‘A genius’: The clever secret behind Taylor Swift’s catchiest pop tunes
A new book reveals the three key elements behind Taylor Swift's rise from teenage songwriter to global phenomenon.
Taylor Swift is a world phenomenon. How did she get that way?
First, it all starts with the songs. Like the Beatles and Prince, and unlike (say) Sinatra, Taylor got famous by singing the songs that she wrote, both on her own and in collaboration. To understand her we ought to hear her songs as songs: not as if they were poems in printed books, but as lyrics interacting with music.
Second, her songs have worked so well – for so long – because throughout all her changes of style and genre and collaborators, she’s been able to stay both aspirational and relatable. She and the characters in her songs present people her fans wish they could be or want to be like.
But, even after her ascent to superstardom, she also writes so that we can identify with her: She presents roles, characters and personae that resonate with many of us, and dilemmas that resemble many of ours.
An almost too typical teenage girl, an insecure outsider even when she gets celebrated and welcomed, a beauty icon who knows she tries too much, Swift represents the kind of person that many of us want to be and mirrors the way that some of us already see ourselves.
We know she works hard, that she’s always been a good girl, that she’s tried to please the adults and the audiences around her, and that she has largely succeeded. So. far.
Her music shows how it feels – and here’s my third answer – when you can’t stop working: when diligence, worldly success and artistic commitment get you everywhere you’ve ever wanted to go, and you still want something more. That work ethic, and that attention to what people want (while trying to give us something more), contribute to what my subtitle calls Swift’s genius.
It’s a word more often applied to artistic revolutionaries, to rule-breakers who stand above and apart from the crowd, and (not by coincidence) to men.
A versatile creator who understands her audiences; who brings us along with her; who figures out all the rules, then uses those rules to make an art that’s many-layered, emotionally compelling, individual, and new: That kind of creator deserves the term “genius” too. And that’s the kind that Taylor Swift has become.
What makes her (in that polemical sense) a genius? What makes her music mean so much to so many fans?
My three big answers (along with many small ones) come from listening to Taylor’s work and from learning about her life.
That life – her triumphs and scandals, her tours and her relocations, her boyfriends and best friends and colleagues and friends-become-enemies – informs the songs. It’s about the music, the recordings and the performances that have emerged from that life: Taylor’s own versions of Taylor, as heard in those songs.
The songs have a kind of heroic origin story. In Taylor’s own telling, she started learning at the age of 12 when, as she put it, “a guy who my parents had hired to fix my computer” saw a guitar in the house and asked, ‘“Do you want me to teach you a few chords?’ I said yes, and that was that … I was just relentless about wanting to play all the time, songwriting for all my free time.”
The supposed repair guy that Scott and Andrea hired seems to have been a professional guitar teacher too. Without Scott and Andrea and their wealth and attention, without the family’s move to Nashville, without Taylor’s whiteness, without her photogenic countenance, without her early collaborators (such as Nathan Chapman and Liz Rose), without her willingness to work and learn and study and take direction, both in the studio and onstage, she could not have found success in the same way.
With them, though, her success came from her songs.
“It can get complicated on every other level,” she said in 2018, “but the songwriting is still the same uncomplicated process it was when I was writing songs in my room.”
The New Yorker critic Kelefa Sanneh, in his majestic survey of American popular music, Major Labels, calls Swift “both a brilliant songwriter and a brilliant collaborator”.
A pop singer who could not please casual fans would run little chance of attracting so many devoted ones: Swift’s rise depended not just on the depth of her lyrics (though they helped), nor on her originality (much of which came later), but on her heard-in-the-drugstore, overheard-on-the-car-radio appeal.
Nonetheless, the songs and their words reward close analysis: The more attention you pay, the better they get, and the more you can get out of them. Reporters for Vogue once asked Taylor, on camera, “If you could teach one subject in school what would it be?” She answered, gleefully, “English!”
She’s been the subject of English classes instead. Teachers and readers can learn how those words work so well by setting them next to other English words from other writings, some of them novels, memoirs and modern poems.
This book treats the songs as songs, not page-based poems or speeches or anything else: The way they sound can transform what the words do and say. Before we look at what the words do and what they mean, I want to make sure that we hear the music too.
To take one recent example from the Midnights era: “Hits Different” repeats the two-word title phrase four times in each chorus.
The song says that the word “love” might be a lie – after all, Swift’s friends keep telling her so – but the word, and its hollowness, change as the phrase “hits different” repeats. Its syllables change pitch, up two whole steps, then down two whole steps, then up and down again, as if Swift couldn’t figure out whether to believe in love (the upside) or spurn her former belief (the downside). Love and disappointment, in this composition, really do hit different each time, even when the words are the same.
And what’s true for that song holds for others. To understand why Swift’s words hit so hard, and so well, and mean something so different each time, we need to understand how they work in her music.
That understanding requires some slightly technical music teacherish vocabulary, though I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum. Most pop music relies on vocal melodies that follow the notes of a major or minor scale. Voice teachers give the eight notes of a scale one-syllable designations: For a major scale, that’s do re mi fa sol la ti and a higher do (as in the song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music).
Modern jazz musicians, contemporary composers, and some pop songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Tori Amos) invent strange or unintuitive chord progressions. Swift mostly reuses simple, familiar ones.
Her creative power comes in the melodies, and the arrangements, and the rhythms, and above all in the words – which need all those other components in order to move us as they do.
Some patterns emerge from her melodies on their own. The musicologist Nate Sloan points to one pattern he calls the T-drop: mi, fa, mi, and then down to the lower la.
“Everything you lose is a step you take” (“You’re on Your Own, Kid”). “You belong with me-e-e.”
Swift uses that drop for dramatic, climactic effect, taking us with her to low points that can precede high points. The big swoop from mi down to the low la also helps her get the most from a vocal range lower than that of many female pop stars.
Hearing these devices come back through her work, we can see how that work holds its words together, how its signature riffs bring us along.
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Originally published as ‘A genius’: The clever secret behind Taylor Swift’s catchiest pop tunes
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