A great way to ruin a party is to put on a Taylor Swift playlist. The Swift fans in the crowd will stop what they’re doing to sing along, but pretty soon the non-Swifties will start to complain—about the breathy and effortful singing, or some fussily worded lyrics, or the general vibe of lovelorn sentimentality cut with dorky humor (“This. Sick. Beat!”). You’ll soon find yourself hosting another round in the endless debate about whether Taylor Swift is a visionary artist or merely a slick product of marketing. Both camps will be reacting to the defining feature of Swift’s music: There’s just so much of her in it.
Pop isn’t supposed to work this way. The most consequential American singer of the past 20 years, Swift can claim commercial achievements that equal or surpass those of the Beatles, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. But Swift still has the feel of an acquired taste, albeit one that millions have acquired. Her success owes less to smash singles—though she has them—than to the obsessive listening she elicits from fans. She is the perfect entertainer for our socially fractured era, in which internet-forged tribes—led by charismatic, love-’em-or-hate-’em idols—have upended politics and popular culture.
Why her? What is the essence of Swiftness? Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift, by Stephanie Burt, is a thorough and thoughtful elaboration of the conventional answer. An influential poet and a Harvard professor, she made headlines for teaching an English course called “Taylor Swift and Her World” last year. Burt writes in a sober, ruminative fashion that departs from the overheated tone of so much Swift-related commentary. Rather than limit her comparisons to contemporary pop stars, she puts Swift in conversation with writers such as Alexander Pope and Willa Cather. Still, the book ultimately reinforces the consensus among critics, fans, and even haters that Swift’s extraordinary success stems from how ordinary she seems—a consensus that both underplays her achievement and insulates her from critique.
Burt knows that the subtitle of her book contains a major claim, and she addresses it early and directly. The genius label is “more often applied to artistic revolutionaries, to rule-breakers who stand above and apart from the crowd, and (not by coincidence) to men,” she writes. They tend to follow Ezra Pound’s famous dictate to “make it new,” leaving an entire discipline transformed. But Swift, as Burt sees her, isn’t that kind of genius. She is “a versatile creator who understands her audiences; who brings us along with her; who figures out all the rules, then uses those rules.” Burt goes through Swift’s catalog album by album, showing how every phase hews to what she sees as the three pillars of Swift’s brilliance: her songwriting acumen, her work ethic, and her relatability.
That last term, relatability, is the watchword of almost all Swiftology—understandably enough. The tidiest explanation for Swift’s success is that she befriended an audience the music industry had underestimated: girls and young women. Swift’s 2006 self-titled debut (released when she was 16) and subsequent two albums of country-pop embodied the point of view of a teen navigating first crushes and schoolyard rivalries. “Fifteen” mentioned Swift’s friend losing her virginity; “The Best Day” was inspired by being shunned by the popular girls. These topics were the concerns of neither the Billboard Hot 100 nor mainstream country at the time. In a 2009 interview, Swift explained, “All the songs I heard on the radio were about marriage and kids and settling down. I just couldn’t relate to that.” The inner lives of girls are so often treated as trivial—but Swift’s hopeful voice and assertive melodies conveyed confidence that her, and her audience’s, experiences were as important as anyone else’s.
As Swift matured from teenage newcomer to name-brand celebrity, she managed to sing about her personal dramas—her trysts with actors, her feud with Kim Kardashian—in ways that sounded recognizable to ordinary young women. “Dear John,” from 2010, was clearly a kiss-off to her ex John Mayer, the rocker who met Swift when she was 19 and he was 31. But Swift’s narrator was simply “the girl in the dress” who “cried the whole way home”—an archetype that many listeners could see themselves in. Swift’s dismay about a powerful ex became a fable for any girl courted by an older guy. “When Swift sings about men, especially bad men,” Burt writes, “she’s often singing to, and for, other women, and she’s usually giving advice.”
Swift’s sisterly relationship with her audience is only part of her role-model appeal. Her songs portray her as a specific sympathetic type: the good, hardworking girl straining to exceed personal and social expectations, all while caddish guys and jealous rivals do her wrong. Pop culture loves to valorize underdogs, and Swift’s trick has been making the figure of the “careful daughter” (to quote “Mine”) into one. She’s a “people-pleaser, driven both by her wish to follow the rules and by her own persistent artistic ambition,” Burt writes. “But that ambition also leaves her vulnerable. What if she fails? What if people think she’s fake?” To anyone with a hint of a pleaser in them, those questions will remain poignant no matter how little Swift’s life resembles their own—as concert crowds who dress up in Swift’s image readily attest.
But relatability can also be a reductive, even belittling lens through which to view any artist’s work. It downplays the exceptional qualities of an entertainer—magnetism, talent, unpredictability—as well as the curiosity and flat-out awe that draw audiences to them. Swift skeptics tout the relatability thesis when they say that she’s done nothing original other than identify an eager audience to exploit. And the logic of She’s just like us renders even the claim of Burt’s subtitle as faint praise. Swift, in Burt’s view, has merely tinkered with a formula. She’s used her songwriting acumen and work ethic to model a feminine sort of genius, in which fastidious care—not disruptive innovation—creates a body of nourishing art. In this interpretation, her achievements should be attainable for anyone who puts their mind to it. Really, though, Swift has done precisely what Pound commanded. She’s made pop music into something new.
