Indeed, there’s something patronizing about kicking off an album full of gems like “Cornelia Street” and “Cruel Summer” with a song that makes Kidz Bop sound like In Our Time. The attempt to reclaim a sense of youthful innocence works only by stripping out anything else that’s interesting or pleasurable about the music. After the Sturm und Drang of the Reputation era, “ Me!” was a return to bubblegum pop, a mission statement that says “I’m through making mission statements.” While self-awareness may be Swift’s superpower, it fails her here. “Me!” is the exception: The more you hear it, the worse it sucks. Like another famous Pennsylvanian, this is a living document. Additionally, many rankings have changed to reflect the author’s evolving taste. It has been updated to include Swift’s subsequent releases. *This list was originally published in November 2017. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult millionaire. Finally, because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. The original version of this list included covers the updated version of 2023 removes these in the interest of concision, as well as recognition that songwriting is an essential element in Swift’s songbook. For similar reasons, the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings are not afforded their own blurbs. Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it - which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” - excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down. I count at least fifteen stone-cold classics in her discography. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality.
The passage of time hits you like a brick.Įven with the widespread critical embrace of poptimism there are still those who see Swift as just another industry widget, a Miley or Katy with the tuner set to “girl with a guitar.” If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the think pieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. Returning to them every few years, as I have since writing this list, is a strangely melancholy experience. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. Which is why, whether you’re a casual listener who bops along to the radio hits, or one of those die-hards who takes her every utterance as a modern Rosetta Stone, it’s easy to feel like you know Swift on a personal level. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. There have been wobbles, most notably in 2016-17, but on the whole she has retained a command of her star image rivaled only by Beyonce and Bowie. As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014. The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small.
Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. To chart her journey - from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties - is to follow a generation coming of age.
Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16.
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