It’s been a week now since Taylor Swift swooped into town for a pair of shows at U.S. Bank Stadium that drew about 128,000 fans and all but dominated local media for days.
And yet, still, I hear people who dismiss her. She’s just for teen girls. She’s not talented. She’s a fraud. And so on.
I’ve been writing professionally about music for 28 years now and I’ve covered teen pop concerts since the days of ‘N Sync. I’ve seen it all, including that time when I went to a Kidz Bop concert alone and endured icy stares the entire show. But I’ve never seen anything like the 33-year-old Taylor Swift.
For those still unconvinced, hear me out.
Swift learned to play the guitar when she was 12 and, soon after, began writing her own songs, inspired by the likes of Shania Twain and Dolly Parton. She convinced her parents to move to Nashville, where she worked with experienced songwriters to hone her craft, including Liz Rose, who once described the pair’s after-school writing sessions as “some of the easiest I’ve ever done. Basically, I was just her editor. She’d write about what happened in school that day. She had such a clear vision of what she was trying to say. And she’d come in with the most incredible hooks.”
From the start, Swift wrote about her life and her passions in a way that connected with her peers like few other musicians. She also wasn’t afraid to evolve. After issuing three multi-platinum albums and 17 hit singles in the country genre, Swift began exploring other sounds with 2012’s “Red,” which in turn expanded her audience and helped turn her into a worldwide star.
It seemed like she might have peaked after 2019’s somewhat tepid “Lover,” but she surprised everyone by taking a pandemic-inspired turn into indie-folk with her 2020 albums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and worked with unlikely collaborators like the National’s Aaron Dessner and Justin “Bon Iver” Vernon. She has a reputation for using her romantic relationships as song fodder, but in 2020 she looked outside her own life for lyrical inspiration.
While she does the majority of her writing with partners, she wrote her third album, 2010’s “Speak Now,” entirely on her own. Her “(Taylor’s Version)” take on the record is due out Friday. (More on her re-recordings in a bit.)
Swift’s debut single, 2006’s “Tim McGraw,” was inspired by her love of a Tim McGraw song. She knows what it’s like to be the one staring up at the stage.
As such, Swift has constructed an entire ecosystem beyond her songs for those who want to go deeper. She fills her lyrics, videos, photo shoots and album sleeves with Easter eggs and clues to both future and past events in her life. Some fans spend hours to decoding it all and that’s part of the fun. Numerous publications regularly sum it all up for the rest of us.
While she’s very controlling about which details she lets the public know about her personal life, the devoted still know a whole lot more than you would think, including the names and bios of many people she works with, like her longtime publicist Tree Paine. Fans know to keep their eye out for potential sightings of Swift’s mother at her concerts.
A casual listener can listen to her music on streaming services. But Swift also offers her music in numerous physical formats with limited-edition runs, alternate covers and colored vinyl. Each new album, or as she puts it “era,” is also accompanied by a staggering amount of merchandise, from shirts and hoodies to totes and beach towels. Merch sales opened outside U.S. Bank Stadium the afternoon prior to her first show there and some people waited hours just to be among the first to have a shot at buying. She is good at capitalism!
In 2019, music executive Scooter Braun purchased Swift’s first label, Big Machine Records, which included all masters, music videos and artwork for Swift’s first six albums. Enraged that Braun, a man she has called an “incessant, manipulative bully,” now controlled so much of her catalog, she vowed to re-record and reissue those records.
In the earlier years of rock and roll, it wasn’t uncommon for artists, particularly Black artists, to re-record key hits after getting shafted by their record label. More recently, groups like ELO and Blondie did the same in hopes their new versions would be the ones used for licensing in films, TV and commercials.
But no one has done what Swift is in the midst of doing right now. (Prince threatened to do so around the turn of the century, but only ever got around to releasing a re-recorded version of his single “1999.”) In 2021, she released not one, but two new re-recordings of “Fearless” and “Red” and put them out with the newly added “(Taylor’s Version)” label. Next up is the aforementioned “Speak Now.” Many fans have predicted her synth-pop smash “1989” will be the next one she releases.
From the start of her career, Swift did everything it took to get her music heard. She toured heavily and personally met with country radio programming staffers at each tour stop. And each tour has grown bigger and more elaborate than the last, leading right up to her current outing, which sees her perform for more than three hours each night. That’s relatively rare for arena and stadium acts and essentially unheard of for pop stars.
Speaking of her current tour, Swift does have a live band and dancers, but she spends much of the show alone on one of three massive stages and manages to hold the attention of the entire crowd in the palm of her hand. When all is said and done, she will have played 117 shows on five continents.
In the early days of her career, Swift was sometimes criticized for her thin voice, particularly during live performances and duets at award shows. So she doubled-down and worked harder, rehearsed more and built her voice into the strong instrument that was on full display at her USBS shows.
The night I saw her, she told the crowd she started writing songs two days into COVID lockdown and has since issued more than 50 new songs across three albums. One gets the sense this is a woman who can’t not work.
All of that has paid off for Swift, who is well known for her philanthropy and support for disaster relief, medical research and the arts. Pollstar is estimating the gross for her current tour could reach “an astonishing, unbelievable, inconceivable $1.4 billion.” Forbes predicts her net worth is likely to hit around $900 million next year.
Next up for Taylor Swift — the Billionaire Era.