Taylor Swift is the most successful female pop artist of all time. She has 11 albums and a string of hits under her belt, and her career is constantly evolving. With each new album, she proves that she’s an unstoppable force. She’s also a business mogul, and has mastered the art of PR and generating hype for her projects with ease. Her meteoric rise has captivated the pop culture, with her influence extending beyond music to fashion, voting and professional football viewership.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania to Andrea (Finlay), a one-time marketing executive and Scott Kingsley Swift, a financial adviser. She is of German, Irish, English and 1/16th Italian descent. Swift started performing in talent competitions at age 11, and won the regional contest in Nashville where she caught the attention of Scott Borchetta, who was forming his independent label Big Machine Records. He signed her, and Swift’s debut album, Fearless, was released in October 2006. It was an immediate success, a small masterpiece of pop-minded country that critics called “wide-eyed and cynical,” and held together by the strength of Swift’s pleading voice.
The Fearless era produced a string of hits, and the tour was wildly successful. Swift won a number of awards, including Female Artist of the Year at the AMAs and Grammy Awards, and she was named one of the Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine.
In 2017, Swift began dating actor Joe Alwyn, and they remained together until spring 2023. Alwyn helped her with songwriting for folklore and evermore, and was a constant source of inspiration during this highly publicized period in her life.
On November 9, 2018, Swift surprised fans by announcing her ninth studio album, folklore, would be released at midnight on December 10. The album was the most successful of her career, and its sister record, evermore, followed suit at #1 on the Billboard 200. Both records included collaborations with Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner of The National and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Having both sisters peak at #1 on the Billboard charts made Taylor the first artist to have their albums appear in this position twice.
With Reputation, Swift shook up the pop genre by delivering an album that was less commercially driven and more emotionally charged. Its themes of alienation and isolation were a departure from the pop-friendly formula of her previous releases, but they still charted well on the Hot 100. The songs on the record were almost like short stories, with rich detail and character exploration. They ranged from Proustian flashbacks to outcast widows and doomed relationships. The most striking element, though, was the sound of a mature Taylor who has embraced her own power. She sounds comfortable bordering on imperious, as if she’d been making lush, montage-ready pop music all along.
