Reputation is, without a doubt, Taylor's most polarizing work to date. Ten albums, a mantelpiece of awards and over a decade later, Swift has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet. Your email address will not be published. But as we all know, Taylor Swift isn't like other artists. Paul Attard, Considering that Swifts previous material was almost always better when she tossed the ill-fitting country signifiers and focused on her uncanny gift for writing pop hooks, Red was a smart, if overdue, move for the singer. 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. evermore - 85. evermore was Swift's ninth studio album. Released in 2012, "Red" is a clear departure from Swift's country days, though she holds onto her signatures, like tragic tales told with beautiful lyrics and upbeat, catchy hits, pivoting easily between the two. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. "Epiphany," track 13 on "Folklore," is written with Swift's grandfather in mind. Haim collaboration No Body, No Crime is a full-blown country revenge song, while Long Story Short and Gold Rush fuse Swifts new sound with some 1984-era gloss. The brooding production glitches and glitters, embracing the indietronica thats permeated the last few The National records. She's since genre-jumped from country to proper pop, to electro R&B and bare-backed folk. The best All Taylor Swift Songs (including Midnights) rankings are on the top of the list and the worst rankings are on the bottom. Entertainment Weekly may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. There are, of course, a handful of golden tunes (Dancing with Our Hands Tied, Call It What You Want, Delicate). Pick what song you like better in each battle to get an accurate list of your favourite songs. Red is filled with top notch tunes: the brilliantly snarky We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Swifts first ever Billboard 100 Number One) and fizzing 22 are stone-cold smashers. 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. folklore. It's a dreamy pop album, though not fully aligned with that subgenre thanks to more of Jack Antonoff's signature production, which injects Midnights with a pulsing, mounting aura in hypnotizing new tracks "You're On Your Own, Kid," "Mastermind," and Spotify play count heavyweight champ "Anti-Hero." If the black-and-white cover art didn't let you know this one would be different, the first song she released off the album, "Look What You Made Me Do," says it all. In recent years, shes also become a music business game-changer: most notably for re-recording her first six albums in order to regain control of her masters, which has seen Swift release the Taylors Version of both Red and Fearless. Sure, this album has its highs and lows and is filled with impressive tracks, but it ranks below others because although it feels like many things she does here (like haunting lyrics and pop beats) are things she's done before and a bit better in her previous releases. The tongue-in-cheek I Forgot That You Existed is a strutting reminder of Swifts skills as a lyricist. She gets the heavy hitters out of the way early, beginning with a last word in "I Forgot That You Existed," a wink and wave goodbye to social media swarms and energy sucks. This time, "All Too Well" retires a full band backing for hazy synths, but it's anything but smoke and mirrors. Acoustic guitars, violins, and banjos enjoy free reign, dancing across tales of childhood friends destined for sparks, short-lived summer love, and backroad rendezvous. In the 16 years since the single Tim McGraw launched Swift to country stardom, shes jettisoned the genres ill-fitting signifiers and overcome the limitations of her early recordingsimprovements captured in her Taylors Version re-recordings as a powerful statement of artistic agency. But none are more affecting than "champagne problems," a first-person post-mortem after rejecting a marriage proposal a classic "it's not you, it's me" scenario with simple piano chords accompanying the guilt of walking away and the peril of being mentally unwell ("'She would've made such a lovely bride' / 'What a shame she's fked in the head,' they said"). Perfectly Fine." Such contrast in tone and prophecy perfectly capture the beautiful whiplash strewn throughout the album as she walks us through the stages of moving on: willing them to stay ("Treacherous"), drinking with friends to forget ("22"), ending the reconciliation cycle ("We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"), and starting anew with the next beau ("Begin Again"). Although the first glimpses we heard from it (the musical theatre-style Me! and the stomping You Need to Calm Down) didnt do the record justice, listen to Lover in full and youll find moments of pure joy. ranking every taylor swift song - YouTube 0:00 / 1:02:35 ranking every taylor swift song julia cudney 186K subscribers Subscribe 12K Share 235K views 2 years ago spotify. But for every purely excellent song off 1989 ("Out Of The Woods," "Clean") there's invariably a hollow foil track, the worst offenses, of course, being "Shake It Off" and "Bad Blood." It saw Swift push back at a narrative that saw her portrayed as vengeful and bitter, an image that had been thrust upon her by the media and exacerbated by her very public, very long-running beef with Kanye West (first started when he infamously interrupted Taylor Swifts acceptance speech at the VMAs, and regularly reignited by the Kardashian-West clan). "Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. 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. Yet between its plot-point breadcrumbs is an inherent relatability embedded in Taylor's never-better introspection. In short: 1989 is Taylor Swifts masterpiece. "Fearless" outranks "Taylor Swift" as it has more standout songs and has a cohesive sound that distinctly country-pop. In a review for Rolling Stone, Claire Shaffer called the album "a refreshing change of pace.". "Champagne Problems" serves as a painful tale of a failed relationship. 