The evolution of Tay-Tay: How Taylor Swift became one of pop music’s all-time greats
Taylor Swift music is ever-evolving, but she always sounds like herself.
It’s finally happening. After months of speculation and weeks of hyperventilation, tickets for Taylor Swift’s 2024 Aviva Stadium dates are finally about to go on sale to the general public. At least they are if you’re one of the minority of Swifties randomly selected for the Ticketmaster shortlist. Everyone else – half the country, it seems– is on the waiting list: a wait that now looks set to stretch on and on…
Pop stars come and go – but it’s hard to think of another tour that has generated the levels of hope, despair and swooning excitement created by Swift with Eras. In an Irish context, the only parallel is Garth Brooks’ five nights at Croke Park last year. That, however, was an Irish love affair. In the case of Swift, the obsession is global.
What is it about the 33-year-old songwriter from Nashville (by way of West Reading, Pennsylvania, where she lived until age 14) that exerts such a grip on our imagination over a career that now stretches across three decades, from her 2006 debut Taylor Swift up to last year’s Midnights?
The simple answer is that, as with artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, she is a singer who contains multitudes and whose career encompasses an ever-expanding body of work. In that context, it is no coincidence that her latest tour, her first in five years, is called Eras.
Because though she never sounds like anyone other than Taylor Swift, her music is also ever-evolving. She started making Shania Twain-style country rock, pivoted into heartfelt electro-pop and then, with her lockdown projects, Folklore and Evermore, mastered the downbeat indie-rock genre.
Then she turned expectations on their heads again with the noir-ish angst of Midnights, an LP about fear and self-doubt that became one of the most ubiquitous moments in her recording life.
She isn’t alone, it is worth pointing out. The past several years have seen pop music dominated by singular female artists – a group that also includes Lorde and Lana Del Rey.
“There are brilliant, brilliant songwriters out there who know how to tell a story and how to work with melody and lyrics and make it happen,’ Jack Antonoff, the producer who has worked extensively with Swift, Lorde and De Rey, told me in 2021.
“But when someone can do that but also has the ability, and also the desire, to tell a hyper-personal story in a hyper-personal way, they create something nobody else could do.
“You could like Bob Dylan or not. You could like Joni Mitchell or not. You can like Tom Waits’ voice or not, or D’Angelo’s voice or not. You can’t ever even consider the idea that there is anyone but that one artist could do what they do.”
To repeat then, Swift’s great talent as a songwriter is perhaps her ability to master all genres while always sounding like herself. Whether it’s gloomy folk or escapist disco, she brings that ineffable Swift quality to whatever she does.
“She’s a brilliant artist and a nice person,” said Aaron Dessner of The National in 2021, a year after he and Swift had worked together on Folklore and Evermore. “She is genuinely kind and humble and talented. She’s very versatile – she shape-shifts very easily.”
She seems appreciative, too, of her Irish fans. Beyoncé and Coldplay skipped Ireland in 2023 – and Swift isn’t playing Canada at all on the Eras tour. But she made sure to come to Dublin, where she lived for several months in 2021 – a period which inspired Sweet Nothings off Midnights (where she sings about “missing Wicklow?”).
There is more to Swift’s appeal than just the music. She’s a genius at moulding her image. Where other pop stars can seem otherworldly or glamorous in a slightly alien way, she’s never stopped being the girl from down the street.
Swift has been very careful not to get in the way of that persona – unlike other pop stars, she has resisted, for instance, launching an exclusive fashion line. Nor will you see her dressed like an extra-terrestrial at the Met Gala – she hasn’t attended the event since 2016.
That squeaky clean image did suffer slightly, it is true, when reports surfaced that she was dating divisive 1975 frontman Matty Healy. He seemed the opposite of everything Swift stood for: he’s performatively obnoxious, attention-seeking – an old school, rock ’n roll provocateur.
They were subsequently said to have broken up – whatever the truth, it’s a testament to her star power that not even an iffy boyfriend has derailed her popularity. Her stardom has transcended tabloid gossip, Twitter backlashes and even the internet.
Swifties will be reminded of this when they log on in an attempt to buy tickets for Eras – a tour that looks set to become the highest-grossing in history and one which will confirm Swift as one of popular music’s all-time greats.
