café, I watched it begin again.”
The other hits are just as timeless. Max Martin and Shellback left their fingerprints all over “I Knew You Were Trouble,” a brilliant piece of popcraft that made her crossover dreams more apparent than ever. And “22” is everything it’s meant to be — a celebration built for rooftop parties that perfectly captures the essence of what it means to be exactly 22 (on a good night), Swift assuring us that “Everything will be alright if we just keep dancing like we’re 22.”
The title refers to her birth year, apparently chosen to signify a symbolic artistic rebirth. And that’s exactly what it feels like, inspired in large part by the synth-pop of the 1980s with Max Martin serving as the album’s co-executive producer.
She’d been “going pop” from the beginning, recording an alternative version of “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the first crossover hit from her first album, without all the country embellishments. But even “Red,” for all its pop ambition, had retained its share of country sensibilities.
There’s no mistaking anything on “1989” for country. The opening track could not have done a better job of channeling the essence of the early ‘80s synth-pop revolution, right down to the digital handclaps.
“Blank Space” was a huge hit and the album’s most compelling track, an electro-pop anthem with state-of-the-art production and a brilliant performance from Swift, who navigates the lyrics with attitude, heartache and humor while playing the serial dater she’d clearly grown weary of being portrayed as in the media.
When “Blank Space” topped the Billboard Hot 100, it replaced another Swift song goofing on her public image — “Shake It Off,” a contagious lead single that coyly sets the tone with “I stay out too late / Got nothin’ in my brain / That’s what people say / Mmm hmm / That’s what people say.” By the time the chorus hits, she’s promising to shake it off, but thankfully, she wrote a song about it first.
A third track from the album, “Bad Blood,” topped the Hot 100 the following year while the electro-funk swagger of “Style” and the majestic hooks “Wildest Dreams” both cracked the Top 10.
It’s as perfect a pop album as she’s ever made. The Grammys named it Album of the Year, making Swift the first woman to win that honor twice.
The homespun indie-folk aesthetic, where the musical embodiment of cottagecore is filtered through a haze of dreamy trip-hop and folktronica embellishments, was arrived at by collaborating with producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff virtually while we were all adrift in COVID-19 quarantine.
Swift, who tracked the vocals in her L.A. home, has said she conceived of the album as “a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness.”
The result was surprisingly rooted in fiction for an artist whose lyrics to that point had tended toward autobiography.
Those forays into fiction include a trilogy of songs she calls “the Teenage Love Triangle.”
The trilogy begins with “Cardigan,” the album’s lead single, which became her sixth release to top the Hot 100. It’s a bittersweet ballad sung from the perspective of a character named “Betty,” whose boyfriend has been “playing hide-and-seek” with someone else. “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone’s bed, you put me and said I was your favorite,” she sings on the chorus.
“August” tells the tale of the affair from the perspective of the other woman. “August slipped away into a moment in time,” she sings. “’Cause you were never mine.”
The final chapter, “Betty,” is sung from the perspective of the boyfriend, James, who crashes Betty’s party, desperate for her to take him back. “I’m only 17, I don’t know anything,” he tells her. “But I know I miss you.”
It’s the crowning achievement of an album packed with brilliant storytelling, from “The Last Great American Dynasty” to “Illicit Affairs” and “Mad Woman.”
Released without warning, “Folklore” offered Swifties a welcome distraction from the tedium of isolation. That made “The 1” the perfect way to start the album, greeting listeners with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new (expletive)/ Been saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’” while checking in and introducing her new sound.
“Folklore” spent eight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart and was the biggest-selling album of the year. It also picked up Album of the Year at the Grammys, making Swift the first woman to win that honor three times.
Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.
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