The car
It is the spring of 2007, somewhere on the long flat stretch of road between Tulsa and Wichita, and Taylor Swift is asleep in the passenger seat of her mother's silver SUV. She has been in this seat, on and off, for six months. Her mother Andrea is driving. The radio is tuned to whatever country station the signal will hold. In the back of the car there is a cardboard box of homemade chocolate-chip cookies, a stack of CDs, and a folder containing the names, hometowns, kids' names and dog breeds of every country radio programme director Taylor has met since October. By spring she will have met two hundred of them. By the end of the year she will have driven over fifty thousand miles.
She is seventeen years old. Her debut album has been out for six months. The lead single, "Tim McGraw", is doing fine on country radio, better, in fact, than anyone at her label expected. But fine doesn't get an album to seven times platinum. Fine doesn't get you a second record deal. So Taylor and her mother are doing what no major-label country debut in 2007 was doing: getting in a car and visiting every station, in person, herself, for as long as it takes.
This is the story most coverage of Taylor Swift skips. It moves from Christmas tree farm to Bluebird Cafe to debut album to Grammy to global megastar, as if there is a moving walkway between those things. There isn't. There is, at every single stage of her career, an absurd amount of work, done at extraordinary velocity, mostly by her, often without anyone watching. Country radio tours. Bedroom songwriting at twelve. Performing at the Bluebird Cafe at fourteen. Writing in math class. Rehearsing the Eras Tour for six months before a single show. Making The Life of a Showgirl in Stockholm during the off-nights of a tour that was already the biggest in history. Buying back her own catalogue, in cash, from a private equity firm.
This is the story of what it took. It starts on a Christmas tree farm.
Pine Ridge Farm
Taylor Alison Swift was born on 13 December 1989 in West Reading, Pennsylvania. Her father Scott was a Merrill Lynch financial advisor. Her mother Andrea had spent ten years as a marketing executive in mutual funds before leaving work to raise Taylor and her younger brother Austin, who arrived two years later. Both parents had decided early that whatever their daughter wanted to do, they would put resources behind it. Andrea would later say she'd waited a long time to be a mother and didn't see the point of half-measures.
When Taylor was very small the family moved to an eleven-acre Christmas tree farm in Cumru Township, just outside the small Pennsylvania town of Wyomissing. Scott had bought it as an investment property. Then the family lived in it. The farm was called Pine Ridge. They grew Fraser firs and Douglas firs for the seasonal trade and sold them by the truckload, mostly to wholesalers who carried them to New York and Philadelphia. Taylor's job, as a small child, was praying mantis pods.
This is the detail you remember once you hear it. In spring, the Fraser firs growing on the farm would be dotted with pale brown, foam-like egg cases, praying mantis pods, each containing two or three hundred future praying mantises. Garden centres sold them as biological pest control. Taylor walked the rows of trees with her father, found the pods, and sold them to the farm shop. It was her first job. She was four or five years old. She has told this story in interviews many times, generally to make a point about how strange a childhood it was, but the more interesting thing about it is that even at that age she was running a small private business attached to her parents' larger one.
The other detail you should know about that house: Taylor's grandmother lived in it. Marjorie Finlay, Andrea's mother, was a coloratura soprano. She had grown up Marjorie Moehlenkamp in St. Charles, Missouri, won a national radio talent contest in 1950 called Music With the Girls on the ABC network, toured for fifteen months on the strength of it, and after marrying the construction executive Robert Finlay in Palm Beach in 1952 had spent the rest of her career making music in Spanish. She had her own television show in Puerto Rico, El Show Pan-Americano, broadcast from Santurce on APA-TV, six nights a week, for seventeen consecutive months. Her Spanish was, by her own admission, charmingly bad, which the audience seemed to enjoy. She toured South America. She recorded an album in Mexico. In 1968 she spent five nights as the soprano lead in Smetana's The Bartered Bride at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore. She had also performed in the operas of Puerto Rico, in supper clubs at the Caribe Hilton, in symphony halls in St. Louis. By the time Taylor was born Marjorie had retired but still sang at home constantly.
Marjorie lived with the Swift family until her death on 1 June 2003. Taylor was thirteen. She had spent her entire childhood with an opera singer in the house, an opera singer who had been a star in another language in another country, whose career had ended decades before Taylor was born and which she would only really come to understand later. Twenty years after Marjorie's death Taylor would write a song called "marjorie" for the album evermore. Andrea Swift would dig through storage and find her mother's old opera records. Taylor would send them to Aaron Dessner, who would layer her grandmother's actual recorded voice into the backing of the song. Marjorie, dead almost two decades, sings on her granddaughter's hit record. The song "marjorie" is technically a duet. Most people listening to it don't know that.
