I need to go deep on this one. Doubt that surprises anybody. I got into Taylor Swift late. Especially for someone who has a thing for teen girl pop. I mean, she’s the queen of it. There was a TayTay-shaped gap in my music collection.

Then I picked up the David Rees mashup EP, Aphex Swift. Which is exactly what it sounds like - Aphex Twin meets Taylor Swift. Intended as an art project, Rees wasn’t even a musician - he taught himself rudimentary DJ software to produce the EP as an art piece … but it’s an absolute banger. And for me it opened the door. I dove into Taylor Swift fandom head first after that.

(Aphex Swift is hard to find nowadays - it gets taken down from Youtube, Soundcloud, etc as soon as it gets posted. If anyone’s interested I could pop the MP3s in the B&B Dropbox.)

Fearless
It’s a toss-up between this and Love Story for which song most perfectly captures ‘early Taylor Swift’. I prefer Fearless. The way she stumbles and hurries through the lines like she can’t wait for the chorus is just so damn cute.

Hey Stephen
It’s like Taylor and the Taylorettes. Motown girl group vibes from top to bottom. And isn’t that the drumbeat from Be my Baby? As usual though, it’s her lyrical stings that do it for me. “All those other girls, well, they’re beautiful, but would they write a song for you?”

Are We Out of the Woods Yet
This one’s hypnotic. Rhythm and repetition. Breathy, half-gothic vocals. And just a hint of genuine threat. “Remember when you hit the brakes too soon? 20 stitches in a hospital room.” It builds and builds and builds and builds and then … just stops. Fucking tease.

New Romantics
Honestly, the sheer balls of calling a song New Romantics for an album that’s famously ’80s influenced … and then leaving it off the album. Contains some of Swift’s very best ‘exhaling for emphasis’ moments, and one of her most withering put down lines “We show off our different scarlet letters - trust me, mine is better.”

No Body, No Crime
Taylor as storyteller, here. A small-town crime novel, where her characteristic melodrama steps up from high-school heartbreak to cold-blooded murder. And she nails it - an alt-country classic just knocked off in her lunch break between pop records. Incredible scenes.

Shake it Off
This is the gateway drug. It’s an all-time pop classic, and you damn well knew it was from the very first time you heard it. It’s not that Swift had ditched country music, not at all. It’s just that she’d filtered it through Bananarama and turned herself into a fucking billionaire overnight.

Betty
Betty sounds okay on record, and stands out as the highlight of the three-song love triangle vignette at the core of Folklore. But the live version with Taylor singing it to an empty auditorium for the socially-distanced 2020 Country Music Awards knocks it into a cocked hat. It’s funny, too.

You Belong with Me
Teenage heartbreak distilled, purified, and wrapped up in massive pop licks. This is TayTay playing at pop-punk and, frankly, knocking it out the park. The oldest high-school story - ‘why is he with her and not me?’ - told without any guile at all. She means it, with every fibre of her being. If you want Pop Taylor but you’re tired of Shake it Off, this is where to go. This is the O.G. source.

Cornelia Street
One that’s already great on record but transcendent live. I go with the Live from Paris performance - it’s easy to find on YouTube or Spotify. Built around details and moments, painting a portrait of nostalgia for the early days of a relationship. The mixture of melancholy and hope works well.

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
It’s a perfect pop song. Sometimes too perfect - polished almost (but not quite) to the point of becoming bland. But this was TayTay at the height of her teen-pop powers, dripping with charisma and able to get away with anything. The millennial-speak and lyrical asides would grate in anyone else’s hands, but here they’re perfect characterisation. Every bit of this song is a hook in its own right. The verses are catchier than other artist’s choruses. Certified banger, this one.

Blank Space
As Taylor Swift grew up, she switched from confessional, autobiographical songwriting to character-based storytelling … but Blank Space was the pivot. Here she fictionalises (and mythologises) herself - playing the cartoon bad girl the gossip media had been painting her as. And you can hear how much she enjoys playing the part. She tried this sort of satirical self awareness loads of times, but Blank Space was the one time it landed. Has there been a better lyrical tease than “You look like my next mistake”?

Delicate
Taylor Swift can do subtle. Who’d have thought it? Delicate walks a tightrope between insecurity and empowerment. The confidence it takes to be self-aware constantly undermined with her asking “isn’t it? Isn’t it?” So many of Taylor’s songs are about insecurity but this is the only one that really feels it. And yet, somehow, that morphs into a raw honesty that twists around and comes out being genuinely sexy -  which, again, isn’t something Taylor pulls off often.

