Taylor Swift recently wrapped up her highly successful Eras Tour, where she explored music from her vast eclectic catalog of music. While her music often blends genres, and we can always debate the finer points of genre classification, one thing always remained true about the music of Taylor Swift, it is genuinely great songwriting that connects with listeners.
Taylor Swift’s Country Songwriting Roots
Some songwriters have provided a masterclass for aspiring composers over the years but few have been as successful as Taylor Swift. In this article, we’ll explore what makes Swift an intriguing and enduring case study in composing music across multiple genres throughout her career.
Swift started her career as a teenage phenom in the pop country realm in 2006. Her songs were not necessarily overly complex, and they adopted certain aspects of country music, like relatable songwriting fodder. She was a bit young to adopt the old country tropes like a cold beer on a Friday night, so her songs leaned into her own adolescent perceptions of life, which connected with a whole new audience, an audience of teenagers that had been largely neglected by country music.
She blended her relatability and country-style songwriting with pop sensibilities, making early hits such as “Teardrops On My Guitar” perfect for radio airplay. Instrumentation didn’t deviate much from what we’d normally hear in pop-centric country music – fiddles, banjos, dobro, mandolins, and acoustic guitar.
From Country to Pop: Early Experiments With Rock and Electronic Sounds
Around 2010, she began to venture out from the pop country sound a bit when she released “Speak Now” and “Red” in 2012. With those albums, she started incorporating more rock (“Haunted“) and dubstep elements (“I Knew You Were Trouble“) into her music but retained the pop sensibility and relatable songwriting. However, the arrangements started to get more complex, and we started to hear more synth textures being layered into her music.
This is not to say that Swift abandoned country music altogether; the track “Mean,” for example, which leans into banjo instrumentation, is clearly rooted in the country realm. And even with the sonic changes these albums brought about, Swift still retained an element of storytelling akin to folk artists like Joni Mitchell. From a marketing standpoint, this album was brilliantly composed, allowing airplay on country radio and pop radio, bringing in new listeners while retaining the old ones.
Collaborations and the Rise of Taylor Swift’s Pop Sound
Her early success allowed her to start to incorporate brilliant songwriting collaborators and producers like Max Martin, Shellback, Jack Antonoff, Ryan Tedder, Nathan Chapman, and Imogen Heap, which further expanded her sonic reach. In 2014, she made a full pop transformation with her album “1989”. She largely abandoned the acoustic arrangements in favor of embracing electronic textures, 80s-inspired synths, programmed drum machines, and polished production. This album yielded hits like “Shake It Off,” “Bad Blood,” and “Blank Space“.
“Reputation” in 2017, saw a more experimental tone, delving into hip-hop, R&B, and electronic influences. The songwriting remained relatable but reflected darker, edgier themes, accentuated by largely ditching acoustic instruments on the record.
The change in persona to an edgier persona was noticed by the media and she experienced some backlash for writing about feuds with people like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. This is widely known as her biggest controversy, and the fact that we use the word “edgy” to describe the album “Reputation” and songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” goes to show what a squeaky clean image she has been able to hang onto across nearly two decades in the music business.
In 2019, she followed up “Reputation” and released “Lover” which was somewhat a return to blending pop with country, folk, and rock elements. Although she was walking in the same general sonic space, she was doing so with a bit more complexity in the compositions and sophistication in the songwriting. Songs like “The Archer” and “Cornelia Street” specifically feature more intricate rhythmic phrasing and phrasing variations than her earlier work.
Indie Folk and Storytelling on Folklore and Evermore
By this point in her career, she was able to look back on her career, especially when the music world became bogged down in uncertainty. This triggered a return to an indie folk style that seemed to convey those songwriting themes very well on the 2020 albums “Folklore” and “Evermore”. Acoustic-driven storytelling has always been the bread and butter of the Taylor Swift sound and these albums proved that she was still an excellent songwriter, even when you strip away the glossy pop production.
Songwriting Lessons From Taylor Swift’s Genre Shifts
Her sound has continued to evolve and adapt, but the way I’ve always seen her music is a signature songwriting style framed with different compositional elements depending on the album or the song. This is an important lesson for those who want to brand themselves with a signature sound, a reminder that you can dabble in other genres while not entirely changing how you write your lyrics. It also shows that a great song will shine through, regardless of what genre or label people want to put on it. The most important thing is that your songs connect with people.
Swift’s career is a masterclass in adaptability and reinvention, and paying attention to your audience. There are a lot of things that set Swift apart from other musicians but from a compositional standpoint, it was developing her own storytelling style and sticking to it while allowing fluidity in how those stories are conveyed in her compositions.
