So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great?
Whether you’re a fan of Taylor Swift or not, it’s hard to deny the cultural and financial juggernaut the pop superstar has become this year. Her album “Midnights,” released in late 2022, was the year’s top-seller at 1.8 million copies, twice that of the second-biggest by Harry Styles. Her latest, “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” debuted in July at No. 1, giving Swift her 12th in the top spot, surpᴀssing Barbra Streisand for the most No. 1 albums by a woman artist.
Swift’s 131-date “Eras” world tour, currently packing stadiums across the U.S., is on track to be the highest-grossing concert tour of all time, at $1.4 billion, when it ends next year. Analysts estimate the tour will also have a total economic impact from tour-related spending of $5 billion on host cities. Even the Federal Reserve noted the effect her tour is having on regional economies.
To better understand the Swift phenomenon, the Gazette asked some Harvard and Berklee College of Music faculty to ᴀssess her artistry, fan base, the tour’s economic impact, and her place in the industry. Interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
She has a terrific ear in terms of how words fit together. She has a sense both of writing songs that convey a feeling that can make you imagine this is the songwriter’s own feelings, like in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” and a way of telling stories and creating characters. She can write songs that take place at one moment, and she can write songs where the success of verses give you a series of events, like in “Betty” or “Fifteen.”
She has a lot of different gifts as a songwriter, both at the macro level, how the song tells a story or presents an atтιтude, and at the micro level, how the vowels and consonants fit together, and she’s able to exercise that range, along with quite a lot of melodic gifts, and in a way that does not make her seem highbrow or alienate potential audience members. I would not be surprised to discover that her body of songwriting altogether had a larger number of words than any body of comparable hit songs by a comparable songwriter, except for someone like Bob Dylan.
One of the things that’s really remarkable for me about her is that harmonically, she’s not usually that interesting. It’s pretty normal pop chord progressions and pretty standard varieties of pop arrangement. Her great genius and her innovations and her brilliance as a songwriter is melodic and verbal. And, of course, she’s also very good at singing, which is not to be sneezed at. But she’s able to do that within the fairly tight constraints of existing, easily recognizable chord progressions and rhythmic setups.
She’s able to create verbal hooks, “I’m only 17. I don’t know anything, but I know I miss you.” They stick in your mind, and you spin stories out from them. That’s just being a good writer. She’s a celebrity with a complicated personal life that has been lived in the public eye for quite some time, and so, people speculate about the meanings of her songs, both because they are complex and meaningful works of art, and because some of them do speak to public facts about her life outside the songs.
“Fifteen,” which is a terrific song, gains resonance if you know that it’s about a real person and they’re still friends. But no one would care if it weren’t a brilliantly constructed song. Take something from “Speak Now”: It’s nice to know that “Dear John” is about John Mayer, who really had no business dating a 19-year-old, but it’s also a song about a pattern [of behavior], and it works in itself.
There’s all kinds of celebrity gossip about pop stars who maybe have her level of vocal talent and performing talent but happen not to have her level of songwriting talent. Very few people have her songwriting talent.
There’s so many good songs. I find the ones that speak to me the most are the ones whose topics are closest to my own life. I’m a queer lady. She writes wonderful songs about falling in love or falling out of love with various guys. Those are not, by and large, my favorites even though they’re some of her biggest hits. “Fifteen,” “Betty,” “seven,” “It’s Nice to Have a Friend.”’
I actually really like “The Last Great American Dynasty.” The two indie folk albums [“Folklore” and “Evermore”], almost everything on them is amazing. It’s so hard to sustain that level of success artistically while changing that much. Few can do it. “Nothing New” is amazing. “Anti-Hero,” which is the big hit from “Midnights,” is an absolutely fantastic and extraordinarily self-conscious song about being the kind of celebrity that she’s become.
