Every Taylor Swift album, comprehensively and controversially ranked

Everyone thinks that her old stuff’s better, or that she peaked at Red. Those are valid (albeit basic and well-worn) opinions, but I can’t agree. I expect I’ll find it very difficult to write this post, because for me, all her albums represent something different. Her story, as far as it is known to the public, is a classic Bildungsroman – there’s been a remarkable development in terms of maturity, both with the richness of her musical style and with the feelings expressed in her lyrics (even reputation, which at first glance represented something of a step back in terms of maturity, fits this narrative, for reasons I’ll get onto when I write about it, if I remember).

So here goes nothing. I could probably write thousands of words about each album individually, but I’ll try not to do that. That said, this is likely to be a fairly long post, and I feel it’s only right to warn you of that going in (though it’ll be embarrassing if that ends up being a misplaced warning). Buckle up – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

1. 1989 (Deluxe)

In the top spot, we have 1989. I’ve agonised over this, but in the end I had to go with my heart, and my heart says that 1989 is the pinnacle of her discography to date.

Of course, 1989 had some misses, but methodologically it only feels right to assess each album as a whole. An album is greater than the sum of its parts, and in my view, 1989 is the most cohesive, well-executed album she’s produced so far.

I’m a sucker for a good album opener, and Welcome To New York is just that. That’s not to say it’s a particularly good song – it’s a bit unremarkable, at least within the context of such a strong album – but it sets the tone perfectly, establishing the theme of growth. The synth riff serves to draw a line in the sand from her previous work: at its release, 1989 was described a lot as being “unashamedly pop”, to the extent that it’s become a bit cliche, but I think it bears repeating – it’s easy to forget, but at the time, Swift was really a country artist with a side of pop, and 1989 left this entirely in the past.

Blank Space is an essential chapter in the story of Swift. In a way, it laid the foundation for reputation, with its sarcastic tone. It’s also worth mentioning that the music video is a great time, though that doesn’t really factor into my opinion on the album. But the album really comes into its own with the sophomore track, Style. One of her best songs to date, Style is musically exceptional – the guitar riff is sublime, with a perfect tone – and a far more mature take on romance than anything she’d managed before, acknowledging the mistakes she’d made and choosing to work past them with her beau rather than dogmatically painting herself as a victim, which she was wont to do in her earlier albums.

I don’t want to go through song-by-song for every album – I’d be here all month if I did – but a couple more songs deserve special mentions. Wildest Dreams is beautiful and melancholic, perfectly capturing how it feels to be swept away, to make a mistake but feel wholly unable to stop yourself. Later in the album, Wonderland serves as a retrospective on this – but rather than being tinged with regret, it’s almost defiant in its tone. Where Wildest Dreams says “nothing lasts forever”, Wonderland says “we pretended it could last forever”.

Finally, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that this is a ranking specifically for the Deluxe version of 1989. The regular version is, of course, a great album, but it makes a crucial omission: that of New Romantics. For me, this is one of her best songs – lyrically, it’s rivalled only by State of Grace, and its energy is wonderful. It takes defiance to a new level, talking about the game of a night out. The couplets are cleverly written and sharply delivered, and it’s just an all-round excellent song – and one which is criminally underrated, in my mind, because of its exclusion from the non-deluxe edition.

The Deluxe edition also came with a bunch of Polaroids, which was a nice touch.

2. Lover

If you’d told me when Lover was first released almost a year ago that it would become my second-favour Taylor Swift album, I’d have looked at you like you were crazy. But since its release, it’s grown on me far more than I’d anticipated. Songs which initially didn’t make it into my album playlist have gradually been re-added, and now the entire album is present apart from ME!. (It turns out that a P!atD/Swift collaboration was not everything I’d ever wanted.)

Firstly, this album is long. It’s 18 songs, and over an hour (just). That’s an absolute treat, in this case, and makes up for the fact that its release right at the end of summer meant that it was only my walk-to-work playlist for a couple of weeks. And in those two weeks, it somehow managed to become the soundtrack to my entire summer, as far as my memory’s concerned. I Forgot That You Existed has a particularly strong resonance in that respect, as does London Boy.

In fact, let’s talk about London Boy for a second. This was one of the songs that wasn’t on my playlist when the album was first released – I thought it was tacky, trite, and a bit boring. But it’s really grown on me. Partly, it’s very gratifying to hear one of my favourite artists singing about a character with whom I can identify (at least in my imagination) – the ego takes over, to a degree, and I end up overlooking the elements which had previously frustrated me. It also makes me want a moped, which may not be a good thing.

