Happy 10th Anniversary to Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album 1989, originally released October 27, 2014.
Over the past year, it has been clear that Taylor Swift is heading towards the end. Let me explain.
Swift is about to wrap up her global billion dollar-grossing Eras Tour. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour bombastic celebration of her career that opened in March of last year and dominated social media, broke box office records, and spun off a breakneck-paced tour movie that became the highest-grossing concert film of all time with over $260 million in worldwide ticket sales.
In February, she won 2 more GRAMMY awards (14 total wins), including her fourth Album Of The Year award—this time for 2022’s Midnights. She now has the most Album Of The Year GRAMMY wins of any artist.
In April, her eleventh studio album The Tortured Poets Department (2024), scored the biggest first-week sales of her career with 2.61 million equivalent album units earned in the US alone. It was the fastest album ever to break over 1 billion streams on Spotify and became her twelfth #1 album in the UK (matching Madonna).
Swift released over 30 variants of Tortured Poets, which kept her at the top of the Billboard 200TM chart in the US for fifteen non-consecutive weeks this year—the most weeks at number one for any of her albums.
She announced the “Anthology” version of that album—featuring an additional fifteen tracks—just two hours after she dropped the standard version by posting on Instagram, “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you.”
I immediately felt like Swift was dumping and purging some of the last remaining lyrical remnants of her past (especially about her romantic relationships) in anticipation of big changes on the horizon. After all, she is touring a show that looks back on all of her albums. One can only assume a personal and professional reassessment for Swift is nigh.
I know Swift wants me to look at her career in eras, but instead I view it as acts. And as I write this in late October of 2024, it feels like she is close to finishing Taylor Swift: Act II—a journey that started a little more than a decade earlier with the writing, recording and release of Swift’s most important album—her first official pop album—2014’s 1989.
1989 was a pivot and an album Swift had to make. A decade ago, country music’s boundaries weren’t as porous as they are slowly becoming today. With crossover hits like “Love Story,” “You Belong With Me,” “Mine” and “Back to December,” Swift was always pushing against those boundaries with her slightly pop-flavored, melodic, reflective and story-filled songs about love and heartbreak that appealed to a wider, much younger, and more female audience.
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As she began accumulating awards and chart hits with her first three albums featuring songs of drama, longing and conflict that belied her age, you could tell with each album that she was slowly plotting her exit from country music based on how much twang you’d hear in her voice.
On her third album, 2010’s Speak Now, it was barely noticeable. While making 2012’s eclectic Red, Swift pretty much left the twang in the rear view.
In the early days of crafting Red, Swift was already worried that she was becoming creatively stagnant within country music. So, in addition to her usual Nashville collaborators, she brought on pop producers and songwriters like Jeff Bhasker, known for his work with Kanye West, Butch Walker, who worked on pop albums for Avril Lavigne, Gavin DeGraw and Panic! At The Disco, and Semisonic’s Dan Wilson who co-wrote and produced Adele’s “Someone Like You” that was a #1 hit in the US for five weeks in 2011.
But it was the pairing of Swift with legendary Swedish producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback on Red that sped up Swift’s exit from country music and eventually into full-time big tent pop with 1989. Between them, Martin and Shellback had crafted huge pop hits for artists and groups like Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, P!nk, *NSYNC, Kesha, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry up to this point.
Working with Martin and Shellback on Red, Swift landed her first #1 song in the US with the cheerleader-y breakup anthem “We Are Never Getting Back Together.” Another Swift/Martin/Shellback single from the album, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” with its scream-along chorus, harder vocal edges and incorporation of dubstep, peaked at #2 in the US.
These two songs (and especially the dubstep) were shots fired across the bow to country music that Swift had fully outgrown its box and it was time for her to leave. Unsurprisingly, neither song made it into the top 10 on Billboard’s country airplay chart in the US; in fact, “Trouble” stalled way out in the pasture at #55.
Regarding working with Martin and Shellback on Red, Swift called them her “dream collaborators” in a 2013 Associated Press interview, adding “I've never been so challenged as a songwriter…I'll bring in ideas and they'll take such a different turn than where I thought they were going to go, and that level of unexpected spontaneity is something that really thrills me.”
