First things first, Taylor Swift was never unpopular. Pre-2020, she was still selling out stadiums, her music was playing in grocery stores, and even your grandma could name a few of her songs. However, 2023 has been unequivocally the year of Taylor. When people thought she couldn’t quite get any more popular, she managed to catapult herself into even greater stardom than people could have imagined.
Over the pandemic, many artists were forced to make music in a much more scaled-back way, resorting to using only what was around them. This resulted in many artists producing more acoustic, slower content. When Taylor Swift surprise-dropped folklore in July, everything about the release was different from how she previously went about her album cycles. Gone were the days of high-profile interviews, music video releases, and months of anticipation for the release of the album. This was a sharp turn from the previous Lover era, which was filled with bright colors, pop anthems, and a glitzy, over-exposed aesthetic that captivated audiences.
Flash forward to 2023. The Great Ticketmaster Debacle is behind us, but demand for tickets to The Eras Tour has never been higher. Taylor is everywhere, and I would argue that some of that success has to do with her release of two albums that were very different from the rest of her discography: folklore and evermore.
You wouldn’t expect such a quietly-released album to do so well, but folklore ended up topping the charts. It won a Grammy for Album of the Year, and the song “cardigan” has surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. It brought in audiences of Swifties and music lovers alike; her retreat to the indie scene was a very good way for some older generations to get into her music. It also helped negate some of the most vehement anti-Taylor people’s arguments, namely that “she only writes about boys.” Taylor brings people into a fictional world of teenage love triangles, poetic escapes into the woods, and even the history of her house.
Bubblegum pop is a genre that attracts a wide audience, but it’s not exactly well respected. In Taylor’s album evermore, she collaborates with a popular indie band, The National. Many people assumed that Taylor was “below” collaborations with such well-respected artists, but she’s not only a fan of their music, but she is also able to work with them in her own writing. The indie genre and Taylor Swift fans now have a surprising amount of overlap. As someone with two parents who are huge fans of the indie genre, this was their introduction to being serious listeners of Taylor Swift. They are now delving into some of her older music, after listening to the two sister albums over and over again. This expansion of her audience is likely one of the reasons she is so popular in 2023.
Folklore and evermore are some of my favorite Taylor albums. However, it makes me sad when people discredit everything that she wrote before she made the transition to the indie genre. Her previous confessional-style songwriting is still evident in folklore and evermore (I would argue that she uses fictional characters to express her own emotions that she might not want to say explicitly), and the songs that she wrote in high school are still incredibly high-level for someone of her age. The people claiming that she only wrote about boys and relationships were also misinformed: “The Best Day” is a heartfelt tribute to her family (2008), “Tied Together With a Smile” is about a high-school friend with an eating disorder (2006), “Mean” is about a harsh music critic (2010), and there are many more songs where the subject isn’t Taylor or a love interest. A lot of this disdain for Taylor’s earlier music comes from a combination of misogyny and a low tolerance for pop music. Throughout the 2000s, everything that teenage girls liked was deemed “cringe-worthy” or low-brow content. From boybands to Twilight, all of the media that teen girls felt seen and understood by was trashed for being “dumb.” Going forward, I hope people respect Taylor for all of who she is. Whether she’s taking us back to the hallways of high school or whisking us away to the folklorian woods, her songwriting capabilities are stellar in every genre.