This winning combination warrants countless replays and, even now, listening to this song more than 10 years later reminds many of us so strongly of a crush we had when we were younger. Casting aside the usual lengthy album campaigns or meticulously planned drip-feeding of singles, T-Swiz uncharacteristically announced Folklore the day before it was released. But once the title track's idyllic and endearing comedown is over, and the atmospheric funeral march for past woes of "The Archer" makes way for new beginnings, Lover has very few high points after its fifth track. Pam Grier reflects on her most iconic roles, from, now backpedaling their initial criticisms, unrequited love looming on the high school bleachers, Professor of Commercial Music explains to EW, reclaiming the masters of her life's work, New Reputation: Taylor Swift shares intel on TS7, fan theories, and her next era, The best song from every Taylor Swift album. Some songs lean more country ("Mean") whereas others hint at the musical experimentation that would follow in subsequent albums ("Enchanted," "Haunted"), and, yet, the album is a mix of styles that seamlessly blend together. Rather, it recalls the key moments of a love gone awry in arresting detail "I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age" wasting not a single word in confronting a past partner many years her senior (unanimously believed to be Jake Gyllenhaal) nearly 10 years after the fact. The Definitive Ranking of Every Song on Taylor Swift's 1989 Grammy winner's fifth studio album is officially out today, and we cannot stop listening to these top five songs By Jenna Mullins. Almost 15 years ago, before the Grammy awards and international tours, a fresh-faced, 17-year-old Taylor Swift released her self-titled debut album. Taylor herself referred to it as her "only true breakup album," and like her today, whatever heartache made us once cling to Red for the solace is (hopefully) behind us now. She draws from her accumulated life experience and musical insight to connect with her younger self, refining her past homages to youth with matured, knowing vocals (dropping her country inflection for a more rounded singsong). All necessary praise aside, one of the great joys of tracing Taylor Swift's arc is seeing her sound bleed across genres, from country and pop to (half-baked) hip-hop and folk and back. Rosen is right this album combines intimate lyrics and incredibly catchy tunes and it is showcased in Swift's hit single "You Belong With Me," an upbeat anthem for those dealing with unrequited love. Here Taylor sacked off her country roots and embraced full-blown pop. Although there are standout individual songs on the album, "Taylor Swift" isn't particularly cohesive and now that her discography has been built up, it's hard to rank this high when listeners now know exactly what she's capable of. In short, her seventh LP suffers from the common complaint waged even by adamant fans: when Taylor is good, she's great, and when she's not, well she's forgettable. These were the de facto anthems for young listeners especially, clutching MP3 players to the chest like rosaries as we projected onto Taylor's portraits of then-mythical teen love. document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "ae642da28755683afdf2ec0fe06ed858" );document.getElementById("facec42938").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 1,062 Likes, 2 Comments - BLKPIK IDI ( ) (@blackpink.india) on Instagram: "#TaylorSwift, BLACKPINK and #OliviaRodrigo are the only female artists ranking inside IFPI's Top 10" So while it's vehemently impressive that an adolescent was the creative force behind the best tracks on a seven-time platinum record, it doesn't change the fact that it's far from her best work, and mostly made of songs that slip through her legacy's cracks more than any other album. "Cold As You" highlights Swift's talent in writing beautiful lyrics about heartbreak, a key Swift signature: "You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray / And I stood there loving you, and wished them all away / And you come away with a great little story / Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.". Even so, there are simply too many placeholders on Lover's 18-track roster for it to fare well against her discography's worthier, meatier contenders. It won a mantelpiece of awards including the Grammy for Album of the Year but perhaps even more impressive is the fact its already left a massive impact, a mere six years after it was released. "Fearless" outranks "Taylor Swift" as it has more standout songs and has a cohesive sound that distinctly country-pop. For the album ranking, I considered a few factors including cohesiveness, listening experience, the number and quality of standout songs, and if the album is musically interesting or lyrically special. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. ), and is occasionally clumsy in its comebacks. The euphoric Mastermind takes it one step further, where on it Swift admits: No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So Ive been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless/This is the first time Ive felt the need to confess. In the 2017 article, Jenkins also noted that this album features hip-hop influences, something Swift hasn't really done before. That said, this album ranked below the others as it plays it a bit safer than some of the music released later in her career. But Swifts most recent three albums are united through their more matured temperament and the stark intimacy of Swifts songwriting, with the comparatively scaled-back nature of her sound serving as a natural extension of this methodology. In a statement when her tenth studio album was first revealed Swift explained this project is the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, meaning its filled with the sorts of realisations that only hit you in the wee hours. Morgan Wallen One Thing at a Time (2023) 20. Your email address will not be published. She's an