Cruel Summer is one of the best songs on the album, and indeed perhaps one of the best songs in Swift’s discography. The hit of the chorus, the sharp delivery of the lyrics (“and if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know” is perhaps the best example of this) – and let’s not forget that excellent bridge and the shouted transition into the chorus that follows. It’s a very strong song.

The titular track is lovely and bucolic, following the tradition of New Year’s Day as a genuine, realistic take on how a relationship should be. It’s perhaps a bit plain, but honestly, I’m okay with that – the ordinary style reflects the day-to-day of being in love, rather than falling in love, and that’s a nice touch.

The Archer should probably have been the opening track for the album. I can see why it wasn’t, of course – it doesn’t really set the tone thematically in the way that I Forgot That You Existed does. But the way it builds is magnificent, and in a way, it seems a bit of a shame that it was put as the fifth track, rather than the first. But one of the advantages of this album’s length is that there are still thirteen tracks to go (and for Swift, thirteen is a pretty important number), so it doesn’t really feel wasted.

I Think He Knows is absolutely great as a walking song. The punchy drums, the driving bass line, and the cheeky, flirtatious vocals make it immensely fun to listen to. Perhaps it doesn’t have much substance, but there’s plenty of that elsewhere. Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince and False God make sure of that, with the former providing a fascinating look back on the intersection of Swift’s personal and professional lives in the form of politics.

Daylight and Afterglow are, for some reason, pretty closely linked in my mind, though I can’t quite figure out why. Of the two, I think Afterglow is my favourite. It’s apologetic, honest, and a display of the maturity that I think sets apart Swift’s later work. That said, Daylight was the perfect song to end the album. It’s tonic: retrospective and regretful to begin with, but optimistic and positive at its core – but perhaps most importantly, it’s satisfied. It’s a song that asks no more, written by an artist who remains fiercely ambitious (as evidenced by The Man) but one who also, in the wake of reputation’s disappointing reception, seems to have found some peace.

3. reputation

reputation is a contradiction of itself. One the one hand, it’s her most repetitive album – 60% of it was written in either C or Am, and the vast majority of it uses the same basic chord structure, with similar sounds, melodies, etc. But at the same time, it’s her least consistent – this isn’t objectively measurable to the same extent, but at least in my view, the album has a pretty wide gap in quality between the best and worst songs, to a much greater extent than you see in her other albums. So the arithmetic ceases to be a question of “how good is this album?”, and starts being “do the good songs make up for the bad?”. In my view, the answer is yes.

Obviously, there are some songs I could leave out pretty happily. Generally, they’re the darker, heavier songs – a style I don’t think really suits Swift – such as I Did Something Bad, Look What You Made Me Do, and Ready For It (though the intensity does make Ready For It a great album opener, and enables it to serve as an extremely clear demarcation from the 1989 era). And I could do without the petty sound of Gorgeous – it’s just a worse version of Blank Space, if we’re honest.

But the good bits of the album are Swift at her best. Dress is sweet, sensitive, and longing, and it captures the quiet, private side of falling in love. And Delicate should have been the album opener: the pulsing drumbeat throughout gives the song a sense of motion, making it feel like a midnight drive. It’s also a song that really benefits from a good pair of headphones – to me, that counts as a positive, because it’s an indicator that there’s a depth to the music that you might miss on a casual listen. The lyrics capture the essence of what makes Swift great: though she has certain lyrical flourishes (mentioned elsewhere in this piece), her real quality is in her relatability: “Is it chill that you’re in my head? / Because I know that it’s delicate” is probably eerily familiar for you – I know it is for me.

So It Goes is in some ways one of the heavier songs on the album, but rather than feeling clunky and harsh, it feels dense and layered. It has an intensity and a momentum that I think sets it apart from some of the other “heavy” songs on the album, aligning it more with Dancing With Our Hands Tied – a song which, again, benefits from its relatability, and the way in which it captures the mixed-up emotions that come with a relationship that just can’t work.

After Gorgeous (a fairly forgettable song, as I’ve alluded to) come Getaway Car and King of my Heart. Though these songs are emblematic of many of the problems highlighted by the record’s detractors, I can’t help but enjoy them: the harmonies in the opening of King of my Heart’s chorus give a wonderful thickness to the sound, and its bridge is optimistic and hopeful.