Music was not a hobby in the Swift house. It was the framework everyone inside it had used to understand the world for as long as anyone could remember.
Taylor started singing publicly at four. She did children's musical theatre in Berks County from around the age of nine, including productions at the Berks Youth Theatre Academy where she would later credit a director called Kirk Cremer with showing her how to actually perform a song rather than recite one. She sang the national anthem at sporting events around the region, Reading Phillies games, Reading Royals hockey, and, when she was eleven, a Philadelphia 76ers game in front of around twenty thousand people. The 76ers gig is the one she has told most often, partly because it was the biggest crowd she had sung to at that age and partly because of what she did with it.
What she did with it was: she made her parents drive her to Nashville the same year. She was eleven. She had recorded a karaoke-style demo of country covers in a strip-mall studio in Pennsylvania, with her name printed on the disc in marker pen. The plan, as she understood it then, was to walk into every record label on Music Row and hand them a copy. They did exactly this. They walked into RCA Nashville, MCA, Sony, Warner. Every label. Every single one passed. She was eleven years old and they all told her, politely, that they had country singers already.
She went back to Pennsylvania. She started writing songs.
The guitar arrived at twelve. A computer repairman called Ronnie Cremer came to the house to fix Scott's PC, noticed a twelve-string guitar sitting in a corner (a Christmas present nobody in the family really played), picked it up, and showed Taylor a few chords. Her fingers were too small to comfortably reach across the neck. She figured it out anyway. Within weeks she was writing songs. One of them, "The Outside", made it onto her debut album in 2006 essentially unchanged from the version she had written aged twelve. Another, called "Lucky You", was about wanting to be different from everyone else at her school. By the end of that year, by Taylor's own count, she had over a hundred songs.
This is the part of the story where she also stopped having friends. She has talked about this many times, including in the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, where she describes specific moments in her middle school cafeteria when the table she sat down at would empty within ninety seconds. She was openly mocked for liking country music, for being earnest about it, for taking guitar to school, for performing at any opportunity. By twelve she was being told to her face that she was annoying. Various combinations of these experiences would feed, more or less directly, into the songs on her first four albums.
In 2003 the family started taking serious trips to Nashville together, Andrea, Scott, Taylor and her brother Austin, who was eleven. Taylor was thirteen. She auditioned. She showcased. In 2004, at an RCA Records showcase in Nashville, she performed original songs and was offered a development deal by the label. A development deal in Nashville at thirteen meant: the label parks you, holds you in reserve, and decides whether to make a record with you later. Maybe much later. Possibly never. Most teenage country artists offered development deals at RCA in the early 2000s spent two to three years on them before being dropped, and the ones who weren't dropped often spent another two to three years before getting to record their first album.
Taylor took the deal. Then she walked away from it.
She has explained this decision in several interviews, but the cleanest version is something like: she had watched what development deals did to other teenagers, she had a hundred songs already, and she was not going to wait. She was thirteen years old, she had absorbed enough of the Nashville machine to understand that "development" was often a polite term for "shelved indefinitely", and she politely told the people at RCA that she did not want to be developed.
This was, in retrospect, the first time she signed away the right to do something specific with her music and got out of it. She would do it again twice more in her career, in considerably more public circumstances.
Hendersonville
In 2004 the family moved to Tennessee. They sold up in Wyomissing, Scott transferring his Merrill Lynch office, Andrea managing the relocation, Austin pulling out of middle school, and bought a house on a lake in Hendersonville, a small town about twenty miles north of Nashville. Taylor was fourteen. She enrolled at Hendersonville High School and began, in the formal sense, her commute to a record deal.
The Sony/ATV Tree publishing house signed her in 2005 as a staff songwriter. She was fifteen. She remains the youngest staff writer Sony/ATV Tree has ever signed. The deal meant she had office hours at one of the largest country publishing companies in the world, a desk, and pairings with veteran Nashville songwriters who were now expected to sit across from a fifteen-year-old at lunch and write songs with her. The arrangement was not, by all accounts, what the veterans had been expecting.