artist defined by eras (as is the name of her heavily anticipated upcoming tour) a Reputation era for self-defense, a Lover era for romantic solace which her adoring fans latch onto and assign to their own life stages with fervor. And the majority of Lover proves her path to better things, being an airy, whipped topping "love letter to love," both for the self and for a partner. The record's tales unfold into imagined personal histories, with what Swift calls the "Teenage Love Triangle" songs (suspected to be "Cardigan," "August," and "Betty") painting three vivid portraits of an interwoven affair at different points in time. This time, she trades her upbeat synth-pop for overt trap tremors and heavy-handed hip-hop, like harsh emergency strobes disrupting a blacked-out cityscape. Its a dazzling, surprising album, brimming with career-best moments, and heralded a brave new direction for the pop star. When it comes to things other than boys, though, Swift has always preferred to dip her toes in rather than get soaking wet; her transformation from country teen to pop queen was, after all, a decade in the making. It was the first taste the world got of Swifts deeply confessional songwriting, and from that moment, we were hooked. And that's really all Swift, whose genius for conversational melodies and knack for giving every chorus a telling new twist every time around remain unmistakable trademarks.". Her once apolitical music is, on Lover, peppered with references to Americas current state of affairs, both thinly veiled (Death by a Thousand Cuts) and more overt (You Need to Calm Down). ", As Craig Jenkins for Vulture put it, "Although the album fixates on big enemies and bad reputations, the buried lede is a quiet romance budding in spite of them. That early nuance and the fact that she wrote this entire album completely on her own is no small feat. First emerging as a country-crossover artist, shes since embraced glossy pure pop and indie-folk; but while her sound may have changed, Swifts brilliantly honest lyricism and songwriting talent has remained a keystone in her tunes. On earworm lead-single Anti-Hero Swift sings: Its me/Hi/Im the problem, its me, the kind of thought weve all had when lying awake trying to drift off. "Drew looks at me / I fake a smile so he won't see / that I want and I'm needin' / Everything that we should be" was as good as poetry, and a north star to the forlorning that looms in girlhood. Its an effortless fusion that, like much of 1989, displays Swifts willingness to venture outside her comfort zone without much of a safety net, and test out an array of sonic experiments that feel both retro and of the moment. Let's be clear: There are no bad Taylor Swift albums. She also adds that with her recent re-recording of previous albums, Swift has "unlocked something brilliant and fresh in her songwriting," by dipping her toe back into previous eras. With the addition of six from the Vault tracks (songs written at the same time as the album, that Swift shared with the re-recorded version), it was like opening a musical time-capsule; with tracks like the emotive Fifteen taking on a new meaning as a poignant tribute to her teenage life. "Fearless" might just be the best opening guitar riff of her applicable albums (Taylor Swift, Speak Now, and Evermore's are less so) fringed with a summer's day twang and immediately infecting the listener with a blissful dose of euphoria, like a spoonful of syrup taken between smiling lips. It made sense then for this, her second studio album, which won her four Grammys including Album of the Year, to be the first altar in the "Taylor's Version" re-recording saga. Painting the picture of an unravelling relationship, it gradually crescendos, climaxing in the gut-punch couplet of And you call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest. 1989 is a masterclass in how to make a timeless pop record. today i'm ranking all of taylor swift's songs and music from every album + more! "Red" and "Lover" remain in the middle of the pack. The Taylor Swift's Albums Tier List below is created by community voting and is the cumulative average rankings from 131 submitted tier lists. But Evermore finds Swift digging further into her explorations of narrative voice and shifting points of view, taking bigger risks in trying to discover how the newfound breadth of her songwriting could possibly reconcile with the arc of her career. Annie Galvin, Evermore is at once as confident and complete a statement as Folklore. It's humbling to hear a decades-defining artist at the absolute top of her career sing confessionals about self-loathing ("I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror") and toxic longing ("I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I'd be saved with a perfect kiss") with less inhibition than ever before. It's as if we're sitting round a campfire confiding in one another, sharing painful memories of when our best wasn't good enough, when our savior complex sputtered out, and when we watched them walk away. Immediate highlights include tracks like "Willow," an upbeat song that transports listeners back to the "Folklore" universe. Sal Cinquemani, Midnights is far removed from the folk instrumentation of Folklore and Evermore, coming closest to mirroring 1989s more uptempo electro-pop palette. But past skeptics be damned, the album has stood the test of time, with many now backpedaling their initial criticisms to revel in her unabashed outbursts of rage and ecstasy and its thematic anchor of tender love and care. Songs like Love Story, You Belong with Me and Fifteen, filled with heart-on-sleeve lyrics and earworm hooks, remain among her best. Taylor Swift's 10 seminal albums, ranked In honor of her instant-classic, record-breaking new LP Midnights , here's EW's ranking of Taylor Swift's 10 studio albums from her illustrious career. Ten albums, a mantelpiece of awards and over a decade later, Swift has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet. Other notable tracks include "Illicit Affairs," "Invisible String," and "Betty.". Whether thats emphasizing the wrong syllables of words because she hadnt quite mastered the meter of language (most notable on Teardrops on My Guitar) or mixing metaphors (on Picture to Burn and the otherwise catchy Our Song), theres a lack of polish and editing on Taylor Swift. The finished product is, of course, sterling. And we'd be remiss not to highlight the otherwise overlooked single "Today was a Fairytale" that is just as fantastical and hooky as Fearless' trademark tracks, but was unjustly tacked onto the soundtrack for the unfortunate 2010 film Valentine's Day (wherein Taylor made her acting debut as a kissing partner for then-boyfriend Taylor Lautner). It's no exaggeration, then, to say almost every emotion has been articulated by Taylor Swift at some point, whether in broad-stroke breakup anthems or close-to-the-chest confessionals. While she had flirted with a transition from country in Red two years prior, 1989 came full throttle with heightened production from soon-to-be mainstay producer Jack Antonoff (of Fun. Marjorie is a tear-jerking tribute to her late grandmother and Justin Vernon-duet Evermore is a euphoric beacon of hope that feels especially poignant at the end of 2020. She's since genre-jumped from country to proper pop, to electro R&B and bare-backed folk. It marks a shift from the retro-minded pop-rock of 1989 toward a harder, more urban aesthetic, and Swift wears the stiff, clattering beats of songs like Ready for It? like body armor. Speak Now. evermore. The best Taylor Swift's Albums rankings are on the top of the list and the worst rankings are on the bottom. Her detour is immediately apparent with a simple piano opening on "the 1," as piano chords echo a slight reverb off a guitar's strum-claps, while melancholy ballad "exile" (feat. Overall, the beauty of revisiting Red is that many of us, at points high and low, have related to its caustic, dizzying array of emotion, tracing the nonlinear trajectory of falling in love, breaking your heart, and putting it back together again. But over a decade later, Taylor makes the incredible move of re-recording her teenaged relics almost note-for-note, now at 31 years old. Expectations were sky high, raising the stakes with them; just how close can Taylor fly to the sun? And, of course, "Marjorie" is a masterful and beautiful tribute to Swift's grandmother that's packed with soulful and illustrative lyrics. But folklore is more a shuffled series of vignettes than a throughlined story, planting the lyrics with easter eggs recurring motifs (a favorite cardigan), places (cobblestone paths), and events (pulling up in a car, professing love on the porch) to offer conflicting perspectives of a love long ago lost. There are, of course, a handful of golden tunes (Dancing with Our Hands Tied, Call It What You Want, Delicate). 2023 Oscars predictions: See who will win at the 95th Academy Awards. Her door to escapism opened for lonesome, fractured listeners everywhere, who dove headfirst into the cottagecore sound grove, and relished in Swift's unexpected pivot towards barer-boned, folk-styled songwriting with electro-adjacent undertones whispered throughout. Thus, Taylor Swift is reduced to the last spot on our ranking, partially by default, though also with respect and not without a good fight. Gone is the will-they-won't-they tension of Reputation's hushed, closed-door affair; Taylor's Lover is here to stay, and this seventh studio album exists almost solely to deliver that proclamation between a few self-love clichs ("I'm the only one of me") and tired girl-power taglines ("If I was a man / Then I'd be the man"). Though the album is gorgeously hooky as a whole, and overall perfect for belting in the car for a pick-me-up, it's not hard to imagine Katy Perry or even Demi Lavato as a stand-in singer for the LP's lowest moments. Some of her trademarksher gift for melody, her third-act POV reversalswere already present here, but theres a sloppiness to the writing that shes long since cleaned up. And theres what Swift has called The Teenage Love Triangle, a trio of songs (Betty, Cardigan and August) that explore a knotty romance from three peoples perspectives. Still, what some may see as folklore's central weakness is in actuality its greatest strength. Keefe, In the run-up to the release of her sixth album, Reputation, Swift was excoriated by fans and foes alike for too often playing the victim. In a review for Rolling Stone, Claire Shaffer called the album "a refreshing change of pace.". The album's opening, "Ready For It?," is an aptly-titled shockwave to the system compared to her previous work, abandoning instrumental lead-ins for a feel-it-in-your-bones bass machine accelerating into a rap? Cruel Summer, co-written with St. Vincent, a euphoric three minutes of exhilarating 80s synth-pop, should have been a single. The album finds Swift living up to all of the praise she earned for her songwriting earlier in career. As J. English penned for NPR in 2017, this album really helped solidify Swift's identity in the music world. Editors Note: This article was originally published on July 6, 2021. and Bleachers fame), who employs an undercurrent of drums that boom like palms on metal doors and vocals that echo as if off skyscrapers. But back to the music. His contributions here are uniformly clean and efficient, but plenty of his signature production tics, even if theyre presented here in a fresh context, are beginning to feel overused. But reputation is much more than an extended diss track; It's also a not-so-private ceremony for a new, hush-hush love affair (that years later blossoms into a now-rumored engagement to partner Joe Alwyn). Love for a song about the worst parts of yourself grows on your heart like a burn on the skin. What makes Taylor's first foray into pop so often irresistible is her ability to rise above the genre's preoccupation with recycled hooks and surface level lyrics. 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