These days, every influencer and brand consultant seems to want to call themselves a storyteller. It’s a 21st-century buzzword, perhaps because narrative—the open-ended, mythic kind sustained across Marvel movies and the MAGA movement—has turned out to be one of the few ways to capture and hold attention in a distractible, content-flooded culture. And yet many familiar narrative forms—stand-alone books, movies, concept albums—can hardly compete anymore. Swift’s greatest legacy is already clear: overhauling pop into a vital, contemporary storytelling medium.
Music has always had narrative aspects: Lyrics can tell stories, and the pleasure of a chord progression is in the movement from beginning to middle to end. But music is also an art form of pure sensation whose power surpasses words. For pop music in particular, narrative can be fundamentally in tension with other imperatives. The more plot, specificity, and complication in a song, historically, the less likely it is to work as a sing-along for everyone.
Great artists have transcended this contradiction. Joni Mitchell’s and Bruce Springsteen’s hits, for example, are simultaneously tuneful and rich with story. The work of both artists is among the many precedents for what Swift has accomplished. But their catalogs are also filled with music that skews away from pop palatability in order to tell woollier tales. They have songs of sharp political observation, something Swift’s only clumsily stab at, and songs describing abstract ideas in abstract ways, which Swift’s concrete style and first-person vantage tend to preclude. (Mitchell’s song “Blue” is a riddle of ambiguous images and phrases; Swift’s “Red” opens, “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.”) And neither Mitchell nor Springsteen enjoyed a sustained duration of chart success on the scale that Swift has. Her commercial echelon, again, is more akin to pure pop artists like Madonna, whose lyrical narratives—while memorable—aren’t usually packed with diaristic detail.
Swift’s breakthrough has been finding ways to saturate sugary tunes with information. Whether banger or ballad, her tracks make room for characters, settings, twists, a tidy ending, a cliff-hanger. The tracks interlock with other tracks—and with extramusical artifacts, headlines, and rumors—to build a larger story that makes each individual work more enjoyable. (For example, the 2022 song “Question … ?,” describing a mysterious kiss at a crowded party, is deepened by piecing together how this kiss ripples over years of Swift’s life—and through the rest of her catalog.) Listening to a Swift song is like eating a candy bar that transmits a personal essay into your memory. If you eat enough candy bars, it becomes a novel, and then a series of novels, and then (this is when you become a Swiftie) a virtual-reality, open-world video game you play with friends and strangers. If that all sounds nonsensical, it’s because Swift has pulled off something that’s never quite been done before. The closest comparison might be to show tunes—but for a one-woman play that’s gone 19 years without a curtain call.
How does she do it? Burt is helpful here. “Every sound and word in almost every Taylor song not only solicits attention but rewards it,” she writes. “Time that we spend on her work won’t feel wasted or pointless.” Swift’s moment-by-moment choices play on both the listener’s ear and intellect. She works to turn the audience’s brain on rather than—as pop often seeks to do—off. But the truth is (and this is an actual sign of genius), there’s no single, simple answer to the how of Swift. With every song, her skills meet her assignment in a new way.
Take “All Too Well,” Swift’s best track by wide acclamation. The original 2012 version is a five-minute strummed reminiscence that was never released as a single; the now-canonical version, released in 2021, is 10 minutes long. No song of this length had ever, as this one did, hit No. 1 on the Hot 100. And perhaps no song of this length has ever been so compulsively listenable. Within that form of distended pop song—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, instrumental passage, outro—she does riveting work with music and lyrics. Burt digs into the poetics:
The song amounts to a masterpiece not just in how images move within the restricted space of a pop song, but also in rhyme and off-rhyme and consonance. “Gaze,” “upstate,” “place,” and “days” shift as if each word sought, but couldn’t quite settle into, its perfect rhyme. “Asked for too much” chimes with “tore it all up”; “break me like a promise” matches “name of being honest” (notice the t’s in the first pair, the b’s in the second).
She observes that “these devices might come off as not much more than basic competence in hip-hop, where rapid off-rhymes across lines are what we expect. In Taylor’s kind of pop song, though, where everything has to fit a melody, and verse-chorus patterns aren’t optional, it’s bravura technique.”
Burt’s allusion to hip-hop hints at another way in which Swift breaks ground: As her career has progressed, Swift’s adventuresome approach to genre has helped her write ever richer chapters. Country music, that classic stronghold for story-songs, was a smart place for her to begin her career. (Intentionally so—at age 13, she moved from the Pennsylvania suburbs to Nashville, where she adopted a twang.) When she began to turn away from country, with 2012’s Red, she embraced electronic-dance-music elements—not simply as trendy tropes, but as punctuation marks in the musical stories she was telling about her giddy, exploratory 20s. The results were jolting and sui generis. One struggles to think of any precedent on the charts for a song like “I Knew You Were Trouble,” in which chipper surf-rock verses careen into headbangable choruses of synth-fortified wailing—signifying the moment when she realizes how ill-advised her crush is.
