There is no confusion as to the unprecedented scale of Taylor Swift’s pop superstardom now, and there hasn’t been for many years. Starting with her crossover breakout on “Red” in 2012, followed by her full anointment on “1989” two years later, she solidified her spot as American pop’s alpha figure on “Reputation,” the 2017 album in which she catalyzed tabloid fixation into some of the most radical music of her career. The Eras Tour, which ran for almost two years with a set list encompassing her whole career, cemented her global dominance.
But it wasn’t always this way. Swift’s beginnings as an unlikely country arriviste meant that her path to the top was winding and unlikely. There were bold musical risks, unanticipated speed bumps both creative and public, and a fiery resolve to triumph over any and all of those obstacles.
Her forthcoming album, “The Life of a Showgirl” (due Friday, Oct. 3), has been advertised as a return to Swift’s pure pop ambition, thanks to her reunion with Swedish writers and producers Max Martin and Shellback, responsible for some of her biggest hits.
The pop music team of The New York Times wrote about the first moments they understood Swift’s pop star destiny.
2009: The Fearless Tour
Taylor Swift performs onstage at a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden in New York, Aug. 27, 2009. Look back at six pivotal moments as the singer and songwriter prepares to release her 12th original studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” (Chad Batka/The New York Times)
When a 19-year-old Taylor Swift played Madison Square Garden in 2009 on her first-ever national tour, she was nominally a country singer. She had made two albums in and around Nashville, Tennessee, backed by guitars, banjo, fiddle and pedal steel. Extensive country radio airplay was the foundation of her crossover into the pop Top 10 with the hits “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me.” But Swift was singing about high school, not honky-tonks, and the country trappings barely contained songs that were constructed like crisp pop bangers, complete with Swift’s beloved bridges.
At Madison Square Garden, Swift leaned into a persona that often still serves her now — the wronged, vengeful and ever stronger ex-girlfriend — and she cranked up the guitars and the drama onstage. For the teenage girls soaking up every bit of big-sisterly advice and shouting along with the lyrics, she was absolutely a pop star already. — JON PARELES
2009: ‘You Belong With Me’ at the VMAs
FILE – In this Sept. 13, 2009 file photo, singer Kanye West takes the microphone from singer Taylor Swift as she accepts the “Best Female Video” award during the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, file)
What the world mostly remembers of this night is Swift’s collision with Ye, formerly Kanye West (four eternal words: “I’mma let you finish”), as she was accepting the best female video award for “You Belong With Me.” But her performance of that song earlier in the show — which began with a (staged) segment inside a New York City subway car, on Swift’s way to finish atop a yellow taxi parked outside Radio City Music Hall — was her intended statement, symbolically crashing the party in a perfect red dress. The night would end up a double blueprint for Swift’s career for years to come: big-tent pop ambition, intertwined with unending celebrity drama. — BEN SISARIO
2010: A First Foray Into US Weekly Pop: ‘Dear John’
John Mayer and Taylor Swift perform during Jingle Ball 2009 at Madison Square Garden in New York, Dec. 12, 2009. Look back at six pivotal moments as the singer and songwriter prepares to release her 12th original studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” (Rahav Segev/The New York Times)
Whatever did or did not happen between Swift and John Mayer in 2009 and 2010 is unknowable, and perhaps ultimately irrelevant. In the eyes of fervid fans and in the pages of tabloids, whatever smoke emanated from the two of them in the wake of their collaboration “Half of My Heart” was real fire.
Then came those two guitar figures at the beginning of “Dear John”: the first, a flat, plangent strum, followed by the second, an irritating, almost whining meow.
Simple — almost innocent — but undeniably a declaration of war.
“Dear John,” from Swift’s third album, “Speak Now,” is a Mayeresque takedown of Mayer. (Allegedly.) It is snide, and also hilarious, and also freakishly sad. Drowsy but sly, it’s an almost seven-minute dissection that animatedly and precisely channels the soporific blues-pop that Mayer had perfected on albums like “Continuum” and “Battle Studies.” Using her purported tormentor’s tools against him, and demonstrating her own casual mastery of a style not her own, Swift robbed him of his power. It’s a savage song — one of her most searing — and one of the great kiss-offs in pop music history.
By that point, only a few years into her career, Swift had found herself the subject of gossip attention, but “Dear John” was her first true foray into US Weekly pop, making a song fully formed by the heat of the spotlight, and designed to be served right back into it.