The most important of the writers she paired with was Liz Rose, then in her forties, who had been writing country songs for ten years and had not yet had a huge hit. Rose has described their writing process in interviews many times. Taylor would walk into the room after school, sometimes still wearing her school bag, sit down, and play a melody and a partial lyric. Sometimes she had a whole verse. Sometimes she had a chorus. Sometimes she had a clear sense of what the song should be about but no melody yet. Rose, in her own words, would mostly just edit. She has said in oral histories that her primary job was to ask Taylor questions and tighten what was already there. The two of them wrote some of the most successful songs of Taylor's first two albums in afternoon sessions of one to three hours.
This included "Tim McGraw", which Taylor began in her freshman year math class at Hendersonville High. The story she has told publicly is that she was in class, a song idea arrived, she hummed it under her breath all the way through the lesson so she wouldn't lose it, then went to the Sony/ATV building that afternoon to find Rose. The pair finished the lyric in about fifteen minutes. The song's title and chorus refer to the actual country star, then in his early forties, whose music had been playing the previous summer when Taylor said goodbye to a boyfriend going off to college. It is, on reflection, a wildly confident move for a teenager, write a song titled after the biggest male country star of the era, and structure it so that he is not in the song at all, he is just a presence in the air around the song. The song is about a girl missing a boy, and the country song they listened to together. Tim McGraw's name in the title is functioning, in songwriting terms, as an emotional shortcut.
It was also, of course, Taylor's first single. Which was a calculated decision: by titling the single "Tim McGraw" she was effectively forcing every country radio DJ in America to say the name of one of the biggest stars in country music while introducing a song by an unknown fifteen-year-old. The move tends to get credited, in retrospect, to ruthless industry strategy. It is somehow more interesting that it was just a thing she happened to do in a math class as a fourteen-year-old.
The other thing she did at Sony/ATV was write a song called "Our Song" for her ninth-grade school talent show. She had been looking for a song to sing at the showcase that captured how she felt about her current boyfriend, hadn't found one, and so wrote one. It would close her debut album and become her third country number one.
The Bluebird
The Bluebird Cafe sits in a Nashville strip mall on Hillsboro Pike, sandwiched between a hair salon and a dry cleaner. From the outside it is impossible to find on purpose. Inside it holds twenty-one tables and around ninety seats. The lighting is dim. There is a sign on the wall asking the audience to shush anyone who talks during songs. Since 1982 it has been the place songwriters in Nashville go to be heard by people who matter. Garth Brooks was signed after performing there in 1988. Trisha Yearwood, Faith Hill and Dierks Bentley have all played its rounds. The waitresses have spent forty years gently moving past microphones with trays of food.
On the night of 4 November 2004, a fourteen-year-old Taylor Swift played a slot at the Bluebird as part of a writers' showcase. In the audience was Scott Borchetta, then a senior executive at Universal Music Group's Nashville office, six weeks away from leaving Universal to start a new record label that did not yet have a name, a roster or an office. He was forty-two years old. He had spent two decades in the Nashville machine. He had no plans to sign a teenager that evening.
Taylor played a short set of her own songs, including "Songs About You" and the early ballad "Beautiful Eyes". Borchetta has described the performance in oral histories as having absolutely held the room. He went up to her afterwards and said something that he has quoted himself on multiple times since: "The only promise I can make you tonight is, when I start my label, you have a deal with me."
Taylor, fourteen, called him ten days later. She said: "I'm waiting for you."
She signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, before the label had finished setting itself up. She was its first artist. Borchetta has said that her father Scott Swift, the Merrill Lynch financial advisor, became one of the label's minority shareholders, with roughly a four per cent stake, an arrangement that would have considerable downstream consequences fifteen years later. The contract Taylor signed, like most country recording contracts in 2005, gave the label ownership of the master recordings of every album she would make under the deal. Six albums. Standard terms. Nobody flagged this as an issue. Nobody flags this as an issue when you are fifteen.
The radio tour
Taylor Swift, her self-titled debut, came out on 24 October 2006. She was sixteen.
The album has eleven tracks. Five are written solely by Taylor. The other six are co-writes, mostly with Liz Rose. There are no outside cuts, no songs from professional country writers handed to the artist to perform. For a country debut by a teenager in 2006, this was almost unheard of. The Nashville machine ran on professional songwriters writing songs for vocalists. Taylor was both. She and Rose had simply written the album themselves.
The album's first single was "Tim McGraw". Country radio in 2006 was a famously closed circuit. There were perhaps two hundred meaningful country radio stations in the United States. Each had a programme director with significant discretionary power over what got played. None of them, as a rule, played songs by fifteen-year-old girls. The industry had a quiet but consistent assumption that women under twenty couldn't carry a country radio audience. Several of the country songwriters Taylor had been working with at Sony/ATV had told her, more or less directly, that they didn't think a teenage girl could break out in the genre. One had suggested she switch to pop.
