The Problem with Taylor Swift
by Michael J. Roberts
How good is Taylor Swift? As a working musician and an amateur historian in regard to the popular song, I went into a Taylor deep dive after her remarkable Eras tour blew through the country like a hurricane. If “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” and Taylor Swift is the latest in a long line, where does she fit in? What I wanted to attempt was to place her artistry in the context of a phalanx of pop writer and performers who have been plying the same trade as Taylor to similar demographics for decades. I’m interested in seeing if the talented Ms. Swift can hold her own when compared to previous generations, and if it even matters. I’m soon to publish a book – Becoming a Great Songwriter or The Art, Philosophy and History of the Popular Song, and I wondered if I could find a place for Taylor? Here we go.
As an entertainment phenomenon, Taylor Swift has few equals, as evidenced by her stunning Eras world tour where for over 3 hours each night she delivered slick versions of songs from 10 different albums over her 17 year career. The production was epic and expensive and the results spectacular – concerts the equal of icons of the past from Madonna to Beyoncé, and she currently leads the pack in terms of commercial impact and fan devotion. As a singer she’s capable and effective, but like Madonna she will never be in the league of say Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston. But given her marketing savvy, that’s no impediment and her voice is good enough for the mostly undemanding range she needs for the songs she writes.
So far so good, but what of the content? What of the quality of the material that represents her body of work, stretching from her teen years to her mid-thirties – years that should represent her peak years as an artist and songwriter. Here’s where it gets stickier. I wanted to learn a Taylor Swift song or two to play at a regular piano bar gig I do, so guided by my Swiftie daughter I went through her catalogue looking for a well-written, interesting tune that I could render effectively – something that could stand up against the hundreds of pop classics that I draw from over several decades of exemplary writers and performers. I watched her Eras concert, watched the Miss Americana documentary and even listened to the full album cover version of 1989 that Ryan Adams did. Ryan Adams is someone who speaks to my generation and is a hugely gifted writer (and flawed human) so the fact he covered an entire album of Taylor’s gave me hope that there were gems to find in her wider catalogue as I had only previously brushed up against her hit singles. Another A-list songwriter, Paul Kelly, covered Anti-Hero and made it work in his style so that too was encouraging, so I started listening sure I’d find some exceptional songs.
Now, keep in mind, the bar is high. I grew up in the 1970s, a signal time for songwriters, where radio was still full of brilliant 1960s songs and the mainstream media dissemination machine delivered immortal talents, amongst others, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Elton John, Queen, Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor, who Taylor Swift was named after, apparently. I’ve lived through the stellar careers of Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, Cat Stevens (Yusef Islam), Elvis Costello, Sting, Steely Dan, Prince and learned much from the songwriting of mavericks like Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman and Andy Partridge and many others. I absorbed the work of the great writers from bygone eras, legends like George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly through to the Brill Building era teams of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill and Burt Bacharach and Hal David, then Motown’s remarkable Holland-Dozier-Holland team. This is by no means a comprehensive list of great songwriters from the past but it’ll do for starters.
The reason I mention a distinguished group such as this is to measure Taylor’s value against the best of the best. As the songwriter and voice of her generation, does she measure up and how will history judge her in comparison? Back to my search…. Part of my criteria was finding interesting and engaging songs, and songs that had something special melodically or lyrically that could put up against songs I play from say Carole King, or Carly Simon or Joni Mitchell. Put simply – there aren’t any. There are some good songs, like Champagne Problems, but not any truly great songs. The best I could find was a bitter song that was written about her ex-boyfriend called All Too Well. It’s a very good song, but it’s not You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman) or That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be or A Case of You.
Now I’m wondering why the great songwriter of her generation doesn’t have songs that match up against the benchmarks of popular songs through the ages? Taylor certainly has taste – there are clips of her performing songs with James Taylor, Carole King, Carly Simon and Stevie Nicks, people she obviously loves and respects. And the problem is not hers alone to be fair – the other supposed exemplar of songwriting for this generation is Ed Sheeran, and Ed is resoundingly similar and similarly generic. Like Taylor Swift he produces a seemingly endless stream of depressingly similar, serviceable, pleasant-but-unremarkable products that add very little to the quantum of songs that give shape and meaning to the collective human experience. That may seem harsh, so why would I say that?
The best songs transcend time and can speak to a deep longing that humans have in wanting to hear music that reaches for the inexpressible and ineffable part of our existence. Some people define it as a ‘soul’ or express it as a transcendent, incandescent connection with something ‘other’ and profound. The best songs can approach that existential question and inform our understanding of what it means to be alive and to feel an interior life. Popular music has always had a part to play, many times in just the sheer joy and exuberance of delighting in pure, euphoric sounding pop songs. Many of the greatest examples of perfect pop songs have been deceptively well written and witty, while many others have been instantly disposable. But the sugary pop hit is only one arrow in a songwriters quiver, and most of the great writers have not been content to provide only the calorific pop songs, but also songs with depth and meaning to balance out the diet. The Beatles provided the sugar hit of She Loves You, a thrilling, thunderous pop tune and 3 years later delivered Eleanor Rigby, a minor key tale of harrowing loneliness and despair. Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys provided the spark and joy of California Girls but balanced it with the sombre and gorgeous God Only Knows and the astounding, aching balladry of Surf’s Up soon after.