Call It What You Want and New Year’s Day are lovely. Though that may sound like an underwhelming description, that’s largely because it’s hard to do justice to how much I like these songs: both as deeply pleasant sonic experiences, and as a representation of the end of reputation’s journey. The record may have some misses, but it also carries a sense of motion, of progression. In Call It What You Want, Swift demonstrates – or at least says – that she’s come to terms with the hate she receives: “All the liars are calling me one / Nobody’s heard from me for months / I’m doing better than I ever was”. Though there has been anger, sadness, and even pettiness along the way, over the course of reputation Swift has grown up, fallen in love, and become strong enough to weather the storm. The album isn’t as strong as Lover or 1989, but it’s a classic Hero’s Journey, and the good more than makes up for the bad, as far as I’m concerned.

4. Red

This is probably the place where I’ll catch the most flak. If I had to guess, Red would be either at or near the top of most people’s mental rankings. It’s certainly a great album, and if I were employing a different methodology, I’m sure it’d be much higher in my own estimation – some of the songs are really wonderful, and the style is great. But as an album, it just feels to me like it’s missing something. It lacks the cohesion of her later work, and there’s no discernible story or theme throughout the album – in many ways, it feels more like it’s just a playlist or a compilation than an actual album. Ultimately, this is probably just because it fell at a transitional point in Swift’s narrative, making it the album equivalent of the awkward teen years – she’d outgrown country, but hadn’t year grown into pop, so the album occupies a slightly strange position. Nonetheless, there are some songs which I think stand out for their quality, and merit specific attention.

I can’t not talk about State of Grace. As a song, it’s great, but as an album opener, it’s near-perfect. The buildup is exciting, it sets the tone exceedingly well, and it’s a great song. “Mosaic broken hearts“ is one of my favourite lyrics of all time, not just within Swift’s discography. But what really seals State of Grace in my mind as an outstanding song is that it’s actually two outstanding songs, because the deluxe edition of Red comes with an absolutely sublime acoustic rendition which may even be the peak of the album for me – though Treacherous gives it a run for its money, and The Lucky One is a solid contender, as well as being particularly underrated.

But I don’t need to extol Red’s virtues – it’s a great album, as pretty much all Swift fans will agree. Really, I need to justify why I’ve put it so low.

I think the key for me is that it feels a bit clumsy. Despite its commercial success, I Knew You Were Trouble is far from her best work: it’s awkward, easily parodied, and ultimately just fairly unremarkable, to my mind. Likewise, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, another huge commercial hit, pretty much does nothing for me. Some of the tracks also feel a bit thin – I Almost Do had the potential to be one of my favourite songs on the album, but its production just feels lacking somehow – her voice doesn’t have the richness found on songs like Treacherous. And Stay Stay Stay is… cute, but a bit twee for my tastes.

Then there’s the odd transitions. It feels like not a great deal of thought was put into the ordering of the songs on the album, which bugs me a bit, even though it’s arguably a fairly minor detail. Moving from All Too Well to 22 and then to I Almost Do just feels… weird, somehow, like rather than being an album, Red is just a playlist, to be listened to on shuffle. The album is full of odd transitions like that, and they undermine it as a body of work, even though many of the songs are great, as I’ve said.

None of this is to say that I don’t like Red. I truly do – it may be languishing in fourth place, but the competition is (to my mind) fierce, and its position is more a product of how much I like the three albums above it. There’s probably also an element of nostalgia at play, or rather a lack thereof: I came to her music pretty late, so I don’t really have any nostalgia for this album, and indeed there were a couple of songs I’d hardly listened to before I started this piece (notably, Girl At Home and The Moment I Knew, both of which have made their way into my playlist).

All that said, you’d best believe I’ll be blasting 22 at my next birthday party. I can’t help myself, and I won’t apologise for it. (N.B. I’m including that line partly just as motivation to actually finishing writing this before I turn 22. It’s creeping up on me a bit.)

5. Fearless

When looking at Fearless, I’ll have to try and approach it on its own terms, but that won’t come altogether naturally to me. It was released long before I got into Swift’s music, and it can often feel like a bit of a relic of a bygone era: of simpler times, small towns, and high school drama. It doesn’t have the emotional depth that her later work carries, and the music isn’t always my cup of tea. After all, it was released on my older brother’s 12th birthday, and I was only 10. But it’s got some great tracks, and it mustn’t be overlooked – this is, after all, a comprehensive ranking.

We begin with the titular track (a very fresh and very 2008 move, to my mind). Fearless is what you’d expect from a track of that name: optimistic, upbeat, and young. Fifteen, which follows, is much the same, with an excellent bridge. There are a few layers of irony: it’s a retrospective on being fifteen, written by a nineteen-year-old, with all the self-awareness that carries. It also highlights the ability of people to be nostalgic for times that were… well, really quite recent. I see it in myself, too: I long for 2015. At this point, I think most of us do. (If you’re reading this long in the future, when this piece has been rightfully recognised as a canonical work in the realm of musical criticism, look up “2020 coronavirus pandemic”, or “2020 politics”, and you’ll see what I mean.)

