The biggest artist in the world right now came out with a 31-track album of half duds. Does it matter when most of the songs are pretty good?
I should start by saying this isn’t a takedown of the latest Taylor Swift album, which I liked. Nor is it an inquiry into her love life, a tired subject, or a review of her ongoing climate-catastrophe tour occupation of Europe, which the fish are lucky isn’t taking place during football season. It’s not even a reckoning with her public persona as the Most Famous Person in many decades who gets scrutinized to such a degree that she can write more songs about being scrutinized (for young women who relate to this scrutiny, because the public eye and elementary school feel the same). It’s not a negative review because I have accepted that, well, Taylor Swift just is. She is unstoppable. Not even a brick of an album can stop her—which TTPD is decided not, despite the many prognostications otherwise. In fact, it’s often pretty good.
But first, is it possible for Taylor to make a bad album? There is a chance that TS, the celeb patron saint of meanies ruining her life (and they tried! including another Most Famous Person we’ll call Aimee), is now immune to a career-ruiner. This is a rare status among cultural juggernauts used to the seismic plate-shifting consequences of creativity and the fickleness of the masses—just ask Kanye or Katy Perry or even Paul McCartney, who sucks the blood of a virgin once a fortnight to reappear with a book of lyrics or errata to stake his relevance. Virtually anyone who was on top ten years ago has taken a step back, or rather been pushed back. Rihanna is a makeup brand, Lady Gaga is whatever brand you want her to be, and Miley Cyrus insists that each new album is finally the real her, in which Hannah Montana finally wrested creative control from the rap guys and Wayne Coyne who briefly kidnapped her. Only TS’s favorite artist Lana Del Rey weathered a public storm similar to the queen, but has settled for critic’s darling - but has decided to make the artist’s wisest choice and the celebrity’s greatest error: to be real. It earns you Pitchfork’s album of the year but certainly not a billion streams. No, in the public consciousness only Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have increased in relevance since 2024. The only ones with numbers to show for it.
So what’s the deal with TTPD? Well, to understand why the album is 31 tracks long, complete with some real diamonds in the rough—“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “But Daddy I Love Him” rank among her best pop/country—you must understand the lore of Taylor swift over the past eight years. And if you don’t, that’s okay! It’s right there in the lyrics. It appears on this album that even Taylor hasn’t gotten over things from eight years ago, which makes sense. I still have arguments with the lesbian from my high school while washing my hair. To be clear, the years 2017-2023 were romantically quite boring for TS—and creatively quite invigorating. She got massively ripped by Kanye and Kim K, aka hypebeast rap music’s Boris and Natasha, back in 2016, and went on a massive, insane, literal basket-case hiatus in which she allegedly departed her NYC apartment in a suitcase to avoid the paps. The resulting plummet from the big-budget 1989 tour, her then-apex and the highest heights a pop star could ascend to even then short of Kabbalah, not only humbled Swift but utterly humiliated her—even infuriated her. Ruined her, says Reputation. To the point where she and PR Svengali Tree Paine made the wise decision to launch a multi-scale rebranding that needs studying in Business School. First, a lawsuit against a disc jockey in Colorado who grabbed Swift’s ass on-air (the suit for $1 was genius PR and occurred at exactly the right time in the #metoo wars). Second, a new album that embraced TS’s more calculating, snake-emoji persona. And third, a demure romance with a doe-eyed Brit named Joe Alwyn whose appearance in weird British movies by Joanna Hogg and Yogurt Lanthimos gave Taylor something she did not need but was funny to watch: indie street cred from film people like Paul Schrader and Olivia Colwin. It was all very smart, it was all very weird, and it seems like years ago that even the biggest Swifties would have questioned her status as #1 star in the world, but they did!
