Hi. Fave swiftie albums?? Just wondering
Oh man, this is such a cop-out answer but I really love all of them so much and I can’t choose! They’re all part of the (ever-growing) Discography(TM) that functions to me as a whole body of work. The more I have an album, and once the painful grafting on of the limb that is a new Taylor album has finished, the more I love all of them and wouldn’t remove any!
I have sort of two thoughts on her music in general (that’s a lie I have way more than two but to put that aside for a moment) and they are: 1) it’s amazing how well her music ages. Going back and listening to debut or fearless—the songs don’t feel stale at all. They have a real timeless quality to them. Like yeah!!! There really IS something about the way the street looks when it’s just rained!!!! And 2) I always feel that her best album is her most recent one. That’s definitely a controversial take—and it’s almost more of an approach my mind has to her art rather than an inflexible statement of dogmatic fact or whatever—but I don’t feel that she moves backward and I think her honing of her craft (honing her powers!!!) only gets better with time. These two truths are two halves of grappling with the Taylor Swift Artistic Journey we’re all lucky enough to see unfold before us!
All of that said, let’s run through the albums real quick just for fun.
Debut. TIMELESS. Pure Taylor essence! But with just enough flaws in her voice and the overall construction for her younger self to shine through in a way that makes it all so endearing, even though she’s definitely grown and improved since then both in terms of melody and wordsmithing.
Fearless. We take it for granted now! Because in a way it was kind of the first Taylor album to build the bedrock of what we know of her. Almost too perfectly constructed for everyone to be able to handle. I think Fearless is one where you’re really surprised at how well it holds up when you go back and listen.
Speak Now. This one is probably the most personal to me! Because it was the first one where I just fully let her in and so the nostalgia is crazy strong. I also love love love this album and I feel like it’s such a ME album because it’s about love as a subject (and growing up) but there’s no men in it. She’s not grappling directly with a man who refuses to love her (besides Dear John) but she is engaging with the subject matter of love and relationships, fairytale and reality, in such a real way. It’s about her more than it is about any of the men.
Red. This is where the grappling with a new kind of heartbreak shows up. It IS about the guy. You can feel his presence; you can feel Taylor wrestle; you can feel her learn lessons she wishes she hadn’t. Taylor’s version made me remember how much I love this one.
1989. The album that pretends it is not about a guy. This is the Perfect pop album with full engineering powers on display full of more mystery and shadows and sadness and depression than you’d guess. The vault cracks this one open and brings back the Taylor CORE she was holding back for so many different reasons. (2014 was a time.)
Reputation. I’ve held this one at arm’s length for a while and in light of everything that we know now but I’ll always come back to it. There’s always a place. It’s special to me now—in light of the central love story falling apart—for how she musically stretches beyond her usual palette while still being her. (Ready for it is one of her most underrated hits of all time.)
Lover. I mean the range. The RANGE. The range. It’s a sad album and an album that contains more than one lie but the restless searching in it still resonates forever. And again—an album has rarely had more range.
Folklore. I mean, it’s crazy work. A shift in her art for sure even though it maddened me and still maddens me that this is the exception for Taylor haters. It’s still Taylor! What can I even say about this. Almost a mood stretch for her; speaking in other voices allowed her to stretch what she wanted to say so she could be free from the confines of writing from her own perspective. Important for that reason. And yet also the more time that passes the more you see that this IS about Taylor.
Evermore. One of my favorite favorites. Just SO. GOOD. It is, in a way, like relaxed folklore. She just sinks into it. She was in a groove; she was in a bag; no one could stop her and culturally we actually stopped being able to keep up with her after this album.
Midnights. Somehow both a blockbuster and an interlude at the same time. Only Taylor could have something that was, I believe, a space for her to gather her thoughts while tortured poets bubbled under the surface and she started touring become the blockbuster moment that it was. I love this one and the bitterness I associated with it for so long has settled into something more peaceful and timeless. Best believe she’s still bejeweled!
Tortured Poets. I mean I think I would say this is her greatest single work so far!!!! I totally get it when people put this as number one. No one has had time to unpack it and it hit at the “wrong” time for the general public to appreciate. But the album is still there growing and growing in power. This is the album that tackles her own life again, something she’d been avoiding doing directly since Lover. But she brings with her all the storytelling instincts (vs. the more diary-like instincts of earlier albums) from folklore through midnights. It’s insane; it’s timeless. It is about the breakdown of her most important relationship and so in a way the truest truth of ALL of her work and the most revealing thing she’s ever written. I’m obsessed with the way she wrote so much almost as a privacy cover? And in a way it worked? The general public doesn’t react to her or her exes in the same way because SHE was simply doing so much. She became the story (and her tour and her monster-like success and the larger than life of it all) but in a way that was all just so she could bury the real simple ugly horrifying story in plain sight. Scholars will study this for years.
The Life of a Showgirl. Wayyyyyy underappreciated. If I see someone call this album “cute and fun but that’s okay we love cute and fun” one more time I will LOSE it. But time will pay it its dues. This is Taylor at her most relaxed. It is the exhale after tortured poets. But it isn’t light and it isn’t frivolous, especially not with eldest daughter and ruin the friendship at its core. In a way (I know I keep saying that but everything is in a way) this is Taylor’s wisdom on full display.
Thanks for asking! Can’t wait to see what she does next.
