The Case for a New Taylor Swift
Why wanting novelty from your favorite pop star isn't a bad thing.
I know what you're thinking: “You want another era?”
Well… yes!
If you’re a staunch Taylor Swift fan, the title of this probably triggers a memory of that one scene in Miss Americana where Taylor talks about the endless amount of novelty we demand from female pop stars. In the film, she points out that “...everyone is a shiny new toy for like two years. The female artists have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to or else you're out of a job.”
I don’t entirely agree with the premise of her argument — there’s an excellent reddit post that supports how I feel about it that I’ll link here. I do think there’s a problem with how much we demand from artists. I’ll give her that. The amount of creative output within a certain amount of time, the tours, the merch, the political statements, the outfits, the social life… the list of grievances is endless. But I think change is necessary when it comes down to the art itself. I think we should want our favorite creators to change and evolve with the times. Taylor speaks about that process like it’s an inherently negative thing, and I couldn’t disagree with her more.
We shouldn’t settle for work from an artist’s comfort zone when we know they're capable of going beyond it. In Taylor’s case, we know she has the capacity for major creative change because she’s done it with albums like folklore and 1989, both of which were massively successful and earned her two additional Grammys for Album of the Year. Those awards weren’t coincidences.
I can understand some of the defensiveness around Taylor’s less critically acclaimed work, but Taylor won a Grammy for folklore because… well, it was a good album. One of her best, in fact. Longtime fans don’t just recommend it to casual listeners because it’s her “most pretentious” or “mature” work. They recommend it because it’s some of her greatest songwriting and arguably her most cohesive project to date.
Albums like folklore and 1989 are perfect case studies for how Taylor’s highest quality, most impactful work comes when she tries new things and sheds her creative skin. She’s clearly at her best when she pushes her own limits. Staleness doesn’t look good on her.
My larger point is that Taylor makes some of her best art when she’s least expecting to. Her most interesting music often comes out of situations where, by her standards, she anticipates public disapproval or commercial failure — or, when she simply trusts her creative intuition more than anyone or anything else. That’s one thing both 1989 and folklore have in common.
Before she released 1989, Taylor pushed back against label executives and top members of her management team countless times because they were so worried about the success of the album. The polaroid she chose for the cover didn’t show her full face, so they inquired about her picking different album art. She held her ground. When she played them the collection of purely synth-pop songs for the first time, they begged her to incorporate more of a country sound to stay closer to her roots. She refused.
In an interview for Billboard in December of 2014, Taylor described the experience like this:
I remember all the sit-downs in the conference rooms, where I would get kind of called in front of a group of people who have worked with me for years. They said, “Are you really sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to call the album 1989? We think it’s a weird title. Are you sure you want to put an album cover out that has less than half of your face on it? Are you positive that you want to take a genre that you cemented yourself in, and switch to one that you are a newcomer to?”
And answering all of those questions with “Yes, I’m sure” really frustrated me at the time — like, “Guys, don’t you understand, this is what I’m dying to do?” The biggest struggle turned into the biggest triumph when it worked out.
Even though fully transitioning to a different genre was a huge artistic leap for her, Taylor told fans at the time that 1989 was her favorite thing she’d ever made. It went on to become one of the most successful pop albums of the 21st century, had a cover that revived polaroid photography for the masses, and was the highest commercial peak of her career up until folklore, Midnights, and The Eras Tour.
She stuck with her gut, and it took her to the mountaintop — despite all her fears of falling.
folklore was similar in its novelty and success, albeit in a very different context. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, Taylor remotely recorded an acoustic record with a significant amount of non-diaristic writing — both elements she’d never applied to an entire album before. She clearly wasn’t expecting the reception it received, because there was no rollout — the album dropped the day she announced it — and only one single. But, against all odds, her massive risk became practically an overnight success.
Part of the reason fans immediately loved folklore (even if nobody wanted to admit it at the time) was that they were desperately craving something different from Taylor after three big pop albums. At that point, it had been almost eight years since she put out a record where the majority of the songs didn’t fall strictly into that genre. folklore was a massive commercial success, but more importantly, it was good all the way through because it was succinct and different. It was effective as one cohesive body of work, not just a collection of songs.
Lover, in contrast, did feel like a collection of songs. Taylor clearly wanted it to be a return to the commercial success of 1989 after the black sheep of reputation — that was evident solely from the plastic-y desperation behind the lead single, “ME!” — but she more than confirmed that in Miss Americana when she told audiences that “[Lover] is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success.”