What happened next is a thing the rest of the industry then spent the next decade trying to copy. Taylor and her mother Andrea got in a car and drove from station to station. They did it themselves. They drove the entire United States. Taylor walked into morning shows at five in the morning. She sang her songs live in studio lobbies if asked. She baked chocolate-chip cookies and brought them. She met every programme director by name, shook their hands, remembered their wives, remembered their children, remembered the names of their dogs. She sent handwritten thank-you notes after every visit. Then she sent more notes when she got home. Then she came back, three months later, with more cookies and a different dress.
By the time the radio tour wound down she had visited over two hundred stations across more than fifty thousand miles. She did all of this between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. She also did most of her schoolwork in the car. She was a homeschooled student officially enrolled at Aaron Academy, a small Christian school in Hendersonville that accommodated her schedule. She passed her diploma early.
"Tim McGraw" reached number six on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. "Teardrops on My Guitar", the second single, reached number two on country and crossed over into the Billboard Hot 100. "Our Song" reached number one. By the time the album's fifth single came around, Taylor Swift had been certified platinum. It would eventually go five times platinum in the US. It spent 277 weeks on the Billboard 200, the longest run of any album released in the 2000s, an album that started life with a fifteen-year-old in a car and ended its run, sixty months later, still on the chart.
She was eighteen years old at the time of that final week. She had already released her second album.
Fearless
Fearless arrived on 11 November 2008. Taylor was eighteen. She had spent most of the previous year opening for major country acts on tour, Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw himself. She had been writing the new album in those tour dressing rooms, in motel rooms, in the back of buses, on hotel-room floors. She has said in interviews that she wrote the title track of Fearless in the corridor outside a venue between meetings.
The album produced "Love Story" and "You Belong With Me", both of which started on country radio and ended up on pop radio. "Love Story" hit number four on the Hot 100. "You Belong With Me" hit number two. Fearless sold over twelve million copies worldwide, won five Grammys, and made Taylor, at twenty, the youngest artist to win Album of the Year. She still holds that record. The acceptance speech in February 2010 is on YouTube and is worth your time. She walked on stage looking, briefly, as if she had genuinely not prepared for the possibility that her album might win.
The other thing she did during the Fearless era was establish a fan-engagement strategy that subsequent pop artists would spend a decade trying to imitate. After every concert on the Fearless Tour, Taylor would host a backstage event called the T-Party, in which she invited a hundred and fifty to three hundred fans chosen by her team into a backstage room, hung out with them, signed things, took photos, talked to them. She did this for every show on the tour. She responded to messages on her Myspace account personally. She remembered fans' names. The strategy was not, at the time, conceived as marketing. It was conceived as a teenage girl wanting to hang out with the people who were buying her records.
In September 2009, between releasing Fearless and winning the Grammy, the other thing happened.
The interruption
The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards took place at Radio City Music Hall in New York on the evening of 13 September. Taylor was nineteen. She was up for Best Female Video for "You Belong With Me", a category in which she was nominated against, among others, Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)". She won. She walked on stage in a silver one-shoulder dress, took the microphone, and began her acceptance speech.
Kanye West climbed onto the stage. He took the microphone out of her hand. He announced, into a live broadcast watched by millions of people, that Beyoncé should have won. He handed Taylor the microphone back. He walked off.
Taylor stood frozen for the rest of the night. The cameras kept finding her. Beyoncé, later in the broadcast, won Video of the Year and used some of her acceptance speech to invite Taylor back on stage to finish hers. President Obama, in a private interview that leaked the following week, called Kanye a jackass. The clip became one of the defining moments of MTV's last great year as a cultural force.
It also became, for a generation of pop fans, the moment they decided to care about Taylor Swift. The footage cuts both ways: it shows her humiliated, but it also shows her recovering, professionally, in real time, on the biggest broadcast of the year. She came out of the 2009 VMAs with twice the audience she had walked in with.
It also began a fifteen-year story with Kanye that would shape, more than it should have, a great deal of what came next.
Speak Now, Red, and the long pop pivot
In October 2010 Taylor released Speak Now. She was twenty. The album was fourteen tracks. Every single one had a single writing credit on it: hers. No co-writes. No Liz Rose. No outside help.
