The Taylor Swift We Know Now Was Born on ‘1989’

This may come as something of a surprise, but there are really only two Taylor Swift eras. It’s OK—you can still do your group Halloween costume. And yes, there is the way in which Swift divides her 11-album discography into segments with their own distinct aesthetic and emotional registers in the Eras Tour. But as far as the major subdivisions of Swift’s career go, there is just one true moment of puncture that divides everything before with everything after.

That moment was the release of 1989, and that album turned 10 years old on Sunday.

Swift picked the name for her fifth album, in part, as a loose nod to its new wave, synth-pop style, which she recorded during a time when she was listening to a lot of Annie Lennox. But it’s mostly a reference to the year she was born. The twist is that it’s not a reflection on her origin story, but on a new story altogether. A rebirth. A nice to meet you. Where’ve you been? I can show you incredible things.

In the decade since 1989’s release, there have been many incredible things indeed. And the Swift we have come to know is the one she introduced on that album. The global pop icon too big for genre. The city slicker—bye, Nashville! The feline enthusiast. The über-capitalist. The Antonoffian. The cultural obsession. It’s all there on 1989.

In the simple, musical sense, 1989 is the album where Taylor Swift went pop. You could see the shift coming—she crossed the Rubicon an album cycle before, the moment the beat dropped in “I Knew You Were Trouble,” on her fourth album, Red. But while that album toggled between pop singles, indie rock–inflected stadium fillers, and singer-songwriter fare, 1989 came out chrome-plated from start to finish. There is not a single moment of twang. This was intentional—a clean reset. Swift’s label begged for some nod to country, just a little banjo here or there, but she refused every time.

Swift co-executive produced 1989 with Max Martin, who’d begun helping her make her crossover by producing the pop singles on Red. And goodness, we should take a moment to reflect on that pairing. In some ways, it was an obvious one—for her first big pop album, Swift tapped the greatest pop hitmaker of the century. And it turned out to be one of her more mercenary major partnerships—Martin was around from Red to Reputation, then both moved on. But this was two heavyweights coming together with a shared goal, which was to make undeniable songs. Swift was an interesting producing partner for Martin because of his dedication to music over lyrics. Has he ever produced a song with as cheekily brilliant writing as “Blank Space?” And has she ever recorded one that simply sounds as good as “Style?”

At the time, the fact that Swift was working with Martin felt like the most noteworthy partnership on the record, because of the hits it produced and what it said about Swift’s genre intentions. In hindsight, though, 1989 stands out as the album on which Swift began working with Jack Antonoff. (Technically, the two partnered for the first time to write “Sweeter Than Fiction,” for the soundtrack to the movie One Chance in 2013, but those sessions took place while work on 1989 was underway, and Swift ultimately roped that song into the 1989 universe by including as a bonus track in the vault section of her Taylor’s Version anyway.)

Antonoff produced three songs on the original album, “Out of the Woods,” “I Wish You Would,” and bonus track “You Are in Love.” It was a relatively small contribution. And for the most part, it doesn’t stand up to the Martin tracks like “Blank Space,” or “Style” or the ethereal “Wildest Dreams,” and certainly can’t compare to “New Romantics,” a perfect song absurdly relegated to the Target deluxe edition of the album. (I will never get over it!) But the trio of songs she created with Antonoff was the real clue to where Swift would go in the next decade.

Swift’s full embrace of pop occasionally came with intense hewing to the tropes of the genre, especially when it came to overly broad lyrics. The best of her work with Martin combines his knack for indelible hooks with her narrative writing, but in its weaker moments, it lost Swift’s power as a lyricist. A song like “Shake It Off” works by pushing the needle to the point of parody, but “Bad Blood” mostly suffers through couplets like “you know it used to be mad love.” Listen carefully to 1989, and you’ll hear how one of its central questions was how to take the writer of a song like “All Too Well,” and help that person write, well, bangers. And this is where Antonoff comes in.

Of the three songs he worked on for 1989, “Out of the Woods” has had the most staying power. A lot of Swifties would probably take issue with my placement of it below most of the Martin tracks. I find Antonoff’s studio production a bit grating; I much prefer the song when performed live. But on the bridge, a memory painting of a snowmobile accident, a hospital trip, and the collapse of a relationship built on a shaky foundation, Swift and Antonoff cracked the code. That bridge merges Swift’s signature lyrical specificity with the sheer catharsis of a great pop song. There is no “Cruel Summer” without “Out of the Woods.” (The song also offers one of the clearest takeaways from 1989: engage in winter sports with Harry Styles at your own peril.) For the record, “Out of the Woods” was one of five Billboard Hot 100 Top 10s on 1989—another milestone for Swift.

When we talk about Taylor Swift these days, it is often about the scale of her fame—the holy shit, she’s everywhere that has been especially palpable since the beginning of the Eras Tour in 2023. Swift is more recognizable today than she was in 2014, she holds on to top album chart positions longer and sells more concert tickets. I can’t imagine a 2014 congressional hearing revolving around her the way I can now (though we don’t have to imagine—it happened) and she is peerless within the music industry in a way she wasn’t quite back then. But 1989 is the album on which Swift began clearly reaching for that kind of stratospheric success, and in some moments, she actually touched it.