My thesis is only this: it’s a shame that TS is unstoppable because she makes the best music when she thinks she’s the underdog. And she hasn’t been the underdog for a long time, save for the dalliance with Matt Healy that fuels most of TTPD. (Yay!) and we’re lucky for that. Indeed, since 2017 you could track her albums as an every-other situation, in which Taylor feels scorned and retreats into the studio to spin gold, and in the next album takes all that goodwill and burns it up with a treacly mix of “oh you like me, you really like me!” (Her attitude recalls the viral Meghan Trainor video about why she makes body-positivity anthems: “Oh, you like them! Well, let’s do eight of these!”) But in the past decade-ish, only her lowest lows yield her highest highs. Reputation from 2017 is a pop masterpiece in which Taylor claws her way back from the brink. The resulting mega-tour and lovey-dovey romance with Joe Alwyn must have earned back some of her confidence, because 2019’s Lover is not a good album. It’s very fun and interesting in parts, but it’s sonically dissonant and very silly and loses the cohesiveness and stark beats á la Max Martin that made Reputation a pop masterpiece. The lukewarm reception—and no Grammy noms—must have put Swift in a weird place. Lover marks the beginning of Taylor’s weird belief that when people love her, they must really want more of her; Lover is 18 hokey songs long, plus bonus tracks that trickled out as late as 2023, and half of them are skips. It was a weird era of fumbles for the queen TS, who can be forgiven insofar as she was probably living in London enjoying her life at the time: no “Cruel Summer” single (one of her biggest songs); her worst lead single “Me!” (which I loved, sorry, it’s camp); and a weird tone-deaf GLAAD-backed music video with the Queer Eyes and Katy Perry as a Hamburger. Queen, this ain’t it. Indeed, there was a chance I thought Lover might be the end for her, but then two crazy things happened—the pandemic and/or Scooter Braun, who probably deserves a “thank you/I hate you” track more than Kim K based on what he’s done for her career.
Now, Folklore is the result of really feeling like a weird kind of underdog. Her mid-career masterpiece, it offers no bangers and mostly the acoustic jams of Fearless and Speak Now sans any big string sections. In fact, it is rather moody, quiet album in the vein of miss LDR. An outlier among her catalog, the album turns away from her public persona into a fictional world of invented love triangles, her own past, and yearning, mature feelings about love affairs we already know about—now anonymous or rendered tastefully vague. The thing about Folklore is that the every-other-album thing still applies, because five months after after this album she released a new one—Evermore—which is best forgotten or labeled as a set of B-sides from Evermore. I love this woman but she really doesn’t know how to not strike while the iron is hot. This feeling only intensified months later when she finally released Fearless TV—her first of the re-recordings—and the cynical among her fans began to accept that we’d get a new album from her every five-to-six months, in between seasons of Rupaul’s Drag Race and COVID vaccinations. It was a dearth of culture at that time, so I will allow it. The bloat of Evermore makes sense when TS and Aaron Dessner were stuck inside doing nothing at “the long pond,” wherever that is. It makes sense. We were starving, as the kids say. But in 2024, I can finally shout gratitude from the rafters that it’s over—or Is It Over Now? Now I wonder if it ever will be… With the arrival of this 31-track album, I think we may be stuck in TS glut era forever.
The rest is sort of history, I guess. Fearless TV -> Red TV -> Midnights -> Speak Now TV -> 1989 TV -> now TTPD. I suppose it’s a solid run for the most famous person on earth. It’s a Pax Romana if Pax Romana was the emperor making you watch his greatest hits on a wall as the Visigoths bang at the gate. (One feels obliged to remind Taylor that the world is crumbling, but perhaps she is a distraction from that fear.) The vault songs on the four re-releases are enough to constitute their own album a la Justin Bieber’s journals. (“Electric Touch” and “I Can See You” are bangers.) There were bonus tracks for Evermore and honestly a few songs I missed in the middle. It begs the question, is there a studio on her jet? One that’s partially responsible for the emissions? All that matters is she makes music and people will listen to it. Half of the time it's just fabulous, and that’s a good hit ratio for a pop artist. (Ariana Grande wishes.) Perhaps the biggest issue is that Taylor only works with yes-people now. Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner—two soyboys from soyboy bands—feel like safe producers for her, in that they stand in awe of her power and probably her hotness and let her do whatever she wants. Producers like Shellback and Max Martin offer no such authority. These big puppet-masters of her biggest hits from Red, 1989, and Reputation are conspicuously absent any track list post-2017 and are glaringly MISSING from any of the TV versions, which is perhaps why magic doesn’t quite come together again. (Taylor, if you’re reading this, please make up with them.) I remember Lady Gaga talking about Mark Ronson in her 2017 documentary on Joanne, a country rebrand, saying he never made her feel small and never once questioned her vision. In the post-#metoo era I wouldn’t be surprised if we see lots more empowered female singer-songwriters forsaking the big guys who made their early hits. The thing is Mark Ronson is objectively less talented than Gaga’s early producers, and the same goes for Antonoff and Dessner. Nobody can craft a hit like Max Martin. But in a world where TS is more concerned with writing songs she can sing until she is fifty plus years old, i.e. no high vocal highs of “Enchanted” or even “I Knew You Were Trouble,” perhaps she simply wants a chill producer to let her sing low-tempo beats, and who can blame her? She deserves it. If we didn’t get tired of her during this run as she mastered the lazy folk and trap beats of the Post Malone-era radio—unlike Kanye or Beyonce she never seems to invent a genre as much as she masters what’s on the radio currently, i.e the gauzy vocal fry of Billie Eilish. So in that way, say it with me, Taylor Swift Just Is.
