A multi-platinum recording artist, a three-time Grammy winner and two-time Academy Award nominee, taylor swift has shaped popular culture through her music. She is one of the most recognizable faces in pop, her image and persona influencing fashion, beauty, philanthropy and politics while her music has become an emblem of generational change. Swift’s career has spanned nearly a decade, from her first performances at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe to her command of stadiums full of Swifties (her fan base) on international tours. Along the way she has starred in the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and released an autobiographical documentary, Miss Americana.
Born in 1989, Taylor Alison Swift is the daughter of a stockbroker and a homemaker. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm in West Reading, Pennsylvania and took voice lessons at the Berks Youth Theatre Academy before moving to Nashville as a teenager to pursue a career in country music. Her breakout single, “Tim McGraw”, in 2006 propelled her to national fame and she quickly signed a record deal with Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records.
She is often cited as the face of modern pop music and her emo-tinged ballads have won her the reputation as a queen of the pop charts. However, her music has moved beyond the formulaic and into more experimental territory with each album release. She has embraced a diverse range of musical styles, from the imperial pop of her early twenties to the more ambivalent ruminations of her thirties. The acoustic ballad “Look What You Made Me Do” is a fine example of this shift in tone, and it showcases her newfound facility for characterization with a lyric that plays like the story J.D. Salinger never wrote.
The slinky, synth-driven “Midnights” finds Swift locked into a groove that’s almost too laid back to call R&B, but it is certainly Swift locked into a good groove. The song demonstrates her newfound comfort with more mature themes and she also enlists an excellent collaborator in the form of producer Jack Antonoff. “USA Today” called the album an engaging and revealing work that explores more nuanced relationship issues, while the “Los Angeles Times” noted how its “unapologetically big pop” opened up new sonic vistas for her.
In 2021, she surprised fans by releasing the indie folk albums folklore and evermore with little advance notice. Both of these albums showcased her growing comfort with the genre and she sought out collaborators from a wide range of musical backgrounds, including The National’s Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and HAIM’s Danielle Bradbery. The result was an incredibly affecting album that captured the nation’s mood during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, and it topped both the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100.
She followed this up in 2022 with the sultry album Red, which smashed streaming records and went on to win a record-setting 10 Grammy awards. That year she starred as Bombalurina in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic Broadway production of Cats and appeared in the documentary Miss Americana. The following year she signed with Universal Music Group’s Republic Records, which gave her ownership of her master recordings — something that had been missing from her previous record deals with Big Machine and Scott Borchetta’s label.
