Taylor Swift sparks an emotional reaction among people age 30 and under like no other artist of the last two decades. As someone in the generation of fans who has grown and matured alongside her, I think we all feel a really unique stake in her development as an artist, a fascination with her extraordinary talent, and a large investment in her story that isn't there for other artists. Pretty much, whenever she does literally anything, we all freak out. She feels like something that is uniquely ours.
Everyone has wasted lots of precious hours of productivity defending what their favorite Taylor Swift album is, but over the last few months (and it literally has been months), I've been thinking a lot about what the best Taylor Swift album is. I wanted to take my own musical preferences and biases out of the criteria and rank her discography based purely on which bodies of work hold up as her most complete and artistically brilliant. Inevitably, I'm sure some of these personal opinions still found a way to creep into the rulings, but below is where I landed in my ranking of all nine Taylor Swift studio albums.
9. Taylor Swift (2006)
It's a fine country album. What can I say? "Picture to Burn" shows a lot of personality. "Stay Beautiful" is pretty heartwarming even today. "Our Song" shows the great ear for a chorus melody she had even at that young age. But very little about this album made it clear we were meeting one of the greatest songwriters of the last 50 years.
8. Reputation (2017)
We all accept at this point that Reputation had to happen, but that doesn't make it more enjoyable. It's far from a disaster; in fact, I think many of the singles — "...Ready For It?," "Delicate," and "Call It What You Want" — sound even better today than when they first came out, and "Getaway Car" is a Taylor Swift classic. But the overarching problem with this album is it sounds like Taylor Swift trying to cosplay a gangsta girl. I just don't think it's a demeanor that suits her very well. I get the statement she's making. But it still makes the whole album feel a bit like a gimmick.
7. Lover (2019)
Lover has some really good songs. You just have to dig way too freaking hard to find them. Taylor is no stranger to releasing long albums, but 18 tracks crosses the limit for me. At least six tracks could have been cut here to make a definitively stronger album, and it pains me to dig through so much fluff to find the handful of songs that I think are genuinely amazing (most specifically "Lover" and "Death By a Thousand Cuts"). "ME!" and "You Need to Calm Down" are possibly the two weakest singles of Taylor's career, and they have only gotten less appealing over time. It's still great hearing a categorically "happy album" from her, and I'm sure anyone who loves hearing her happy is thrilled with this album because they get a whopping 18 tracks of that vibe. But Lover to me feels like a missed opportunity.
6. Red (2012)
The recent release of Red (Taylor's Version) has led to this sort of resurgence in adoration for Red, but I'm not sure it's entirely warranted. I think we all really want to love this era of Taylor's career; all of these "red" emotions she's singing about — anger, lust, spite, etc — put us in a position where we want to be supportive and defensive of her, but I'm not sure these emotions produced the best record. A lot of Red is pretty unmemorable, and I think a lot of people forget that until they look at the tracklist again. The singles here don't really move the needle, with "I Knew You Were Trouble," "22," and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" all being fun but relatively inconsequential. This is also the second of a back-to-back pair of albums that were sonically inconsistent to a fault as Taylor struggled to walk the delicate line between a heart entirely in pop music and a livelihood entirely in country music. I see this as a pretty messy album in retrospect. But "All Too Well" slaps.
5. Evermore (2021)
I always saw Evermore as a record that had a handful of great songs but no real identity around it. I still look back on it and think of it as "songs similar to Folklore, but more of them," or maybe "Folklore, but more forgettable." This isn't fair since the brilliance of Folklore should not be a scourge on Evermore's resume, but I think comparing both records really helps the two major shortcomings in Evermore come to the surface more. First, I just don't think as many of the songs are all that memorable; "happiness," "coney island,""cowboy like me," and "closure" all just seem to sort of come and go without leaving much of an impression. And second, I just don't think the instrumentals are nearly as gripping. Evermore has a lot more traditional folk tones in it, but they don't sound particularly inspired. When you have less compelling songwriting and less compelling instrumentals, you get a less compelling album. That being said, the first six songs here make up one of the strongest openings to an album in Taylor's career, and few of her tunes have impressed me more on first listen than "gold rush."