Red was the #1 album in the US for seven weeks and sold incredibly well. But with its incongruous mix of mainstream pop songs, delicate ballads and some country-friendly compositions for country radio, Swift was still working in between country and pop—and those worlds were pulling her in two different creative directions. “I was standing on a state line,” she told Rolling Stone in 2020 “and I had a foot on either side of the border line.” It was time for a change.
Red and its huge global tour marked the end of Taylor Swift: Act I, which began a little more than a decade earlier when Swift wrote an important entry in her journal on May 19, 2003 around the time she was trying to get a development deal with RCA Records.
She wrote, “Well, I tried to practice my songs, but I completely psyched myself out and broke down crying. I don't know if I can do this…Relax, I can handle it. I'm young, I'm talented. They'll see it in me. I've got to hang on.”
Taylor Swift released ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ in 2023
Swift landed that development deal, which led to a publishing deal with Sony/ATV (she was the youngest songwriter the company had ever signed). That led to her signing with Big Machine Records where, during the next decade, she fully realized her dream of becoming a country music star.
With Red, though, Swift had gone as far as she could in country music. She had already won enough CMA and ACM awards—including two for Album of the Year and four for Entertainer of the Year.
Swift had also been nominated for nineteen GRAMMYs and won seven. Five of those wins were in country categories plus her first Album of the Year win for 2008’s Fearless. Her awards mantle was pretty full.
After Red, it was also time for Swift to make a big change because of the endless headlines about all of her high profile romantic relationships that allegedly inspired so many of the songs for which she became famous. The narrative relentlessly spun by the media was that Swift was clingy and vindictive—a serial dater who would write hit songs about you if you broke her heart.
It should be noted that none of the men Swift was involved with over the years were subjected to such cruel treatment by the press for their own dating history.
In the wake of Red, it was expected that her next album would traffic in the same confessional singer-songwriter lyrics about her relationships and play in both worlds of country and pop. But all that changed on August 18, 2014 when Swift hosted a livestream in front of a live audience on Yahoo! and ABC News.
She announced that her new album was named 1989 (after her birth year) and it was inspired by late ‘80s pop and the era’s “bright colors, bold chances, rebellion…and the idea of endless possibility.”
"For the record, this is my very first documented official pop album," she also declared during the livestream, officially closing the door on Taylor Swift: Act I—the country artist.
Then she opened Act II by debuting 1989’s first single, “Shake It Off”—a stompy, horn-addled, big budget pop anthem about paying dust to all the haters and headlines so concerned with her personal life.
“Shake It Off” and 1989’s announcement immediately signaled that Swift was no longer straddling the line between country and pop. She was ALL IN for pop with a capital “P,” telling Billboard a few months later, “In the past, I’ve always tried to make sure that I was maintaining a stronghold on two different genres, and this time I just had to think about one, which was creatively a relief.”
In the liner notes to 1989, Swift went into more detail about her sonic rebirth: “For the last few years, I've woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded. I listened to a lot of music from the decade in which I was born and I listened to my intuition that it was a good thing to follow this gut feeling.”
Smartly, Swift brought Martin back to executive produce the album with her. If you’re going to attempt a risky jump from country (or any genre, really) into mainstream pop full-time with a new album, Martin is definitely the guy to help you oversee a pop project that will appeal to the widest possible audience.
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He and Shellback worked on seven songs for the standard version of the album, including its three biggest hits “Blank Space” (#1 in the US for seven weeks), “Shake It Off” (#1 for four weeks), and “Bad Blood” (#1 for one week).
These were fun, in-your-face and over-the-top pop songs that gave Swift confidence to craft more big-budget pop singles in the upcoming decade like “Look What You Made Me Do” from 2017’s Reputation and the much-maligned “Me” from 2019’s Lover.
For the rest of the album’s big swing and mid-tempo pop tracks, Swift brought on producers/songwriters/musicians Ryan Tedder and Jack Antonoff to separately work with Swift on different songs.