She was essentially planning in advance for her own demise, with the expectation that she’d have to copy and paste all the traditional rules of pop stardom across her career for as long as possible in order to draw out her success. But, as we all know now, that’s not the playbook that ultimately led her to the entirely new level of fame she’s reached over the past two years. She didn’t become the most famous entertainer in the world because she tried to recreate the success of 1989.
No — she did that by branching out with folklore and taking an artistic risk, even in the face of a pandemic, a canceled world tour, and an entire future career that suddenly felt uncertain. Many fans joke that if it weren’t for Covid, Taylor would be performing at a Las Vegas residency right now. And even though that’s hyperbole, I have to admit I agree with the sentiment. Who knows where Taylor would be today if it weren’t for her decision to say “fuck it” to what the industry expected of her?
I desperately want her to do that again. I want to see another major artistic shift in Taylor’s music, and in the wake of The Tortured Poets Department and Eras Tour, I think it’s sorely needed. I want a reset from 31-song-long diaristic projects. It’s hard to find a specific, compelling theme that makes all the music in TTPD come together as a focused experience for me as a listener — both sonically and aesthetically. And that’s really saying something, considering I understand the lore behind the lyrics better than 99% of her fandom (don’t ask).
Both Lover, Midnights (3am Edition), and TTPD suffer from a serious lack of editing. If I’m being totally honest, the sheer amount of material she’s putting out with these albums is starting to become exhausting, even as a Taylor fan of sixteen years.
The harsh reality is that you simply can’t build a career off of good lyrics, mainstream pop production, and large creative output alone. Not the kind of historic career Taylor so clearly wants to maintain, anyway. She’s proven that by making albums like Fearless, Red, 1989, folklore, and Midnights — all projects where she broke industry barriers whether it was through a change in genre, innovative marketing, interesting creative choices, fresh production, new collaborators, or all of the above. And notably, through all of those eras, she managed to stay true to herself the entire time while taking creative leaps that paid off in immeasurable ways.
If Taylor continues to put out long, sparsely edited projects like Midnights (3am Edition) and TTPD — albums that largely have similar production and stylistic choices to ones she’s previously put out — I fear she’s going to reach a truly stagnant place in her career. Fans will still buy whatever she’s selling, of course, but critics, the industry, and the general public will simply move on to something more interesting if she continues to produce the same material over and over again.
In some ways that’s already starting to happen. TTPD is an excellent album with some incredible songwriting, but it’s not curated, culturally relevant, innovative, or boundary pushing for her personal artistry in the same way that Brat was for Charli XCX or Cowboy Carter was for Beyoncé in 2024.
Swifties’ resistance to that statement — resistance I’ve heard countless times and seen in many irritating forms on Twitter — just shows that at this point, many of them are so opposed to thinking critically about Taylor’s music and so determined to defend her to their last breath that they’ve deliberately omitted the concept of artistic merit from their reasoning. They can only judge art by its popularity, because by that metric, Taylor is always the best. It’s a guaranteed way for them to win.
“Winning” isn’t the point of music, though. That’s the problem with Swiftie stan culture and a lot of fan culture at large. Numbers aren’t truly indicative of talent, no matter how bad Swifties want them to be. No matter how successful Taylor is — no matter how many streams she gets or weeks she stays on the charts or tickets she sells — she can’t sit on her creative laurels if she wants to continue to be a prolific leader in the industry. And we shouldn’t want her to.
Ultimately, I think her capitalistic mindset and fear of disapproval (being a pathological people pleaser, if you will) are what stifle Taylor’s artistry the most. After the amount of success she’s had with her last two albums, The Eras Tour, and the re-recordings, I hope she can remove those two factors as priorities in her career — or at the very least take them down a few notches. She has more money than God and all the evidence in the world to know that her intuition is almost always the best guide for her artistry. She shouldn’t have to rely on the perceived opinions of executives or the general public to dictate what her music should sound like.
I love Taylor, and it’s because I care about her so much that I’m willing to think critically about her music. As a longtime fan, I know she has the capability to craft cohesive, curated projects like folklore & 1989 that obliterate her old boundaries. The aesthetics are secondary — I couldn’t care less if she has another era that looks like Midnights or folklore or whatever. I just care that whatever she does next doesn’t sound like those albums. I care about the material.
I never want her music to reach a point where it sounds safe. I want her to make curated, thoughtful art. I want her to say “fuck it” to everything but that. She shouldn’t have to focus on singles, music videos, sales, charts, public opinion, awards, or success whatsoever while doing what she does best. I want her to take big risks again.
And as we approach the end of The Eras Tour and the closing of this monumental chapter in her life, I want to see a new Taylor emerge from the ashes.
I just hope she does too.