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Taylor Swift,
raised in a wealthy family of Pennsylvania who moved to Nashville specifically
to help her succeed in the world of country music,
was the unusual country-music star (and songwriter) who, a teenager herself, addressed her songs to the younger generation.
Taylor Swift (2006), containing the hits
Teardrops on My Guitar (a languid country ballad) and Picture to Burn (a rowdier honky-tonk number),
was her breakthrough;
and
Fearless (2008), containing the smooth, poppy Fifteen was her
first best-selling album of the year.
At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Swift's You Belong With Me was voted best video by a jury that obviously had seen very few music videos in their career.
The route to stardom continued with
Mean (an unusually lively ditty), off Speak Now (2010),
perhaps her most personal album,
the danceable We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and the hard-rocking (by her standards) I Knew You Were Trouble, off
Red (2012).
A ten-minute version of All Too Well would eventually break the record of longest song to reach the top the US sales charts, a record held for 50 years by Don McLean's American Pie.
She became recognizable for
the bubblegum dance-pop of the Max Martin creations:
Bad Blood, Shake It Off and Blank Space, off 1989 (2014).
In 2016 she mainly made news for clashing with Kim Kardashian and ever obnoxious rap star Kanye West.
The songs of Reputation (2017), mostly composed by Martin, Shellback (Johan Schuster) and Jack Antonoff,
notably Look What You Made Me Do (not written by Martin),
were not particularly more tedious and banal than the previous ones, just she had decided to impersonate the villain.
Five consecutive Swift albums had topped the Billboard charts.
In 2019 Swift was named the world's highest paid celebrity by Forbes magazine
Me (by Joel Little) was the first single off
Lover (2019), followed by You Need to Calm Down.
Folklore (2020) remained eight weeks at the top of the US sales charts.
Most of the songs were composed and produced by Aaron Dessner (The National), including the mega-hit
Cardigan, while
Jack Antonoff composed and produced some of the most interesting, like
Mirrorball and
This Is Me Trying,
and Exile was a collaboration with
Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).
A few months later she released
Evermore (2020), another collaboration with Dessner, which is basically
a collection of leftovers.
Starting in 2021, with Fearless: Taylor's Version (2021), she began
re-recording her first five albums in order to own the rights on their music.
This re-recorded version has 26 songs, i.e. it includes leftovers and assorted garbage, i.e. it sounds even worse than the original.
Despite being one of the worst albums of the year, Midnights (2022) was another bestseller. In fact,
in 2022 Taylor Swift became the first artist in history to claim every slot in the top 10 of the US singles chart, thus
overtaking Drake, who held the previous record of nine top 10 singles in September 2021 (the Beatles scored eight top 10s in 1964).
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