Swift and Antonoff first worked together on “Sweeter Than Fiction” for the soundtrack to the 2013 movie One Chance. It was a fortuitous collaboration that would prove creatively and commercially fruitful in the next decade as they worked together on every new studio album Swift released after 1989.
Besides the shift in her sonic palette for this album, one of the biggest changes in Swift’s music on 1989 was her updated POV on relationships within her lyrics. This was not a breakup album like Red. Instead, many of the songs on 1989 looked at relationships with an adult cynical eye and a realization that sometimes they burn bright and fast…and then POOF! they're gone. And that’s okay.
Like on “Wildest Dreams,” the most Jack Antonoff-sounding song on the album that’s not produced by Antonoff, where Swift channels Lana Del Rey with a silky recollection of a quick fire connection that’s destined to break (“His hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room / And his voicе is a familiar sound / Nothin' lasts forever / But this is gettin' good now”).
Swift talked about that newly discovered theory on romantic entanglements in a 2014 NPR interview, saying “If I meet someone who I feel I have a connection with, the first thought I have is: ‘When this ends, I hope it ends well’... It's the anomaly if something works out; it's not a given.”
Of all the songs on 1989, “Wildest Dreams” is a sonic foreshadowing of what we’d hear years later on Midnights and Tortured Poets—that kind of gauzy, maroon-hazed reminiscence of romantic adventures and life stories.
Writing about relationships, not from a victim perspective but from an understanding that sometimes connections are big time complicated, was new lyrical ground for Swift.
Fan favorite “Style” (the best song on 1989 and one of its few tracks with a guitar lead) celebrates that messy “I can’t quit you” nature of certain pairings that are so hard to let go of (“And I should just tell you to leave 'cause I / Know exactly where it leads, but I / Watch us go 'round and 'round each time…”).
“On this album, I'm writing about more complex relationships, where the blame is kind of split 50-50,” she elaborated in the NPR interview, “those are different themes that I don't think people have really seen in my lyrics before.”
While the lyrics on 1989 dialed back the specificity, drama and conflict that drove some of the biggest hits on Swift’s previous albums, many of the song arrangements made up for it with intensely memorable melodies, delicious lyrical mouthfeel, youthful brashness and overall broad appeal.
“I…wanted the focus to be on the sound of the record,” Swift told the AP in 2014, “rather than everyone dissecting each lyric to see who these songs are about.”
Unlike her pop contemporaries, Swift didn’t incorporate EDM or R&B into her sound on the album. For the most part, 1989 is straight up synth-pop with drum programming, keyboards, electronically manipulated vocals and, on some songs, organic stomps and claps.
The big pop songs on the album are brisk and slightly aggressive, but with Martin on as an executive producer, they all follow the Swedish music production philosophy of “Don't bore the audience.”
Swift knew, though, that she couldn't just ditch everything about the music she made during Taylor Swift: Act I for 1989 without alienating some of her fanbase. That’s why there are wistful ballads like “This Love” and “Clean” (a worthy successor to Kelly Clarkson’s “Sober”) which harken back to the Taylor Swift who would open up space on her other albums and slow things down to tell a story.
With the inclusion of these two songs, Swift struck a tricky balance on 1989 between her megawatt pop star ambitions and her desire to be included in the list of legendary confessional singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Carole King.
Over the next decade, it’s a highwire she’d confidently walk upon by releasing her big statement pop albums Reputation and Lover followed by her stripped-down folk-pop albums Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020).
When Swift first turned in 1989 to Big Machine Records, label head Scott Borchetta remarked, “This is extraordinary—it’s the best album you’ve ever done. Can you just give me three country songs?” Swift said no and stood her ground.
It’s that rock-solid commitment to her artistry and confidence in her ability to maneuver her sound into a new direction with 1989 that refreshed her career and set in motion an incredible ten years of global pop domination that I think we’re slowly watching wrap up right now.
With the final leg of The Eras Tour finishing next month in Vancouver and another inevitable visit in February to the GRAMMYs where Swift will, most likely, close out the Tortured Poets era, it definitely feels like this unbelievably successful ten years of Taylor Swift: Act II is about to end.
We should all thank 1989 for setting it off so right.
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