The issue, as I see it, is that a great artist or songwriter pushes the form. A great artist or songwriter finds the art in a certain condition and proceeds to propel it in a way that progresses the artistry and art form. The opposite of that is to find the form in a certain condition and to just contentedly stay with it, filling in the bland expectations of the ‘market’ and taking no risks at all. It’s the kind of approach that works brilliantly for McDonalds. And surprise surprise, it’s all sugar based.
Popular, chart based hit music in the last part of the first quarter of the 21st century is a very predictable and aurally calorific commodity. You could get diabetes just by listening to most of it. For someone who understands the component pieces it’s very dull and unchallenging, so it’s no fun for me to listen to something that I can predict how it will play out after roughly 15 seconds.
Of course, it doesn’t matter that most listeners to music are not educated in the component inputs of music, and that’s no impediment to simply enjoying what you hear. That said, I’m not the target market and a teen in the throes of hormones and romantic angst is going to respond differently to what’s on offer, and that’s as it should be. But – contemporary producers and the writers and performers are essentially providing McDonald’s for the ears. The question is then, where is the protein?
Consider – music in the Western Civilisation sense operates on a 12-note scale. Sonically all pop, folk and jazz music employs these notes and usually puts them across groups of notes, or chords, to provide a harmonic context. Those chords will be based around keys (C, C#, D, D#, E, etc.) and usually employ the first, fourth and fifth chords of the relevant key. If the key is C, then most chords used will be C, F and G major and their relative minor chords, Am, Dm and Em respectively, because they are closely harmonically related and fit together well. The laziest writers will construct a pattern, usually a four bar ‘turnaround’ that involves repeating the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th chords in preordained intervals of one bar each. Variations typically include 1 5 6 4, or 6 4 5 1. This then sets up a base for the melody that necessarily excludes most of the available notes of the 12 tone scale. The notes that will make a pleasant sound across these chords will be pentatonic (only 5 available notes) or maybe diatonic i.e. the 8 notes of the major scale relevant to the key. The majority of songs produced by the Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran continuum exist in this limited predictable and unadventurous musical world. It seems their generation would not know a chromatic note if it bit them in the arse.
If what is expressed melodically and sonically is depressingly limited and predictable, then the lyric content fares little better I’m afraid. It’s one thing for a teen Taylor Swift to have written about teen angst, boyfriend problems and tomes that speak to her peers, but did she find new depths as she aged the way the greats of the past did? Again, sadly, no. Taylor seems stuck in a perpetual adolescence of the same issues and problems and limited vocabulary, which seems puerile for a woman in her mid-thirties. Most of the great songwriters had painted their masterpieces by the time they turned thirty. Typically, in their late teens and early twenties they were mostly imitating their heroes and then took the bull by the horns and made brilliant personal statements that pushed music and expanded the form.
Taylor Swift fans might not know or care too much about what has come before, but Taylor Swift obviously does. Taylor was always a commercial proposition, and I recall when I was working for Universal Music when she first started releasing albums, she was actively seen as the new Shania Twain, who had made the transition from country to pop and sold multi-millions of albums. The issue is not commerciality per se, it’s when commerce drives the art that you end up with generic, safe product instead of gold standard art. Taylor played safe. Her early country style work is mostly written by her with help from Liz Rose. She then took the very safe option of crossing to pop by employing the ubiquitous Max Martin to produce and co-write, overlaying his middle-aged, ponytailed, white Euro-pop aesthetic over Taylor’s work. The world will never have to worry about A.I. writing formula songs when it has Max Martin – or Desmond Child or Diane Warren et al. And because of the social media explosion we got Shania Twain on steroids.
She pursued this pop approach for a couple of hugely successful albums full of generic, attractive sounding formula songs before she found partners with a more indie aesthetic for Folklore and Evermore. While those albums are more sonically adventurous in terms of textures, her writing never elevates itself to stand out on its own terms. The flow and cadences are the same if a little more satisfying than her previous, more juvenile material. Some growth but she never pushes into the truly distinguished, echelon of indelible writers who define universal truths. Different outfit, different accessories, same issues. Those albums seem to have been driven by a particular event. In Miss Americana one of the key crisis points is when she’s told she wasn’t nominated for some industry award – at which point she resolves to make a ‘better album’ i.e. one that will be nominated for awards. So she sought out co-producers with more ‘credibility’ – Does she get her self-worth from making artistically satisfying work or from conforming to what the industry will award?
