Pennsylvania-born, Nashville-resident Taylor Swift is currently in the midst of what the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant once famously referred to as a pop star’s “imperial phase” – that moment in a performer’s career when they are the very centre of the culture and everything they touch turns to gold.
The 24-year-old singer has broken all sorts of records with her fifth album, 1989 – incredibly, in the age of falling sales, it has become the first album in a full 12 years to shift a million copies in one week, and perhaps even more remarkably, she has become the first ever artist to have three albums go platinum on their debut.
It’s not difficult to locate the source of Swift’s appeal – possessed of striking good looks and an impressive voice, her songwriting skills are also of an exceptionally high order. The first clue that there was substantially more to her than the average starlet arrived with the “popstep” smash ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’, an utterly inspired genre mash-up which took the international charts by storm.
Swift has said that 1989 (named for the year of her birth) is unashamedly an attempt at a pop masterwork, a fact which becomes abundantly clear thanks to the preponderance of huge choruses and catchy hooks. She has succeed admirably in her aim of making a state-of-the-art collection of 21st century, mass appeal pop.
The likes of ‘Welcome To New York’, ‘Blank Space’, ‘Style’ and the US No.1, ‘Shake It Off’, are all brilliantly executed pieces of sparking electro-pop, buzzing with addictive beats, infectious synth sounds and irresistible melodies. Elsewhere, ‘I Wish You Would’ boasts towering power-pop choruses, while ‘Bad Blood’ sees Swift gleefully subvert her girl-next-door persona with a positively seething putdown of an ex (“Still got wounds in my back from your knife,” she snarls).
Best of all is the ballad ‘Wildest Dreams’, which alternates between Ariel Pink-style chillwave verses and sweeping, singalong choruses. No wonder, then, that in New York, London, Paris and Munich, everybody’s talking about Taylor’s unique brand of pop music.
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