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. "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.". Its admirable that she tries to incorporate more sophisticated elements into a few of the songs here, but dancing with or kissing someone in the rain is a default image that crops up with nearly the same distracting frequency as references to princesses, angels, and fairy tales. Stuffed with 80s influence, it also saw a step up in Swifts song writing, with her sharp, pithy lyrics feeling refined and sleek, hook-laden melodies dominating the entire record. Written when she was a high school freshman, it saw Swift dissect her relationship with a senior who she knew would break up with her when he went off to college. Any album judgment requires not just multiple listens, but the passage of time to sit with the music. 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. Keefe. Her narrators often seem to lack insight because Swift writes with the point of view that hers is the only story to be told, which makes songs like Dear John and Better Than Revenge come across as shallow and shortsighted. Released in 2014 and named after the year she was born, "1989" was inspired by the pop music of the mid-1980s. She may be on the outs, but she sure isn't alone. 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. 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. This new sound may not be a far cry from the original, but to the trained Swiftie's ear, these small changes culminate into a noticeably "richer" listening experience from all angles. The album finds Swift living up to all of the praise she earned for her songwriting earlier in career. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past." 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. Swift closes the non-deluxe edition of "1989" with "Clean," which adheres to the pop theme but is more low-key and showcases the heartfelt, haunting songwriting she's known for: "The drought was the very worst / When the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst / It was months and months of back and forth / You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore.". Where Reputation before it was a risky, abrasive side-step shrouded in a smoky eye, Lover's follow up is a blushing cheek beaming with rosy retrospection and hopes for the future. by Slant Staff October 25, 2022 1 Photo: Republic Records Taylor Swift started off as a country artist at a time when the genre was both less respectful and accommodating of the voices of women than at any other point in its storied history. 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. 40 "Should've Said No" Swift's uptempo. The music of folklore takes its time to unfurl, ivory keys yawning at dusk, acoustic strings waking at daybreak. 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? But what's never changed is Taylor's enchanting ability to translate a memory whether charmed or trying into a moment that feels like yours. "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. 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. Its fantasias are more melancholic, its themes of longing more resentful. And then theres the title track, a gorgeous slow-dance, that acts as a reminder to why the world fell in love with Swift in the first place. Dark, biting, sassy, and straight-up cool, in this track, Swift makes it known that she's here to play and no one can take her down: "But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time / Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time. Filled with rootin tootin tunes like Tim McGraw, Our Song and Teardrops on My Guitar (largely considered Swifts breakout song) that stormed the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, it earned a teenage Taylor support slots on tour with Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Faith Hill. First released in 2008, its original release won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and thirteen years later in 2021, Fearless (Taylors Version) became the first of Swifts re-recorded albums to drop. Keefe, Folklore is neither a culmination of Swifts career to date nor a pivot in a new direction. No one would have blamed her for taking a well-deserved creative hiatus after that marathon of releases, but Taylor has proven herself to be an artist of momentum multiple times over. While tracks like Cardigan and Invisible Strings hinge on protracted metaphors, Mad Woman and Peace are blunt and plainspoken. October 26, 2022. Its a dazzling, surprising album, brimming with career-best moments, and heralded a brave new direction for the pop star. Certainly, it matters that the two albums were born of the protracted isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and that collaborators like Bon Iver and the Nationals Aaron Dessner figure prominently on both. Her earlier works' fanciful twang and youthful daydreams still linger on tracks "Speak Now" and "Mean," but where Fearless was purely starry-eyed, Speak Now instead wields a wonderstruck vernacular like a cherished childhood locket and scorches a hole in the heart-shaped photo. Two things before we get into the list: 1. But just because Taylor took a sharp left turn doesn't mean she was unsuccessful. The rest of the record sees relationships rise and fall like once-great empires reduced to dust, each an individual tragedy set to incessantly hooky choruses. Swift, of course, got her start writing astutely observed country ballads, and these songs bolster her trademark knack for lyric-crafting with maximalist, blown-out pop production courtesy of collaborators Max Martin and Jack Antonoff. The definitive ranking