1. 1989 (2014)
1989 is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. At the 58th Grammy Awards in 2016, 1989 won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, making Swift the first female solo artist to win Album of the Year twice.
Taylor Swift started breaking up with country music long before she first stepped out with hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback for three pop-leaning songs on 2012’s blockbuster Red. It’s more that Swift’s music attracts the kind of serious critical attention afforded almost none of her peers. So on her fifth album, when she indulges her crush on Eighties synth-pop, she goes full blast, spending most of the album trying to turn herself into the Pet Shop Boys. The album was supported by seven singles, including three US Billboard Hot 100 number ones: “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”, and “Bad Blood”. 1989 is far more electronic than previous work, driven by Martin’s trademark drum programming and synthesizers, pulsating bass and processed backing vocals.
2. Reputation (2017)
Taylor Swift’s sixth studio album, Reputation, which is fifteen tracks long, is filled with songs that range from forgettable to exquisite, it is concerned with lust, loss and revenge.
This was the time she was beleaguered and defensive, a figure fighting back from public relations problems she largely could’ve avoided. She stepped into back-and-forths with Nicki Minaj and her eternal nemesis Kanye West. Reputation is her most intimate album – a song cycle about how it feels when you stop chasing romance and start letting your life happen. As one of the all-time great pop masterminds, she’s trying something new, as she always does. Nonetheless, it’s Swift’s refusal to have to choose between delightfully effervescent sonic values and raw, classic candor that makes Reputation the pop album of the year.
Reputation was preceded by two singles, the Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit “Look What You Made Me Do” and top-five hit “…Ready for It?”. Reputation debuted atop the Billboard 200, and made Swift the first artist to have four albums each sell over one million copies within one week, and has been certified threefold platinum. Reputation received a nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 61st Grammy Awards, becoming her second nomination in the category, following 1989.
3. Taylor Swift (self-titled) (2006)
Taylor Swift’s self-titled 2006 debut arrived at a fortuitous moment for young women in country music, particularly those with crossover ambitions.
Released a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Taylor swift spoke to a constituency of country music that pretty much been ignored since LeAnn Rimes. Her phrasing is occasionally challenged and her voice proves unable to deliver when a more mature range is required. The 16-year-old Swift crash-landed into this landscape with “Tim McGraw,” a saudade-drenched mid-tempo ballad that’s as much a love letter to music’s power as it is to a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend leaving for college. The album turned out to be a solid, spunky-yet-reflective country record told squarely from the teenage perspective.
Five singles were released from Taylor Swift, all of which reached the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and has been certified platinum or multi-platinum. Swift’s debut single and the album’s lead single, “Tim McGraw”, peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. In the US alone, it topped the Billboard Top Country Albums Chart for 24 weeks, and was certified 7× Platinum by the RIAA for sales of over seven million copies.
Now, Swift is a knot of contradiction: a country singer who does not make country music.
4. Folklore (2020)
Taylor Swift’s surprise eighth album, Folklore, takes 16 complex and intriguing tunes by pop’s reigning colossus and gussies them up in atmospherics acceptable to the mature indie rock listener.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Swift wrote the album while in quarantine. Folklore is acoustic and shows an even more mature side to Swift with its music and lyrics. Swift writes about love in a more reflective manner than in her earlier albums, which react to the events of her life in the moment.
The delights of Folklore, an audacious and almost-too-rich feast of an album, is that Swift moves away from a solid sense of the first person. There are fictional stories, there are historical stories, there are personal stories—and there are all three in the space of single songs. It’s amusing, in retrospect, how people actually worried that being happy in love might mean Swift would run out of things to write songs about. Not a chance. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories.
Folklore broke numerous records on streaming services, including the Guinness World Record for the biggest opening day for an album by a female artist on Spotify. The album sold two million copies in its first week globally, 1.3 million of which were sold on its first day. On the Billboard 200 chart, Folklore debuted at number one with 846,000 units moved, giving Swift her seventh consecutive number-one album in the United States, and immediately became the best-selling album of 2020.
5. Fearless (2008)
As the solo writer or the co-writer of all of her material, Swift has demonstrated a real facility with how to structure a pop song.
Swift writes what she knows—typical teenage drama that is honest, if largely vapid—is what appeals to her primary fanbase, who equate her plain-spokenness with one-of-us authenticity. “When you’re 15, somebody tells you they you love you, you’re gonna believe it,” runs the chorus of Fifteen. This is both clever – at a stroke it broadens her potential market from teenage girls to anyone who used to be a teenage girl.
