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Taylor Swift Arrives on Time
The artist’s singularly inconsistent evolution reaches a muted zenith with Folklore.
I remember the first time I heard “We Are Never Getting Back Together.” I was in my Hyundai Sonata, rolling through the H.E.B. parking lot, in 2012, back before I wrote things about music and before I even made music. The song came on the radio; I said, “this is a good song! I’m going to Shazam it.” When the app displayed the artist, my jaw hit the floor. “Wait … this is Taylor Swift?”
“We Are Never Getting Back Together” forced me — and, candidly, much of the world — to reevaluate Ms Swift. She was no longer a pop-country prodigy, but a bonafide superstar.
Red, the album on which “We Are Never Getting Back Together” — as well as the spectacular “22” and other punchy, catchy tunes—appears, spawned seven hit singles, thrust her nearly alongside Beyonce and Rihanna as a pop force, and even convinced curmudgeonly music snobs like me to “make fun of our exes” before diving back into Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Channel Orange.
To follow it up, Swift moved from Nashville to New York and radically evolved her sound — incorporating EDM, R&B, minimalist post-modernism and adult contemporary into her pop leanings, and scrapping country and Americana altogether.