Swift kept experimenting to make her music more pungent, more extreme, even more her. Burt identifies how her swerves into synth pop (for 2014’s 1989 ) and hip-hop and R&B (for 2017’s Reputation ) broadened both how Swift wrote and what she wrote about. She tried on different attitudes, different subplots, and different notions about how words and rhythm and notes interact. A soft dancehall groove on “Delicate” matched her tale of secretive, tiptoeing courtship; the disco spiral of “Style” framed a romance that “has no particular destination,” Burt writes. Her 2020 duo of albums, Folklore and Evermore, channeled the sound and sensibility of indie rock, refracting her perennial personal themes through a dark, blurry lens of fantasy and allegory. She was moving into a newly rewarding phase: making emotionally ambivalent, sonically omnivorous music about the anxieties of her 30s—aging, work, commitment. Her 2022 album, Midnights, first scanned as a return to the safety of beats-driven pop, but the lyrics were bracingly candid, the confessions of a onetime child star wondering if she would ever truly grow up.
Swift’s zigs and zags were well timed for cultural and technological shifts that were dissolving the very meaning of pop. Thanks to streaming—which started to take off after the release of Red—success in music no longer always entails landing a hit single that drives album sales. Luring as many people as possible to listen to your music as compulsively as possible is now the goal. Even as Swift balked at Spotify’s pay rates (she pulled her catalog off the platform from 2014 to 2017), she took the opportunity afforded by its influence to deepen and densify the classic format of the pop song. This thrilled her base—and annoyed many casual listeners.
Much of pop now follows her example. A cohort of young female singer-songwriters—including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams—has arisen over the past five years, delivering storytelling-driven, personally revealing bubblegum. These artists no doubt saw themselves in the plucky perspective that Swift’s lyrics conveyed. But more important, they’ve clearly studied her methods in order to express their experiences in a way that—like any well-delivered yarn—can resonate broadly.
As for Swift, she’s been straining the pop format nearly to its breaking point. Her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, is—even among fans—her most divisive work. Its full form (the “Anthology” edition, which was released the same night as the normal edition) contains 31 songs. Grokking it fully requires knowing the convoluted backstory about an early midlife crisis of sorts. It’s an album about restlessness, impulsivity, consequences, and a very specific-to-Swift brew of personal hurt and public judgment. More than anything, it’s an album in which narrative trumps all. The songs ramble and double back and change shape; she and her producers (Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner) use perplexing time signatures and unsettling, bittersweet chord patterns. Tortured Poets is almost her crowning artistic achievement, containing the most complex and unguarded—and gorgeous—songs of her career.
Almost. The problem with Tortured Poets highlights a problem with Swift that’s been there all along. If she is a genius—and here’s my faint praise—she’s a genius at making diamonds out of doggerel. Her best songs daisy-chain clichés into novel shapes (“The Archer” on 2019’s Lover: “Easy they come, easy they go / I jump from the train, I ride off alone / I never grew up, it’s getting so old”). Her worst songs lumber along with clanging metaphors and leaden coinages (“Willow” on Evermore: “Every bait and switch was a work of art”). Fans mostly don’t mind this, and as a listener, I often don’t either; the overall effect of her music is what counts. But the stark, brooding palette of Tortured Poets casts an unforgiving light on some of the least consistent writing of her career. I adore the melty, country-trip-hop sound of “Guilty as Sin?,” except for the part where the arrangement slows down and she says this: “You’ve haunted me so stunningly,” precisely enunciating the last word, as if it made much sense.
I’d hoped that Burt, herself a wordsmith, might have some gentle feedback to give about such clunkiness. Instead, she praises the album’s multisyllabic excess for executing a conceptual bit: Swift making herself into a tortured poet trying to outdo a pretentious, typewriter-wielding ex. This effort, in Burt’s telling, reflects the broader female experience of falling for a dashing, manipulative “art monster.” Swift is kind of doing this—the delightful title track goes, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots”—but that shouldn’t necessitate ruining otherwise great songs. The search for a mote of relatability has led Burt to excuse-making. Any claim for Swift’s genius should reckon with her lapses into imprecision and pompousness. She has the chops to do better than she often does.
That criticism doesn’t hold Swift—who just announced her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl—to an unfair standard. It recognizes the level she’s long aspired to and has often hit. Swift’s trajectory and the hype around it embody a utopian dream: the perfect marriage between pop music and art music. The two were never separate, really, but pop is an art of compromise—and these days, Swift seems less bound by limits. Can she get deeper, realer, less relatable without sacrificing the pleasure of a tale well told or a song well sung? Might she branch out from the I ? Or might she rewrite her narrative again in a way only someone as singular as her could? The suspense is part of the story.
This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “Songs of Herself.”
The post How We All Came to Live in Taylor Swift’s Version of the World appeared first on The Atlantic.