This was a response to the conversation that had developed in Nashville and the wider music press in the wake of Fearless. Several male songwriters and music critics had, with varying degrees of public visibility, suggested that Taylor Swift wasn't really the writer her credits implied. The suggestion was that Liz Rose was carrying her, or that there were ghost-writers, or that producers were doing the actual lifting and Taylor was just signing off on the result. Speak Now was the answer to all of that. She wrote it alone. She has said in interviews that she did so to prove the point. The album sold over a million copies in its first week.
Speak Now also contains "Mean", a song aimed squarely at the male music critic Bob Lefsetz, who had publicly suggested after Taylor's vocally rough 2010 Grammys performance with Stevie Nicks that her career might be over. "Mean" won her two Grammys in 2012, including Best Country Song. She performed it on the broadcast.
By 2012 the model for the next album was already changing in her head. She had been listening to pop. She had been writing songs that sounded more pop. She wanted, for the first time, to work with Max Martin and Shellback, Max Martin being the Swedish super-producer behind every important pop record by Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Pink, Justin Timberlake and most of the rest of mainstream radio between approximately 1998 and forever, and Shellback being his protégé and collaborator. The two of them produced two tracks on Red (2012): "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "I Knew You Were Trouble". The first one became Taylor's first Hot 100 number one. The second became one of her biggest international hits.
The rest of Red she made with her existing collaborators, Nathan Chapman, who had produced the previous three albums, and Jeff Bhasker, who would later co-produce parts of 1989. The album is a mess in the best possible way: country songs, pure pop, dubstep breakdowns, a seven-minute album track called "All Too Well" that would become one of the most famous things Taylor Swift ever wrote.
The story of "All Too Well", which she has told in multiple interviews and which Liz Rose has corroborated, is this: Taylor wrote a draft of it during a soundcheck rehearsal one afternoon, working through what was then a very public, very recent breakup. The song poured out of her almost in real time. The original version was around ten minutes long. Various accounts describe early drafts as much longer, twenty minutes, sometimes more. She and Rose then cut it down to a manageable length. Five and a half minutes ended up on Red. The full ten-minute cut would sit in a drawer for nine years before becoming, in November 2021, the cultural moment of an entire autumn.
In October 2014 Taylor released 1989.
This time she was unambiguous about what it was. 1989 was named after the year she was born, after the synth-pop production of the late 1980s she had been listening to obsessively, Bruce Hornsby, Annie Lennox, Madonna's Like a Prayer, Phil Collins. It was produced primarily by Max Martin and Shellback, with Jack Antonoff on three tracks. It was a pure pop album with no country tracks at all. Taylor specifically requested that her label not submit it for country awards consideration. She wanted it counted as pop. She also wanted the country charts to stop reporting it.
The album sold 1.29 million copies in the United States in its first week, the biggest first-week sales for any album since 2002. "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood" all went to number one on the Hot 100. The 1989 World Tour, which ran through 2015, became famous for its rotating cast of surprise guests, Taylor would bring out a different special guest in every city, often a major pop star or actor (Mick Jagger in Nashville, Lorde in Washington, Mary J. Blige in Los Angeles, Idina Menzel in Tampa). By the end of the tour she had brought out over fifty different guests across eighty-five shows.
In February 2016 1989 won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Taylor became the first woman ever to win the prize twice as a lead artist.
The acceptance speech for that one is also worth watching. She thanked the people who had helped her make the album, then very pointedly added a passage to her younger listeners: that there would be people along the way who would try to undercut their success, or take credit for their achievements. Everybody watching, more or less, knew who she was talking about.
What she could not have known, standing on that stage in February 2016, was that the second Kanye chapter was about to start, and that this one would last considerably longer.
The collapse
In February 2016, three days before the Grammys, in fact, Kanye West released a song called "Famous". The relevant lyric, sung by Kanye, was: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous."
Kanye's team said he had called Taylor before the album release, played her the line, and got her approval. Taylor said the phone call had not gone the way Kanye described. Specifically, she had been played part of the lyric, but the "I made that bitch famous" part, and particularly the word "bitch", had not been played to her. She had not approved a song that called her a bitch in front of millions of people.
That summer, in July 2016, Kim Kardashian, Kanye's then-wife, went on Snapchat and posted edited clips of the original phone call. The clips appeared to show Taylor enthusiastically approving the entire lyric.
What happened next, on the internet of 2016, is hard to remember now without flinching. Taylor's name became, for several weeks, attached to a global flood of snake emojis, a coordinated harassment campaign that began as a Kim Kardashian fan response, escalated into a generalised storm, and continued for months. The hashtag #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty trended worldwide. Her public image, which she had spent fifteen years carefully building on a foundation of relatability, songwriter-craft and approachability, collapsed within a fortnight.