Many of the reviews of 1989 10 years ago focused on the way the album ignored the musical trends of the day, therefore centering Swift within the entire history of the pop canon instead of in a single moment. Before we routinely talked about Swift in the conversation with Michael Jackson and the Beatles, she made a singular pop album designed to exist in the context of Thriller and Abbey Road—not Coldplay’s Ghost Stories or Ariana Grande’s My Everything. No one ever said Taylor Swift wasn’t ambitious!

The Taylor Swift stadium show experience was also born with 1989. The 1989 World Tour (again: scale) had a lengthy setlist, the production budget of a Hollywood movie, and a new special guest stomping down the catwalk at nearly every show. The U.S. women’s national soccer team showed up in New York, as did about half the models from the Victoria’s Secret runway show; Mick Jagger performed a duet of “Satisfaction” with Swift in Nashville, and Idina Menzel sang “Let It Go” in Tampa on Halloween, with Swift in full costume as Olaf the snowman. By the end of the tour, several dozen of the most famous people on the planet had popped up on stage to kiss the ring.

Swift the corporate animal also emerged with a force during this time. She had endorsements with Keds, Diet Coke, and American Express, which sponsored a 360-degree filmed virtual experience where fans could step “inside” the “Blank Space” music video. She also began exerting pressure on stakeholders in the music business to give her her due. A week after 1989 was released, Swift pulled her entire catalog from Spotify (which owns The Ringer) over royalty rates. The following year, she’d write a lengthy open letter on Tumblr outlining a similar issue about royalties with Apple Music, which led to Apple changing its policy that kept artists from getting paid for music streamed during user free-trial periods. Much of Swift’s pre-1989 career had been spent convincing Nashville power brokers to give a young woman singing about her life the time of day, but it became clear quickly she’d outgrown that argument by 2014.

And also, she didn’t live in Nashville anymore! Someday, she’d promised us, she’d be livin’ in a big ol’ city, and there she was, splashing out on a $20 million penthouse in Tribeca. New York had been waiting for her, and it was there that Swift became A-list famous in a way she hadn’t been before. She hosted parties in the city and also in Rhode Island, where her July 4 celebration became an annual paparazzi bonanza. She courted cameras with her model/actress friends and hid from them with Styles. It came as a bit of whiplash. She explained in the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) last year that part of the reason she’d begun spending so much time with her girl squad was to escape the incessant tabloid glare on her romantic relationships. (This is perhaps also why it only became clear upon the album’s re-release, with its Styles-coded vault tracks, how much of this album was originally about her relationship with the One Direction singer.) Anyone familiar with the Kaylor sections of Reddit knows how that plan worked out.

This increase in her notoriety wound up having musical implications, too. 1989 broke new ground for Swift in that the subject matter available to her was not just her own life, but what people thought her life was. She wasn’t just a person but an avatar, someone with a meta-narrative that could either coexist with or diverge from what was happening on the inside. And she began to write about both.

There’s no better example than “Blank Space,” written from the perspective of the screaming, crying, man-eating femme she felt she’d come to represent in the tabloids that covered her romantic life. It’s one of the best songs and arguably the best music video of her career—with 21 outfit changes, multiple horses and dobermans included. And it’s one of the first Swift songs that deals with something that would become core subject matter—how she’s perceived. Her next album, after all, would be Reputation. And she had more on the subject after that, from “peace,” to “Anti-Hero” to “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Once again, 1989 marks the moment everything changed.

Because of this leveling up, 1989 can be a complicated album for some Swifties. We have a tendency to shortchange it as an album for normies. A lot of people jumped on the Swift bandwagon around this time, so there’s a reflexive defensiveness about what came before, and an impulse to argue she didn’t need to change.

But 1989 is undeniable. Over the summer, The Tortured Poets Department became the Swift album to spend the most weeks atop the Billboard 200 album chart, with 15 weeks at no. 1. 1989 is tied with Fearless for second place, both with 11 weeks in the top slot. But only time will tell if anything in the rest of Swift’s discography can match the 512 weeks 1989 has spent somewhere on the chart. It has existed for only 522 weeks. For 51 of those weeks, it has had a Taylor’s Version of the same album to compete with. You have to be a bit of a chart nerd to dig for that information, but that’s what happens when songs like “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off” become fixtures on wedding and birthday party playlists. Maybe that’s a little bit normie! But also, it is staying power.

So much of the Taylor Swift phenomenon is how woven she is into the fabric of peoples’ lives. Families with multiple generations of fans. Inside jokes that work for an audience of millions. She’s a reference, she’s a punch line, she’s a historical text. That happened with 1989. It was the album on which she learned how to deliver her musical superpowers to the biggest audiences in the world, and in the process reinvented herself as the Swift we know today. To borrow a phrase, her name is Taylor. And she was born on 1989.