Love Story was probably the first Taylor Swift song I heard – though I heard the DaveDays cover of it, rather than the original, and probably made some disparaging remark about how DaveDays “somehow even managed to make Taylor Swift of all people sound good!”. Oh, to be young and foolish again. Really, it’s a great song. It’s twee, but it’s self-aware: when I saw Swift in concert, at the Manchester Arena in 2014 (as part of the 1989 World Tour), she told the story of how she read Romeo & Juliet, and was so heartbroken about the way it ended that she figured she’d write her own version with a happy ending, and thus Love Story was born. I suppose, in a way, it’s a Shakespeare fanfiction, putting it in excellent company with The Lion King.

White Horse is has some great guitar, and the tone of Swift’s voice is particularly good, but the song is ultimately hindered by some distracting strings and piano, and the clumsy “to come around” with which the chorus ends. The instrumental section just before the bridge is also a bit overdramatic, and I think the song would be stronger if it had a slightly more minimalist production. The same applies to Tell Me Why, You’re Not Sorry, and Forever and Always, though I do still like Tell Me Why, and Forever and Always has some wonderful lyrics. You Belong With Me is, of course, an absolute classic which I will happily belt at a karaoke evening, and The Way I Loved You is wonderfully and hilariously over-dramatic. Breathe is also great, though I confess it’s a bit difficult to tell when Swift is singing and when it’s part of Colbie Caillat’s feature (call me a fake fan, but their voices are… pretty similar).

I noted at the beginning of this section that this ranking is supposed to be comprehensive, and so I’d be remiss to not consider the Platinum Edition of Fearless, which has one of my all-time favourite Swift songs: Untouchable. Of course, perhaps ironically, this isn’t actually a Taylor Swift song at all: it’s a cover, with the song’s initial incarnation being a pop-punk ballad. I confess, I haven’t listened to the original – in part because I worry it would spoil Swift’s version for me (though listening to the Swift version with the knowledge of its origins, one can hear the echoes of what it originally sounded like). But the song is beautiful: it’s tender, soft, and heartbreaking. The Platinum Edition also contains the wonderful piano version of Forever and Always. Perhaps it’s unfair, but these songs are probably what enabled Fearless to edge out Speak Now for fifth place. It’s my ranking, and I’ll do what I want.

6. Speak Now

Although Speak Now was released two years later than Fearless, it feels in many ways like a step back. Undeniably, it has some great songs, but there are also a few points where it just falls flat, and where it’s really a victim of both the commercial success that Swift was experiencing by this point, and by the production trends which I find to be… tacky, I suppose? Mine, the opening track, codifies this: electric guitar, overdone drums, and a fairly middle of the road vocal performance combined with a generic structure, all combining to produce a pretty underwhelming and forgettable song.

Thankfully, the album begins to redeem itself with Sparks Fly. On paper, it suffers from many of the same maladies, but the dynamic range combined with the excellent lyrics and reflective theme, alongside a driving bassline, mean it’s a much better song. The bridge is a particular high point, giving respite from the relatively high volume of the rest of the track – something Mine could have done with, but didn’t receive.

Back To December is a good song, but it’s held back a bit by the dated production (a theme throughout the album, unfortunately – the whole thing could do with a bit less electric guitar). Speak Now is amusing, and the deliberate, self-aware pettiness makes it feel quite witty, as well as being a fun song to listen to. Once Swift has pointed out that the bride’s dress looks like a pastry, you’ll see pastry-shaped dresses at every wedding you attend, which is the sort of blessing that feels like a curse.

The Story Of Us isn’t a particularly great song musically, but thematically and lyrically it’s one of my favourites on the album, simply because it’s so relatable: “I used to know my place was a spot next to you / Now I’m searching the room for an empty seat” and “This is looking like a contest / Of who can act like they care less / But I liked it better when you were on my side” are particular highlights, as well as the sharp delivery of “A simple complication / Miscommunications / Lead to fall-outs”.

Better Than Revenge, Innocent, Haunted, and Last Kiss are ultimately where the album falls apart for me. They’re all overdramatic, exceptionally dated, and sadly unremarkable songs, and their positioning one after the other means that this album, despite its high points, is held back from achieving a higher position on this list, as far as I’m concerned. The odd positioning of the different tracks is, in fact, a fairly consistent problem for the album: Never Grow Up is a very strange way of following The Story Of Us, and Better Than Revenge is a harsh wake-up from the sweetness of Enchanted.