Then she disappeared.
For most of the back half of 2016 and the first eight months of 2017, there was simply no Taylor Swift in public life. No interviews. No public appearances of any meaningful kind. The social media accounts were wiped of every previous post. The official website went blank. Various rumours circulated about what she was doing. The most plausible turned out to be true: she had moved to a flat in London, started a relationship with the English actor Joe Alwyn, and was largely living a normal twenty-something life off the grid, in a city where she could walk to a pub without being followed.
In August 2017 she put out "Look What You Made Me Do". The single is a snarling, electropop, samples-based song with the central spoken line: "I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, 'cause she's dead." The video uses snake imagery extensively. The single went to number one in seventeen countries.
Reputation arrived in November 2017. It was dark, electropop, paranoid and, on first listen, extremely angry. Critics were polarised. Some hailed it as her most interesting and most stylistically committed record. Others called it bloated, hostile and tonally confused. It sold over four million copies worldwide in its first weeks. The Reputation Tour, which followed in 2018, became her first all-stadium tour and grossed over $345 million, then the highest US tour gross in history.
The reclamation of the snake was deliberate. Where the snake emoji had been used to harass her, now snake imagery was everywhere on the album, the cover art, the stage design, the merchandise, the music videos. The line on the Reputation Tour was that her enemies had given her a weapon and she had decided to use it.
In March 2020, four years after Kim's edited Snapchat clips, an unedited recording of the original Kanye phone call leaked onto TikTok. It confirmed Taylor's version of events. By that point she had moved on to other, considerably larger, fights.
The masters dispute
To understand what happened next you have to understand the contract Taylor signed at fifteen.
The standard country recording contract in 2005 gave the label ownership of every master recording the artist produced during the term of the deal. This was unremarkable. Almost every artist on every country label in Nashville in the 2000s signed something similar. The masters, the actual original audio recordings, sat on the label's books as assets. The artist owned the songwriting copyrights, which is a separate and more valuable thing in many ways, but the recordings themselves belonged to the label. In Taylor's case this meant Big Machine Records owned the masters of every album she would release during her six-album term: Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation. Six albums covering the entire decade of her career to that point.
In November 2018, her contract with Big Machine expired. She had completed her six-album obligation. She was, for the first time since age fifteen, a free agent. Several major labels offered her deals. She chose Republic Records, a division of Universal Music Group, on terms which she has said included one specific clause: she would own every master recording she made from that point forward. Lover, released in August 2019, was the first album she had ever made that she actually owned. She was twenty-nine years old.
Five months before that, in June 2019, Scooter Braun's company Ithaca Holdings had acquired Big Machine Records for what was reported as approximately $330 million. Braun was a major music manager whose clients included Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Kanye West. The Big Machine acquisition gave Braun ownership of the master recordings of all six of Taylor's earlier albums, the entire catalogue she had built between the ages of fifteen and twenty-seven.
Taylor learned about the sale, by her own account, the morning the press releases went out. She published a Tumblr post in response which ran to several pages. The post said she had spent years asking Borchetta to let her buy her own masters, and had been told the only route to ownership was to sign a new ten-year contract with Big Machine and release ten more albums in exchange. The post described Braun as "incessant, manipulative" and said she had been "stripped" of her life's work by the men in the deal. It accused Borchetta of having known exactly what selling to Braun would mean to her. It said her father, who held a minority stake in Big Machine, had been excluded from the negotiations by a non-disclosure agreement.
The fight escalated through the second half of 2019. Halsey publicly supported Taylor. So did Camila Cabello. Justin Bieber apologised on Instagram for a 2016 photo of himself laughing with Braun and Kanye. Demi Lovato defended Braun. In November 2019, Taylor said publicly that Braun and Borchetta were refusing her permission to perform her older Big Machine-era songs at the American Music Awards, where she was being honoured as Artist of the Decade. Borchetta denied the claim. Taylor performed the songs anyway. The dispute was the loudest music industry story of the year.
In November 2020 Braun's Ithaca Holdings sold the masters on again, to Shamrock Holdings, a private equity firm with roots in the Disney family, for an amount reported around $405 million. Taylor had been in conversation with Shamrock about buying the masters herself. She walked away when she learned the terms gave Braun ongoing financial benefit from her catalogue.
So she did the only other thing.
She announced she was re-recording her old albums, in full, note for note, from scratch. New masters. Owned by her.