4. Fearless (2008)
The sound of Fearless is pretty juvenile and undeveloped listening back to it now. Taylor hadn't yet grown into her own as a vocalist, the songs all have a repetitive Tin Pan Alley straight-forwardness to them, and the musical arrangements have virtually no impact on their own and were little more than a vehicle through which to deliver Taylor's songwriting. But just look at that tracklist. This album nabs the four spot just by how many classics are on Side A alone. "White Horse" and "The Best Day" were in my opinion the first proper glimpses of the more mature songwriter Taylor would blossom into, and songs like "Hey Stephen" and "Forever & Always" have really risen in the depth chart now that they don't have to live in the outsized airplay shadow of "Love Story"and "You Belong With Me." I don't love records where the whole strategy with the instrumentals and song structures appears to be "do no harm," but when the songs are this good, I can forgive it.
3. Speak Now (2010)
I considered putting Fearless here, but Speak Now takes the cake because of how bold of an artistic statement it was. It's a well-told tail at this point, but around this time period, Taylor grew frustrated with the number of people questioning her merits as a songwriter since she co-wrote much of her first two albums; therefore, she set out to write all of Speak Now completely on her own, a task which she inevitably completed to stunning results. "Back to December" is one of the most emotionally stirring performances Taylor has ever given, and I would put "Enchanted" up there close to "All Too Well" in the echelons of "Great Songwriters' Songs" in Taylor's catalog. But in some ways Speak Now's greatest accomplishment — showing the remarkable breadth of Taylor's songwriting abilities — is also its greatest weakness. The mood of the album jumps around a lot without any clear pattern, which makes it hard to settle into a rhythm while listening. It's off-putting enough that I don't find myself returning to this album nearly as much as the quality of the tracklist should warrant.
2. Folklore (2020)
For an artist so innately focused on creating a distinct aesthetic for every project, Taylor never crafted a better atmosphere for an album than on Folklore. Everything from the album cover to the amount of reverb on the guitars to the daydream airiness in the vocal melodies feels like it was plucked from the same universe. There's a certain glow in every song here that makes the album feel so warm when you listen to it, especially on "mirrorball" and "august." And since the time period and environment an album is recorded in can never fully be separated from the album itself, it's worth noting I'm not sure anyone captured the feeling of longing isolation and escapism in 2020 as perfectly as Taylor did on Folklore. The album felt like being lonely during a pandemic without talking about being lonely during a pandemic, which was a clever hand to play. Admittedly, for an album that is 16 tracks long, I think the lack of instrumental variation between songs does kind of lull the listener into a slumber eventually, and this makes the second half of the album drag a little. Nevertheless, it cannot be overstated how well Taylor executed this pivot, and Folklore will remain a defining record of her career no matter how long that career lasts.
1. 1989 (2014)
1989 is a modern pop masterpiece. There's no other way to say it. When Red lost the Album of the Year award at the 2014 Grammys, Taylor set out on a quest to refocus her recordings and return to making sonically cohesive albums, and she delivered in every measurable way here. Every track draws from the exact same glittery 80s color pallet that makes 1989 an incredibly consistent listen end-to-end. However, while Folklore suffers a bit under the weight of this monotonous consistency, each track on 1989 packs enough genuinely unique textures and arrangements to make the album an incredibly engaging listen end-to-end too. And while Taylor's proficiency as a songwriter might be more evident on Speak Now, I don't think there's an album that better showcases how razor sharp her songwriting can be than 1989. I would put "Blank Space," "Style," and "Wildest Dreams" all in the conversation of the best pop songs of the 2010s, and deeper cuts like "Clean," "Out of the Woods," and "This Love" age better with every passing year. Where the pop cuts on Red may have felt built-to-order or immature, 1989 is a case study in how to combine mature, thoughtful songwriting with the in-your-face instrumentals that make great pop music instantly lovable.
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