" Bad Blood . "Speak Now" comes in at no. Theres a Bon Iver collaboration, too: melancholy duet Exile, a slow-burning number which eventually erupts into chattering layered vocals and euphoric strings at the climax. "I have this Forrest Gump-ian way of touching something and it becomes a hit!" Any album judgment requires not just multiple listens, but the passage of time to sit with the music. But her mounting success undoubtedly stands on the shoulders of Speak Now's case studies of condensing complex inner dilemmas seeing your parents' failed marriage as a prophecy, wishing you'd never grown up into an album still adorned with hope. So, though this list must include the favorites, it's also a love letter to her illustrious career and its intersections into listeners' lives. The album's comedown is a moment of quiet reflection carried by a piano's lone lullaby, when the festivities are over, the partygoers are gone, and all that's left is a lover for the long haul ("I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day"). On Red (Taylors Version), we got the spellbinding 10-minute version of the song, an epic rendition that cements the tunes place as a songwriting triumph. Her earlier works' fanciful twang and youthful daydreams still linger on tracks "Speak Now" and "Mean," but where Fearless was purely starry-eyed, Speak Now instead wields a wonderstruck vernacular like a cherished childhood locket and scorches a hole in the heart-shaped photo. What once felt (or possibly still feels) like the end of the world is, on "Taylor's Version," also a testament to resilience we'll make it to the other side, and we'll do it again and again. Would it be soft and sincere, like "New Year's Day," poppy and upbeat like "Wildest Dreams," or go back to Swift's acoustic roots with songs like "Untouchable"? First released in 2008, its original release won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and thirteen years later in 2021, Fearless (Taylors Version) became the first of Swifts re-recorded albums to drop. Only vault songs are included. Yet between its plot-point breadcrumbs is an inherent relatability embedded in Taylor's never-better introspection. Look, Reputation served a purpose. to ultimate effect (and influence to mega-fan Olivia Rodrigo's raucous debut). It was the first taste the world got of Swifts deeply confessional songwriting, and from that moment, we were hooked. It's a dreamy pop album, though not fully aligned with that subgenre thanks to more of Jack Antonoff's signature production, which injects Midnights with a pulsing, mounting aura in hypnotizing new tracks "You're On Your Own, Kid," "Mastermind," and Spotify play count heavyweight champ "Anti-Hero." Unlike previous albums, no singles were released before the official album drop, and at 3 a.m. taylor swift albums Tier List Maker - TierLists.com taylor swift albums Press the labels to change the label text. The albums standout tracks retain the narrative detail and clever metaphor-building that distinguished Swifts early songs, even amid the diversions wrought by the aggressive studio production on display throughout. In every instance, whats noteworthy is Swifts precision in communicating her exact intent. I'm not using the 5-tier-ranking-scale or whatever because if I did literally half of the list would be a 5/5 yeah music is pretty good rn. Certainly, it matters that the two albums were born of the protracted isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and that collaborators like Bon Iver and the Nationals Aaron Dessner figure prominently on both. Only time will tell if "Midnights" will climb up my ranking, but as a new album amidst an outstanding discography, more time is needed to test how well it stands out from the rest. "Red" and "Lover" remain in the middle of the pack. Overall, it's charming and mostly tame, but then again, she's happy. And though she does vary her phrasing in ways that attempt to mask her limited voice, Swift is still noticeably off-pitch at least once on every song on the album. 2023 Oscars predictions: See who will win at the 95th Academy Awards. Periodically, Midnights does run into issues of redundancy, which has more to do with Jack Antonoffs deficiencies as a producer than with Swifts skills as a writer and performer. Swift closes the non-deluxe edition of "1989" with "Clean," which adheres to the pop theme but is more low-key and showcases the heartfelt, haunting songwriting she's known for: "The drought was the very worst / When the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst / It was months and months of back and forth / You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore.". Songs like "Blank Space" and "Wildest Dreams" are more than deserving of their far-reaching recognizability, but not so much their long time (and only recently dethroned) standing at the top of Taylor's Spotify play stats. Fearless. That said, this album ranked below the others as it plays it a bit safer than some of the music released later in her career. And though "All Too Well" is of course her opus in this arena, Speak Now precedes it with an impressive display of her one-off storytelling powers. Her detour is immediately apparent with a simple piano opening on "the 1," as piano chords echo a slight reverb off a guitar's strum-claps, while melancholy ballad "exile" (feat. It's the stuff of shared languages, not unlike our own pensive journal entries when we had nowhere else to turn but the page. It's Taylor's first autobiographical album in three years, after an incredible pivot to fiction in folklore and evermore followed by re-recording Fearless and Red (with the latter three all dropping in 11 months' time). The worlds defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking whats new and whats next since 1952. The All Taylor Swift Songs (including Midnights) Tier List below is created by community voting and is the cumulative average rankings from 190 submitted tier lists. folklore in comparison merely flirts along the edges of pop mantras on songs like "the last great american dynasty" and the deeply affecting "mirrorball," while veering straight into indie-folk influence on "illicit affairs" and the finger-plucked "invisible string," among others. But while her grasp of song structure at this point in her career suggested an innate talent for how to develop a melody, Fearless also highlights Swifts then-limited repertoire and lack of creativity in constructing her narratives of doe-eyed infatuations and first loves gone wrong. To celebrate the release of Swifts tenth album Midnights, here we take a look back on Taylor Swifts entire career and rank her ten albums in order of greatness. Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince, however, is her stock in trade, a richly painted narrative punctuated by cool synth washes and pep-rally chants, while The Archer is quintessential Swift: wistful, minimalist dream pop that displays her willingness to acknowledge and dismantle her own flaws, triggers, and neuroses. Many artists lucky enough to enjoy their 15 minutes of fame peak at the onset, delivering one or two tokens of pop culture product before a dwindling stream of less impressive ventures. Its a dazzling, surprising album, brimming with career-best moments, and heralded a brave new direction for the pop star. Songs like Love Story, You Belong with Me and Fifteen, filled with heart-on-sleeve lyrics and earworm hooks, remain among her best. Read on for a ranking of all of Swift's albums, from least to most iconic in descending order. On Swifts second album she still kept things country, but this time the pop edge that defined later releases was more evident. This only further proves that "Reputation" is a prime example that Swift can experiment with a variety of genres and still create magic. Swift certainly has an . And though Taylor's never been a stranger to love songs, here, she's more sultry than sweet. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. She draws from her accumulated life experience and musical insight to connect with her younger self, refining her past homages to youth with matured, knowing vocals (dropping her country inflection for a more rounded singsong). On earworm lead-single Anti-Hero Swift sings: Its me/Hi/Im the problem, its me, the kind of thought weve all had when lying awake trying to drift off. Swift's other albums have hits that I can imagine hearing in a grocery store or on a radio station years from now and immediately recognizing just from the opening chords alone. I don't love the way the writer described some of the albums (saying Taylor sounds like a stay at home mom? But on Red, it's "worthwhile fight" and "a ruthless game," never easy but always intoxicating, almost to the point of nausea. But this time, we're also met with a subtle lightness, like the calm and clarity that comes after a good cry. Morgan Wallen One Thing at a Time (2023) 20. Im not surprised you guys mostly hate on records and rarely do things right. I'm using weekly Spotify Charts because I hate Billboard 2. Perhaps compensating for that previous album's wave of negative press, Taylor here returns to her tried-and-true toolbox, leaning into romantic whim and angelic daydreams: living room waltzes, paper promise rings, sneaking through gardens, skipping down streets. Swift shines brightest on these songs, building and developing her story out of economic but evocative turns of phrase.". But its All Too Well thats the finest moment on Red, and possibly the greatest song Swift has ever written. How Marvel went big with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Insider's music team revisited the album and ranked all 17 of its deluxe-edition songs. She's endlessly accessible, easy to understand even in her later, more cryptic works, yet her songwriting is also a blank space (*cue pen-click*) ripe for filling in your personal memories and private associations. It's as if we're sitting round a campfire confiding in one another, sharing painful memories of when our best wasn't good enough, when our savior complex sputtered out, and when we watched them walk away. 'All You Had To Do Was Stay' - '1989' Article Continues Below Don't get me wrong, "All You Had To Do Was Stay" is an amazing song that fits perfectly into. Copyright 2023 Meredith Corporation. Some songs lean more country ("Mean") whereas others hint at the musical experimentation that would follow in subsequent albums ("Enchanted," "Haunted"), and, yet, the album is a mix of styles that seamlessly blend together. Like folklore, much of evermore is made up of somber soliloquies that materialize like a fine mist over a field in the dead of winter. Overall, the beauty of revisiting Red is that many of us, at points high and low, have related to its caustic, dizzying array of emotion, tracing the nonlinear trajectory of falling in love, breaking your heart, and putting it back together again. Note: hitting 'no opinion' or 'I like both' frequently will negatively affect your results. "Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. This Taylor Swift discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Taylor Swift albums can be found at the top of the list. 176. evermore - 85. evermore was Swift's ninth studio album. By album three Swift was a certified Big Deal. Tier ranking every single Taylor Swift song was the hardest thing I've ever done lol, so ENJOY! The euphoric Mastermind takes it one step further, where on it Swift admits: No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So Ive been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless/This is the first time Ive felt the need to confess. With a record thats a love letter to love itself. Although "Folklore" may not have the mainstream appeal of her previous albums, it's an album longtime fans will appreciate as it highlights her stellar songwriting and pays homage to her acoustic roots. Ten albums, a mantelpiece of awards and over a decade later, Swift has become one of the biggest popstars on the planet. In an album review for Variety, critic Chris Willman wrote, "For some fans, it might take a couple of spins around the block with this very different model to become re-accustomed to how there's still the same power under the hood here. Haim