There is a difference between being a star and being an industry. By 2024, Taylor Swift was an industry.
folklore
The world locked down in March 2020. Taylor was thirty. Lover had come out the previous summer; the tour that should have followed was, like every other tour in the world, abandoned. She was at home in Los Angeles. There was no plan.
In April she received an email from Aaron Dessner, the guitarist and primary songwriter of The National (the band has its own Backstory on findyl if you want the full story of how Aaron and his twin brother Bryce built a self-released indie band into one of the most quietly important groups of the 2000s). Dessner had a folder of about a dozen instrumental sketches he had recorded at his converted barn studio in upstate New York, a place called Long Pond, named after the body of water it sat next to. He sent the folder to Taylor. He said, more or less: do what you want with these.
Taylor returned the first lyric within a few hours. It would become "cardigan". She returned the next one the following day. Within two weeks she had vocals on most of the folder. Most of it she sang in her home studio in Los Angeles. Dessner mixed in upstate. They did not meet in person during the recording. Jack Antonoff, who had been producing parts of every Taylor Swift album since 1989, joined the project for several tracks. The whole album was made in approximately five weeks.
On 23 July 2020 Taylor posted on Instagram. Tonight at midnight, she said, I'll be releasing my eighth studio album. It's called folklore. There had been no roll-out, no singles, no press, no preceding photoshoots. Sixteen tracks. The cover art showed Taylor alone in a forest in monochrome. The whole thing was indie folk. There was a guest vocal from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver on a song called "exile", a duet that the two of them had recorded without ever meeting each other, Vernon laying down his vocals at his cabin in Wisconsin, Taylor in LA.
The album debuted at number one in every market that charts albums. It was, by some distance, the best-reviewed Taylor Swift album of her career. folklore won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammys. It was her third. She remains the only artist in history to have won Album of the Year three times as the lead writer and performer. She would, three years later, become the only artist to win it four.
The thing that folklore also did, less obvious but more important, was finally end the decade-old conversation about whether Taylor Swift was really a songwriter. The music press collectively, almost overnight, stopped calling her "Taylor Swift, pop star" and started calling her "Taylor Swift, songwriter". The album was full of fictional characters and constructed narratives, a teenage love triangle between three characters called Betty, James and Augustine ran across "cardigan", "august" and "betty"; a song called "the last great american dynasty" was a four-minute biographical poem about a real Standard Oil heiress called Rebekah Harkness, who had owned Taylor's Rhode Island house decades earlier. It was, by any reasonable measure, a literary album. Critics who had spent fifteen years sceptical of her wrote letters of apology.
There was also the matter of William Bowery. Listed as a co-writer on "exile" and "betty", Bowery was credited on multiple tracks across folklore and its sister album evermore. Nobody had heard of him. For five months his identity was the most discussed mystery in pop music. In November 2020 Taylor confirmed it during the folklore: the long pond studio sessions documentary. William Bowery was her then-partner, the actor Joe Alwyn, who had been playing the piano in their London flat during lockdown and contributed the chord progression and melody for "exile" while she happened to be on a call with Aaron Dessner. He had no formal songwriting experience. The credit was real.
Long Pond
In November 2020 the three of them, Taylor, Dessner, Antonoff, drove up to Long Pond Studio in upstate New York and recorded a live performance of the album in two days. The film became the folklore: the long pond studio sessions. Justin Vernon, who had sung "exile" with Taylor over email, met her in person there for the first time. He walked into the converted barn carrying a guitar and they shook hands. The footage of the meeting is in the film. Vernon, by his own admission, had no idea what to expect.
The two-day shoot was filmed in the converted barn that served as Dessner's studio. There were three feet of leaves on the ground outside. The mist coming off Long Pond in November was a particular upstate New York mist, half-frozen, lying flat to the water at dawn. The film cuts between the three musicians playing the songs, Taylor talking about how each track came together, and exterior shots of the building in fog. It is, for many fans, the best thing Taylor Swift has ever filmed, which is partly because the songs are very strong and partly because everyone in the building looks, for ninety minutes, like they are extremely glad to be there.
Five months later, in December 2020, she did the same trick again with a sister album. evermore arrived with no warning, was again produced primarily by Dessner, again included Jack Antonoff and Joe Alwyn. It included "marjorie", the song about her late grandmother with Marjorie Finlay's actual voice on the backing track. Taylor's mother Andrea had dug out the old opera records from the family's storage. Aaron Dessner had sampled them.
Two surprise albums in five months. Both Grammy-nominated for Album of the Year (only folklore won). People started to remember what artists could do when nobody else was managing them.