The most important thing to mention about Taylor Swift is that she makes music for people who don’t listen to much other music. This is a majority of the listening public. You know how there are people for whom Titanic is the definition of a movie or Marvel the definition of a series? Those are people for whom a new Taylor Swift album is just “that thing I’ll be playing for six months until the next one comes.” These are the picky eaters of cultural consumers, too afraid to venture past what their ears and the world immediately deems is good. I know many millennial women who buy her latest album on CD at target and leave it playing in their car console until the next one comes out, in which case they immediately replace it. (Otherwise it would be Disney Music.) This in large part explains her popularity. Taylor Swift just Is because she’s the buttered noodles of pop music. Safe and knowable. As a brand, she makes girls feel known and understood—a “safe place” as Courtney Love said, but not “a significant one.” I disagree with the latter. I do think TS is quite significant.
About the music I haven’t said much, but it’s pretty good. While I could spend paragraphs extoling the best of her songs, I will instead point to a weird, oft-overlooked feature of her life: Taylor’s secure attachment to her parents. If you don’t know Taylor’s parents Scott and Andrea, you are missing a lot of the story. Even at 34 years old, this young woman calls her mother whenever something bad happens to her. (Frankly it makes me want advice from Andrea Swift.) I remember understanding this about Lady Gaga in 2015, how the only reason she was able to survive the Anschluss of criticism about her physical appearance was that her parents would sit on the front row at concerts. The online therapist Nicole LaPera recently tweeted that the most important thing in life is “a secure emotional connection with a trusted caregiver, “a thing that most of us did not have. Now, that’s not the key to everything, but it certainly seems to make a big difference for Taylor, and explains why she feels comfortable in the limelight. For every major takedown, she has an audience of loving family to assure her she’d doing everything right. Perhaps this is why she often posits herself as a victim—something that those celebs famously ambivalent of mothers, including LDR, try not to do—but can you blame her when our culture places such a premium on victimhood right now? And what does it say about young womanhood when so many people feel not only represented by TS lyrics but… nearly healed by everything done wrong to them by men, society, and other women. Taylor Swift is an embodiment of the things that girls and gay with Big Feelings tried processing on the drive home with our moms from middle school, and we’re still not over them! Indeed, even in our mid-30s people are still so mean to us! You may not like this, but it’s the truth. Who’s afraid of little old me? is a histrionic question that all high-school tv and movies encourage us to self-dramatize about from a young age. And based on the power of the Instagram story call-out, the op-ed piece, and even the TS post-breakup call out song, the truth about self-victimization is that it is quite scary, and for those with moms telling them that everything they do is fine, it’s also rather common. Who’s afraid of little old me? Well, you probably should be. The world will soon be full of Taylor Swift’s—self-aware, media savvy, pretty young people with lists of everything anyone has done wrong to them. And we should all be ready to be one or be written about by one.
Unless, of course, they make a move bad enough to fall from grace, which is only grist for the mill—occasion enough to write another victim album that gets you back on the gallows where the public wants you. Bravo, Taylor! You won