With her second album, Swift aims to extend her dominion beyond the country-music-loving red states. Songs like “Fearless” and “The Way I Loved You” are packed with loud, lean guitars and rousing choruses. Swift brings listeners straight to the dreaded football-game bleachers and mean-girl maze of high school. She took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same, navigating the cloying innocence of a girl who simultaneously experiences relationships, knowing know that not all kisses end in a rainstorm.
The most awarded album in the history of country music, Fearless won Album of the Year at the Grammys, the Country Music Association Awards, and the Academy of Country Music Awards. The Grammy for Album of the Year made Swift, then 20 years old, the youngest artist to win the award at the time. Fearless spent 11 weeks atop the US Billboard 200 and was the best-selling album of 2009 in the United States. Worldwide, it is one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century, having sold over 12 million copies worldwide.
6. Red (2012)
Swift’s biggest achievement on Red is continuing to ignore critics looking to hold her back. Her songwriting is sharper than ever. Vocal training pays off in a big way (especially late in the album), and there is the familiar balance of glee and heartache one craves.
Red, in many respects, feels like the last pure Taylor Swift album we’ll ever get. It’s not just the last one before her career became consumed by the narratives that grow from it, but also the last one before she completely engineered her music for world domination. “Red” puts Swift the artist front and center with big, beefy hooks that transcend her country roots for a genre-spanning record that reaches heights unseen. Nonetheless, Swift has made it clear that she is never going to be pigeonholed, and will always strive for relatable transcendence. Her goal was to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country, and she succeeded.
Red was supported by seven singles in total, four of which became top ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100—the lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” topped the chart for three weeks, marking Swift’s first number-one single in the United States. Red received nominations for Album of the Year and Best Country Album at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, and for Album of the Year at the 2013 Country Music Association Awards.
7. Speak Now (2010)
Speak Now, is certainly part of Swift’s narrative arc. Existing in the liminal space between pop-country and country-pop, Speak Now was, at the time, the first album to be touted as entirely Swift-penned.
Swift’s appeal (especially among young, female fans) lies in her willingness to serve up earnest, confessional morsels paired with infectiously melodic hooks that blur the boundaries between country, pop and rock. Taylor Swift’s third album Speak Now opens with one of her best songs. “Mine” is pure, Platinum pop-country perfection, as well as an amalgam of what had already made Swift a record-breaking superstar at the age of 20: open-hearted romanticism, a careful balance of pop hooks and gentle twang, and the kind of evocative lyrics that can transport you right back to the halls of your high school or to that last night out with the one that got away.
Some might say Speak Now, is roughly twice as good as 2008’s Fearless, which is roughly twice as good as her 2006 debut. But, it still a ridiculously over-the-top cliché project that sees Swift wrestle with her outsider persona and sudden celebrity, and the dissonance weighing heavily on her relationships.
Speak Now, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, giving Swift her second consecutive chart-topper in the U.S. Its first-week sales of 1,047,000 copies was the fifth-biggest debut in history for a female artist, the third biggest ever by a country album (the first being Swift’s own Red album later released in 2012), the biggest in five and a half years, and the biggest first week sales of 2010. The album also made music history for claiming the biggest one-week sales tally for an album by a female country artist. The album spent six weeks at number one. At the 54th Grammy Awards, Speak Now received three nominations, including one for the Best Country Album; its third single “Mean” won Grammy Awards for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance.
8. Lover (2019)
Lover, is too long, containing a handful of tracks that could only be described as filler, and is let down by some extremely clumsy moments, both musically and lyrically.
Still, Lover largely come from a place of contentment and satisfaction in the middle of a strong relationship, rather than chronicling its downfall. But most significantly, on Lover, Swift looks back on her youth as both mood and metaphor, marking a significant shift from the storytelling in Red, 1989, and Reputation. She’s a pop star who—over a career that’s spanned thirteen plus years, more than seven albums and at least a dozen songs that have become immortalized in pop culture iconography.
Woke overtures fit into the wider strategy of using Lover to reposition Taylor Swift at pop music’s center. You still get a heaping serving of Swift’s synth-heavy trademark sound, but working with producers Jack Antonoff, Joel Little, and others, she’s created a more pleasing iteration of it than the last album was able to muster. It’s enticing and also structurally impressive, an obstacle course of smart turns of phrase and bridges that build tension as its choruses rocket into the stratosphere.
Lover debuted atop the Billboard 200, giving Swift her sixth consecutive number-one album in the US. Globally, Lover was the top-selling studio album of 2019, selling over 3.2 million pure copies worldwide, and set the Guinness World Record for the biggest-selling album of the year by a solo artist.