The album’s final track, Long Live, goes some way to redeeming it for me: it’s pleasant and optimistic, and although it’s perhaps a little cliche, it manages to avoid being twee, instead striking the sweet spot and positioning itself as charming. It’s not quite enough to bring the album up in my estimation, leaving it languishing in sixth place, but that’s not to say this isn’t a good album – it’s simply held back by a few unfortunate issues which plague many of the songs.

7. Taylor Swift

As we reach the bottom of this list, we also reach Swift’s 2006 debut. It’s… well, it’s about what you could expect from an album released by a sixteen-year-old in 2006, albeit a talented sixteen-year-old who, even then, had a good voice and a knack for songwriting. It’s also a country album, through and through. All that is to say: it’s not really my cup of tea.

I must admit, I wasn’t overly familiar with much of this album before I began writing this piece. I was hoping I’d find some gems, and discover that I’d been missing out on some excellent music all these years. After all, the joy of discovering new old music far outweighs the retroactive FOMO from having not known it before. And certainly, there are some diamonds in the rough: A Place In This World is great from the very beginning, with a great opening chord leading into a pretty decent song (sadly undermined slightly by the clumsy vocal harmonies). The Outside is also a strong contender for best song on the album, with great melodies and a good vocal performance, as well as a great central conceit, though the ending comes from nowhere, which is a bit underwhelming.

In Tied Together with a Smile, Swift beats One Direction to the punch of What Makes You Beautiful by a good five years, but the lower register in which she sings throughout sounds forced: her voice just doesn’t have the power or richness when she searches for the lower notes. Nonetheless, the song is reasonable, and the good lyrics do help to rescue it, to an extent. Stay Beautiful is underwhelming, forgettable, and generally pretty generic: not unpleasant, but nothing special. Should’ve Said No is a bit better, and points in the direction Swift will go in her coming albums – though sadly one of the trappings of this seems to be an overuse of electric guitar to lend a cliched sense of drama. Its lyrics make up for this somewhat, but good lyrics can only do so much when the fiddle is so loudly lost at the end of the first chorus. I have no idea what happened there, or how it ended up on the final release, but some mysteries are destined to remain unsolved.

I could, of course, continue to go through each track and enumerate their respective strengths and weaknesses. But that’s not really the purpose of this. Taylor Swift is a reasonable album, with some reasonable songs. It’s not to my taste, really, and it’s a product of both its time and the person that Swift was when she released it. It’s not perfect, but above all, I’m deeply glad it exists, and I’m glad it experienced the success it did, if only so that it could serve as a foundation for the body of work that followed.

Postscript

It’s difficult to talk about Taylor Swift’s music without talking about her story. That’s not an original observation, but it’s certainly something I’ve found to be true while writing this post. I’ve not really tried to do it – her story is part of her music, in a way that’s very deliberate and overt, much more so than it is for many artists. One of the implications of this link between the story and the songs is that everything can feel a lot more manufactured. This is more true for her later work, when it’s impossible to argue that the work was distinct from the persona, but I think it’s true for her earlier work too. That makes it feel strange to use words like “authentic” and “honest” when describing her songs, but I think they’re appropriate. Even if the songs didn’t relate to her own story or experiences – and for what it’s worth, I think they genuinely do, at lest for the most part – that can be honest and authentic in tone and feeling, without necessarily conforming to those descriptors in the strictest sense.

It also bears repeating that this ranking makes no pretension to objectivity. I can’t justify how much I like Taylor Swift, and nor can I justify the positions I’ve assigned to her albums – I’ve gone with my gut, and worked backwards from there. Her music has aged with me, and I think that’s a large part of why 1989 clinched the top spot: throughout the past six years, it’s been an album I’ve returned to, and I’ve related to different bits of it in different ways over that period. So while Style, New Romantics, and Wildest Dreams are all great songs, it’s probably much more important that they’re relatable, that they speak to my emotions and experiences, and that I can keep going back to them and getting something from the experience every time. People who know me well will know how much I value that.

Although I love Swift’s music, I don’t know that I love it in the same way I once did. Like I say, it’s grown with me – and like she said, “Like any real love, it’s ever-changing”. Perhaps in a few years’ time, she’ll have released new music that surpasses what I view as her current peak, or perhaps I’ll have changed and I’ll find that actually, Red is where I find myself more than Lover or 1989. I don’t know what the future holds, either for her or for me. But I’ll let myself get excited. What have I got to lose?