If her unadventurous and incurious use of melody is an issue, then it is exacerbated by her lack of depth in her lyrical content. Writers like Bob Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell and others showed that lyric writing could embrace the poetic and the literary, but there is little poetry or literary depth in Taylor’s work. Her best work revolves around the core trope of the breakup song, and she excels in tripping out an endless stream of cliches to address that topic. Likewise her Girl Power anthems play to her strengths as an independent women owning her own behaviour and not taking a backward step. But these are mostly adolescent concerns and in her mid-thirties she doesn’t seem able to broaden her range and exhibit the maturity you’d expect of a first rank artist.
She attempted some ‘story’ songs in Folklore and Evermore, but they feel underdone and strained to me, even if many critics fawned over her ‘new’ direction – On Folklore, Cardigan is lovely and slight and Hoax is very good.
On Evermore, Champagne Problems is excellent, if a rewrite of All Too Well. Tolerate It is diverting and effective, Dorothea is fine and could be a Ryan Adams outtake. Even Coney Island, her duet with The National rises to no great heights, too generically Taylor to ever break out and find new ground. Evermore the title track itself, is very classy. It has a nice piano figure and is delicately realised, making the best of her vocal warmth. But overall I think the critics confused sonic mood with content, as both albums do have ambience and atmospherics that were fresh and attractive. It’s one thing to create an evocative soundscape, but it’s another thing to apply it to a satisfying song. I think it possibly worked for some critics because she was coming off such a low base, song wise, and they were keen to encourage her development, either way the albums sound fine, but the songs don’t stack up.
Filling albums with adequate songs is not the same as carving out bold artistic statements that resonate through the ages. Great artists grow and expand their range and reveal something to us in the process. David Bowie went from Laughing Gnome to Life on Mars. Paul Simon from Feelin’ Groovy to American Tune. Carole King from The Locomotion to It’s Gonna take Some Time. Elvis Costello from Pump It Up to Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4. Andy Partridge from This Is Pop to Rook. Stevie Wonder from Hey Love to Livin’ For The City. Joni Mitchell from the three chord folk of The Circle Game to the sophisticated chromaticism and stark romanticism of Shades of Scarlett Conquering. And so it goes.
In 2019, after nearly 16 years in the business, Taylor did NPR’s Tiny Desk concert. This was the perfect opportunity for her to make her case as an A-list songwriter. Just her, on acoustic guitar and piano in a small room playing to maybe 60 people in an intimate setting. She’s charming, personable and her musicianship is rudimentary but capable and she does The Man, Lover, Death By a Thousand Cuts and All Too Well, which should represent her peak work. There’s nothing like putting a song under pressure to stand up by stripping it down to a single acoustic instrument presentation. The Man is a nice idea, and a great twisting of gender stereotypes but a generic melody and musical pattern. Lover is adequate and operates on a predictable 1, 5, 4, 4 turnaround, overused by everyone and devalued as a consequence. Death uses a traditional descending full tone run down across a 1 to 4, 2 to 5 harmonic move before it settles into a 1 5 4 5 turnaround, with her usual heartbreak lyrics, it’s okay. All Too Well is the standard 1 5 6 4 turnaround, but she makes it work because the tone is stark and confessional in a way that is incisive and raw and not just coming across as whiny as she can be on other songs. It’s a fine song. Unlike Eras, which is heavily scripted and epic and reveals not much of Taylor Swift the person, the Tiny Desk concert is the opposite, she is warm and humble and wonderful.
And now, because too much Taylor is never enough, we have Tortured Poets Dept. The double album proves a couple of things – that Taylor is stuck in the same mode she’s been for years and in no danger of growing as an artist anytime soon. Much of the album is beyond predictable and in need of a good editor to try to contain the sameness of the content. Some songs stand out – Peter is very nice and Fortnight is excellent. But too many are by-the-numbers gruel like I Can Do It With a Broken Heart and Cruel Summer, which come across as almost cynical stadium anthems. Florida!!! and I Can Fix Him both start promisingly but here again, it’s clever production making a good record rather than great production bringing out a great song and making it shine. The exercise is obviously aimed at fans and they will be unconcerned about the quality v quantity debate.
To be clear, this is not an anti-Taylor rant. She’s had too much misogyny and bullshit to put up with in most areas of her life and her artistry is her sanctuary. She is a first class human being and an excellent role model for young women everywhere. She educated herself politically and makes responsible and reasoned statements in that area. More power to her. She is a fine performer who fronts a world-class show, and she gives pure happiness to many people. No small feat. But consider it this way – She’s the Marvel movies of the music industry – they are glossy, give pleasure to millions but will never make any all-time best films list. Like Marvel, Taylor Swift is a first rate marketer and acutely savvy in relating to her fans. But musically? She’s an okay songwriter when classed with her peers, but a second rate songwriter when compared to the masters.
And that saddens me. Not every generation experiences songs that can stand as amongst the best of the best. Years from now, after I’m long gone, her fans will be my age and looking back on the important music from their lives. Taylor Swift will be a happy memory for sure, the experiences, the associations, the friendship bracelets, the concerts…. but if they developed a curiosity and an openness to diversity and adventure in music, I doubt they’ll be remembering those songs as amongst the best and most meaningful they will have ever heard.