collaboration No Body, No Crime is a full-blown country revenge song, while Long Story Short and Gold Rush fuse Swifts new sound with some 1984-era gloss. From Taylor Swift to Midnights, we've ranked all of the singer's studio albums from best to worst. Lover is a backtrack in a way. Reputation is, without a doubt, Taylor's most polarizing work to date. There are, of course, a handful of golden tunes (Dancing with Our Hands Tied, Call It What You Want, Delicate). Shes doing exactly what shes always done: offering a collection of incisive, often provocative songs that incorporate authentic, first-person details and leaving others to argue over specific genre signifiers. "Fearless" might just be the best opening guitar riff of her applicable albums (Taylor Swift, Speak Now, and Evermore's are less so) fringed with a summer's day twang and immediately infecting the listener with a blissful dose of euphoria, like a spoonful of syrup taken between smiling lips. The contrast of that relationship with the one detailed in "Champagne Problems" makes the latter seem even more heart-wrenching. Debut. It's 1989's sonic spirit with more lyrical depth, dipping a brush in her newfound solipsism and painting musical murals of Taylor's "13 sleepless nights," scenes of "self-loathing, fantasizing about revenge, wondering what might have been, falling in love, and falling apart" construed in vivid detail. While she had flirted with a transition from country in Red two years prior, 1989 came full throttle with heightened production from soon-to-be mainstay producer Jack Antonoff (of Fun. Fearless in its original 2008 form was adolescent in every way: a gentle voice singing fantasies of Juliet finding her Romeo, a boy on a white horse beckoning his hardened princess. These are songs that beckon celebration, hands raised over heads in secular worship of a 20-something's innate need to romanticize their life visions of nice dresses and sunsets, the epicenter of the world awaiting your arrival, hope that your beauty and grace will never fade. As critic Jon Caramanica wrote for The New York Times in 2014, this album is filled with catchy pop tracks but it sets itself apart from mainstream music of that genre. and Bleachers fame), who employs an undercurrent of drums that boom like palms on metal doors and vocals that echo as if off skyscrapers. Almost 15 years ago, before the Grammy awards and international tours, a fresh-faced, 17-year-old Taylor Swift released her self-titled debut album. Her narrators often seem to lack insight because Swift writes with the point of view that hers is the only story to be told, which makes songs like Dear John and Better Than Revenge come across as shallow and shortsighted. On 2012s Red, Swift began her transition from country crossover artist to creating glossy, mainstream pop; on its 2021 re-record we were reminded just what a superb songwriter Swift has always been. The imagery for the album was filled with snakes, and lyrics subtly (and at times, not so subtly) addressed their falling out. As if a trump card she saved specially for its bridge, Taylor relinquishes a rare shriek of elation and dismay ("He looks up grinning like a devil!") At the time of publishing, we're just over two weeks past our first listen, still internalizing the record's themes of loneliness and loathing, insecurity and insomnia. this includes her entire catalogue/discography and eras debut to evermore. Swift, of course, got her start writing astutely observed country ballads, and these songs bolster her trademark knack for lyric-crafting with maximalist, blown-out pop production courtesy of collaborators Max Martin and Jack Antonoff. And on this album, in particular, the stories she tells are about how her narrators choices impact others, often in ways that cause irreparable harm. Whether it's a song about an ex or someone else who wronged her, Swift's clever, catchy "revenge tracks" have only continued to improve from here. With the addition of six from the Vault tracks (songs written at the same time as the album, that Swift shared with the re-recorded version), it was like opening a musical time-capsule; with tracks like the emotive Fifteen taking on a new meaning as a poignant tribute to her teenage life. So while it's vehemently impressive that an adolescent was the creative force behind the best tracks on a seven-time platinum record, it doesn't change the fact that it's far from her best work, and mostly made of songs that slip through her legacy's cracks more than any other album. escaped the fate of Pharrell in Minions or Timberlake in Trolls). 1,062 Likes, 2 Comments - BLKPIK IDI ( ) (@blackpink.india) on Instagram: "#TaylorSwift, BLACKPINK and #OliviaRodrigo are the only female artists ranking inside IFPI's Top 10" "1989" is packed with standout songs that hold their own, like "Blank Space," featuring masterful lyrics in a pop context;"Wildest Dreams," showcasing a heartbeat driving the song and breathy singing that creates a dreamlike quality; and "How You Get The Girl," serving as a lighthearted, pop-infused love song. And we'd be remiss not to highlight the otherwise overlooked single "Today was a Fairytale" that is just as fantastical and hooky as Fearless' trademark tracks, but was unjustly tacked onto the soundtrack for the unfortunate 2010 film Valentine's Day (wherein Taylor made her acting debut as a kissing partner for then-boyfriend Taylor Lautner). Filled with rootin tootin tunes like Tim McGraw, Our Song and Teardrops on My Guitar (largely considered Swifts breakout song) that stormed the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, it earned a teenage Taylor support slots on tour with Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Faith Hill. But, as is tradition, the haters hardly scratched the surface of this sixth record, overlooking its genuine feats of all-encompassing production and high-energy, in-your-face vocals. 1989 signifies a rebirth of sorts for Taylor, not just because it's named after her actual birth year, but more due to its status as her first seismic genre shift. 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