Her ascent continued unimpeded, but the song marked a shift in Mayer’s public life. In 2012, he told Rolling Stone he was “humiliated” by his portrayal in it, and suggested Swift had bullied him with her prodigious songwriting gift: “How would you feel if, at the lowest you’ve ever been, someone kicked you even lower?” — JON CARAMANICA
2010: The ‘Mine’ Pop Mix
Before the Taylor’s Version alternates, there were the pop mixes. And after “Love Story,” the first single from “Fearless” in 2008, there was no going back. As a country-pop crossover smash, the song became the first in history to go No. 1 on both genres’ radio formats; not that it needed it, but there was even a dumbed-down reproduction — “Love Story (Pop Mix)” — with its instrumentation simplified and digitized. (Swift’s label at the time, Big Machine, had tried something similar with “Teardrops on My Guitar,” from her self-titled debut, but there was no hiding that twang then.) “Love Story” hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “You Belong With Me” would go on to peak two spots higher.
So when it came time to follow up her mainstream breakout, Swift’s omnidirectional savvy showed me where things were headed. As an album, “Speak Now” in 2010 was a pit stop on the road to the full-scale ambitions of “Red” and “1989,” meant to shore up her diaristic credibility in the face of those questioning her pen, with no collaborative songwriters to be found in the liner notes across 14 tracks. But its lead single, “Mine,” a spiritual sequel and underrated companion piece to “Love Story” — “you made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” (!) — was having it both ways, with a pop mix of its own.
It works arguably better than those before, the strums and plucks of producer Nathan Chapman’s guitars sped up and smoothed out, his banjo excised entirely. But genre limitations all of a sudden felt beside the point. Swift performed the song on “Dancing With the Stars,” it reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and “Speak Now” sold more than 1 million copies in its first week, nearly double that of its predecessor. From then on, the pop mix would prove superfluous. — JOE COSCARELLI
2012: The ‘Trouble’ Drop
“I Knew You Were Trouble” starts with a clean, syncopated guitar chord. A kick drum joins, underscoring the rhythm, then a bass slides into the mix. For about a minute, Swift’s voice, growing more insistent, is the driving source of the drama, singing about the push and pull of a (bad) boyfriend. When she reaches the hiccuping pre-chorus — “I knew you were trouble when you walked in,” her voice galloping between octaves — the music falls out, save for a piano striking the main chords and few spare guitar strums.
Quickly, the song starts to grow again: drums, doubled vocal tracks, more guitars, more processing. And then, it comes. The drop: an enormous synthy bass with a familiar dubstep wobble.
“Trouble” was one of a trio of songs Swift wrote with Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback for her 2012 album, “Red” (the others were “22″ and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”), and it heralded a genuine interest in engaging with the pop formats of the moment. Dubstep, a grimy mode of electronic dance music with teeth-rattling, oscillating bass, had worked its way into the mainstream via artists like Skrillex, whose 2010 EP “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” became a landmark. Swift credited Ed Sheeran with introducing her to the style, and said she’d told her collaborators she wanted the music to sound “as chaotic as that emotion felt.”
A drop — a build, a pause and then a tension-breaking explosion — is a hallmark of DJ sets, jam-band improvisations and anywhere listeners are reveling in musical ecstasy. On “Trouble,” Swift uses it to replicate the whiplash of a curdled romance. “Oh!” she shrieks as a wall of synths and bass vibrates around her. It was a startling, thrilling moment — the sound of something new brewing. — CARYN GANZ
2014: ‘1989’
Taylor Swift performs on her “1989” world tour at Nationals Park in Washington, July 13, 2015. Look back at six pivotal moments as the singer and songwriter prepares to release her 12th original studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
In fall 2014, Swift and her very 2014 flat-ironed bob were filmed by MTV talking to Jack Antonoff, the producer she’d worked with for the first time on her upcoming album, “1989.” Though she’d long established her pop bona fides on the world-conquering “You Belong With Me,” and had later worked with pop maestro Max Martin on “Red,” she was billing “1989” as her “very first documented, official pop album.”
She wanted to make it clear, though, that “1989” was devoid of “evil pop” — a term that she and Antonoff used in the studio, to define an aesthetic they were trying to avoid. “Evil pop,” she clarified in that interview, “is when you’re singing something in your head and it’s like an ‘ohh,’ or an ‘ooh,’ and you don’t know why, because it’s brainless.” Swift asserted that she was aiming for something smarter and more purposeful. “If it’s stuck in your head,” she said of the pop on “1989,” “I want you to know what the song is about as well.”
Over the subsequent decade, when it comes to Swift’s songwriting philosophy, that distinction has proved to be her North Star. Even when she’s streamlined her song structures into their most radio-friendly forms — as she did on “1989” hits like “Blank Space,” “Style” and “Shake It Off,” and on much later singles like “Cruel Summer” and “Anti-Hero” — Swift has always kept an emphasis on lyricism and storytelling. Those tracks were expertly engineered to become lodged in your brain, sure, but at least you knew what you were singing about. Who said all earworms have to be evil? Certainly not Taylor Swift. — LINDSAY ZOLADZ
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