I Knew You Were Trouble
I don’t know where to start with this. It’s not Taylor’s best. It’s not her biggest hit. It’s not a live favourite. But it hits me in the gut every single time I hear it. So it’s my favourite, because when it comes to girl-pop I’m a masochist. I want that gut-punch. There’s a world-weariness to “He was long gone, when he met me, and I realise, the joke is on me …”, but there’s still youthful optimism in the opening “Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago …” This is a flawed song though, the faux-goth drop in the chorus is almost Avril Lavigne level cringe, but I guess sometimes it’s the flaws that make a song interesting. Taylor can fix that though - there’s an acoustic live performance of … Trouble that blows the recording away. It’s incredible. It slays me, every time. So this is my pick.

I Knew You Were Trouble live on the Seine, Paris

Pop has been very thorough there, so i don't have to i guess.  Great write up.  I too love a bit of Swifty.

I'm going with We are Never Getting Back Together but it could so easily have been I knew You Were Trouble or any of the massive pop bangers tbh.

Just listened to Folklore for the first time. Lockdown really did a number on people I guess.

Me too,

I mean my timeline was going mental for weeks like it it had transformed music. Lots of 'in this essay I will'.

I listened to it and heard a decent enough indie folk rock album.

poprock wrote:

Have you watched the Studio Sessions on Disney+? I haven’t got around to it yet. (I prefer Evermore to Folklore, so far.)

That’s a good point and means tomorrow evening is now full. Cheers for the reminder.

Diluted Dante wrote:

I mean my timeline was going mental for weeks like it it had transformed music. Lots of 'in this essay I will'.

I listened to it and heard a decent enough indie folk rock album.

I expected it to be shit, so I guess it’s the position you start from.

I found myself reading an 'all songs ranked' list this morning.  Turns out my favourite is no.1, so I guess obvious choice incoming: All Too Well.  Production is a bit shimmery (note to self: find a stripped down live performance) but it's such a finely crafted song and doesn't really any obvious lulls.  I've only dabbled here and there with Taytay - two albums bought and probably only four albums heard in full - but this was the point where I realised she was a songwriter as well as a ex country pop lovely.  Perhaps she didn't write it, or it's a heavy co-write mayber, but *shrugs*, it's great.  She annoyed some for turning her back on country music, but a lot of her her early stuff was inoffensive/bang average anyway, so I'm glad she did.        

Runner up shouts: Getaway Car, Love Story (come at me), Mirrorball, Wildest Dreams.

Love story

Obvious I guess but the quintessential Taylor swift song for
Me

What does technically better mean in this context?

Ah right, I did wonder, because I'd usually use that in releation to production, which shouldn't be drastically different between songs on one album!

Giving the new album a go. Dorothea is great.

Late call for My Tears Ricochet. Ta.

Taylor Swift

Swifts first album, and it’s fine. Country fans will probably get more out of it, but for me there’s no hook. It just sort of washes over you, background music I suppose. Her voice is of course fantastic, but ultimately there’s little here to compete with later stuff.

Our Song


Fearless

Big jump in quality here, but let's be honest, we’re here for Love Story. There’s a reason it’s her biggest selling single. Other notables are You Belong With Me, The Way I Loved You and Forever and Always

Love Story

Speak Now

Quality dips back down here. It’s a bridge from the country to the pop stuff, but none of it is particularly memorable, or indeed particularly good. Forced at gunpoint, I guess I’d pick Better Than Revenge.

Better Than Revenge

Red

This is where she really does break out of country, it’s a bit White Album, jumping genres all over, and frankly better for it.I Knew You Were Trouble and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together are immense, but the track I always forget about is 22. Then it comes on and oh my.

22

1989

This is it. The big dog. Le grand chien. Most of this album could be picked, but that’s not what we’re doing here. Bad Blood is immense. Similar to 22, I always forget about Style, but by Christ does it rock. And then we get down to the top 2. Blank Space and Shake it Off. Truly it could, indeed should be both. Such is the cruelty of man though, that this cannot be. The result of an uncaring God directly lead to massive global inequality, rampant climate change, war, pestilence famine and having to choose between these two songs.

Blank Space.

The stuff that came after this

There’s no point going on. I’ve just listened to them all and none of them have anything that can remotely compare to 1989. It’s one of the greatest albums ever made, so this isn’t much of a surprise, but the lack of enthusiasm I had for carrying on picking best tracks per album after 1989 showed me that nothing on them could possibly win in the long run. It's a fools errand. You may wish to engage in this folly, but not for me.

So after all that, it should be obvious my vote will be for Black Space.

Diluted Dante wrote:

The stuff that came after this

There’s no point going on. I’ve just listened to them.

What, once? I'm on about my 5th listen to Folklore and it's gone from "hmm, I could be converted" to, "JESUS THIS IS FUCKING WONDROUS".