of Taylor Swift's 'Folklore' songs. How Marvel went big with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Standouts tracks on this album also include "Fearless," an easy listen that captures the sweet feelings surrounding new romances; "Fifteen," a young love story that unfolds over several verses; "White Horse," a slow tune featuring lyrics about heartbreak that cut deep; "Love Story," a romantic tale with a fairytale edge; and "The Best Day," an emotional song that is filled with sweet childhood memories. Taylor Swift surprise-released her eighth album "Folklore" on July 24, 2020. "Picture To Burn" is a scorned teen's "Before He Cheats" swapping shooting whiskey for rumor mills with a grown woman's wit and a veteran songwriter's aptitude. Expectations were sky high, raising the stakes with them; just how close can Taylor fly to the sun? escaped the fate of Pharrell in Minions or Timberlake in Trolls). Note: If you make a mistake DO NOT click backspace unless you find extremely necessary. From Taylor Swift to Midnights, we've ranked all of the singer's studio albums from best to worst. And I'm telling you, it's going to be a journey. Songs like "Blank Space" and "Wildest Dreams" are more than deserving of their far-reaching recognizability, but not so much their long time (and only recently dethroned) standing at the top of Taylor's Spotify play stats. First contact is a shock, a singe that lingers and radiates energy, next a scab, hardening as it heals, before calming into a scar you carry, listening to, forevermore. 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. Unlike previous albums, no singles were released before the official album drop, and at 3 a.m. The album's comedown is a moment of quiet reflection carried by a piano's lone lullaby, when the festivities are over, the partygoers are gone, and all that's left is a lover for the long haul ("I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day"). So reads Taylor Swift's social media announcement that, just two months after gracing fans with her re-recording of Fearless, she was giving the same treatment to 2012's Red with all 30 songs originally intended for the record. There were TikTok teasers to reveal the track titles, but beyond that fans weren't given many clues about what to expect from the album. Where Swift has re-recorded an album, we have included only the new, re-recorded version of the record in the ranking. "Entirely self-penned, sans the collaborations of the previous albums, it's an enormous breakthrough in songwriting maturity, while hardly forsaking the childlike lack of pretense that made earlier efforts such guilt-free ear candy," wrote Willman. From the first track, you know this album isn't like what you've been hearing on the radio it opens with the synthetic beats and sounds of "Welcome to New York.". Songs like I Know Places ride a reggae swagger and trap-influenced snare beats before launching into a soaring, Pat Benatar-esque chorus. Many listeners at the time of its 2017 release were less than thrilled by what they saw as pseudo-edgy antics, the equivalent of a prep having a bad day and reaching for black lipstick. Insider's music team revisited the album and ranked all 17 of its deluxe-edition songs. But "Folklore" has a laid-back vibe that reflects the spontaneity of how this album was created. "Speak Now" comes in at no. Working with a whos who of trendy producers and writers (Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, Ali Payami alongside indie darling Imogen Heap), she crafted a collection of glossy belters, that flit from fluffy dance-pop (Shake It Off) and sophisticated electronic-tinged bops (Blank Space, Style), to glorious indietronica (Out of the Woods, Clean). That early nuance and the fact that she wrote this entire album completely on her own is no small feat. The distorted vocal effects and shifts in dynamics on I Knew You Were Trouble heighten the sense of frustration that drives the song, and the driving rhythm section on Holy Ground reflects Swifts reminiscence of a lover who took off faster than a green light, go. Not all of the songs here are so keenly observedState of Grace and I Almost Do lack the specificity thats one of Swifts songwriting trademarks, while the title track underwhelms with its train of pedestrian similes and metaphorsbut if Reds highlights were career-best work for Swift at the time. Released in 2008, "Fearless" steps away from country and edges into pop in an impressive balance of the two as Swift continues to develop a style that is uniquely hers. Modify tier labels, colors or position through the action bar on the right. The albums lyrics only serve to bolster that perception: Swift comes off like a frazzled stay-at-home mom scolding her disobedient children on Look What You Made Me Do and This Is Why We Cant Have Nice Things. But its her willingness to portray herself not as a victim, but the villain of her own story that makes Reputation such a fascinatingly thorny glimpse inside the mind of pops reigning princess. Love for a song about the worst parts of yourself grows on your heart like a burn on the skin. 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). Ranking all 129 of Taylor Swift's songs (from "Tim McGraw" to the 'Reputation' era, Rob Sheffield writes, "the weirdest and most fascinating thing about Taylor Swift will always . So, though this list must include the favorites, it's also a love letter to her illustrious career and its intersections into listeners' lives. This Taylor Swift discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Taylor Swift albums can be found at the top of the list. A song about the worst parts of yourself grows on your heart like a burn on the,. Her eighth album & quot ; Should & # x27 ; s going to be a journey musical theatre-style!! 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