The re-recordings
The re-recording project had been announced in 2019 but Taylor had been legally unable to begin recording until November 2020, when a clause in her original Big Machine contract finally expired. As of that date, she was free to re-record the masters she had been locked out of owning since 2005. She started the next morning.
The first re-recorded album, Fearless (Taylor's Version), came out in April 2021. The album contained the original eighteen tracks of Fearless re-recorded note for note in the studio with new vocals from a thirty-one-year-old Taylor singing songs she had written at eighteen, plus six previously unreleased songs that she and Liz Rose had written for the original album and not used. These were called "From the Vault" tracks. Maren Morris guested on one of them. Keith Urban guested on two. The album became the first re-recorded album in modern pop history to top the US Billboard 200.
Red (Taylor's Version) came in November 2021. Same approach. Note-for-note re-recording, plus nine vault tracks. The headline event was a new track called "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)", a full-length, restored edit of the song Taylor and Liz Rose had cut down to five and a half minutes back in 2012. The ten-minute version was released alongside a short film starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien, which Taylor directed herself, and which received a theatrical run in selected cinemas. The song became, in the autumn of 2021, briefly inescapable. Sara Bareilles covered it on Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live itself ran a sketch about it. The term "Sad Girl Autumn" became unavoidable for the duration of the season. The ten-minute version of "All Too Well" went to number one on the Hot 100. Taylor became, with that song, the artist with the longest song ever to top the chart.
Speak Now (Taylor's Version) arrived in July 2023. 1989 (Taylor's Version) arrived in October 2023. Each came with vault tracks. Each replaced its original on streaming as the default canonical version of the album.
Reputation Taylor's Version, however, did not come. It has not come. Taylor has hinted in interviews that the specific paranoid darkness of the original is hard to recapture in a studio thirty floors removed from the moment that created it. Some songs, she has suggested, can only be made once. Debut Taylor's Version, a re-recording of her self-titled 2006 album, has also not yet appeared, though she has hinted it is coming. The status of both remains a question mark over her catalogue. People still ask. She still hasn't said.
The re-recording project did exactly what it was designed to do. By 2024 the original Big Machine recordings of Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989 had been comprehensively supplanted on every meaningful streaming platform, every playlist, every Spotify "Taylor Swift" search result, by the Taylor's Version equivalents. The value of the original masters Scooter Braun had bought in 2019 had been substantially undermined by Taylor making, in effect, a perfect imitation of them that she owned. The financial logic of the re-recording project, as well as the cultural one, had landed.
The Eras Tour
In October 2022 Taylor released Midnights. It was made entirely with Jack Antonoff. The album broke streaming records on its first day of release and held its number one position on the Billboard 200 for multiple non-consecutive weeks.
In November 2022 she announced a tour. It was called the Eras Tour, the conceit being that it would be a multi-act show covering all of the distinct musical "eras" of her career to date, debut country, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, folklore, evermore and Midnights. The pre-sale opened on Ticketmaster's Verified Fan system. Approximately fourteen million people attempted to access the system on the morning the queues opened. The system collapsed. The fallout was significant enough that the United States Department of Justice opened an investigation into Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, on antitrust grounds. The investigation was still ongoing two years later.
The Eras Tour opened on 17 March 2023 in Glendale, Arizona. For the opening weekend the city of Glendale officially renamed itself Swift City. The mayor signed a proclamation to that effect. Local news ran out of synonyms for "deluge". Across the four-night run the city hosted over a hundred and fifty thousand people, most of whom had travelled in from out of state.
The show ran three hours and fifteen minutes. Forty-four songs. Ten distinct acts, each themed around an era of her music. Multiple costume changes per act. A choreographed sequence in which Taylor appeared to be swimming through the stage during a folklore-era song. Two acoustic "surprise songs" performed solo at the piano or guitar in the middle of every show, never repeated, taken from any of her ten studio albums and the unreleased vault. The surprise-songs format meant fans were trading set lists nightly. By the second leg of the tour Taylor had performed almost every song in her catalogue at some point on the tour, some of them for the first time live.
Taylor had rehearsed the show for six months before opening night, on a soundstage in Los Angeles. She has said in subsequent interviews that she choreographed the entire flow of the show herself, working with her long-time choreographer Mandy Moore, and that she essentially did three hours of cardio every day for half a year to be physically capable of performing the entire set live.
The tour played 149 dates across five continents. It became the first concert tour in history to gross $1 billion. By the time it finished, it had grossed approximately $2.07 billion. It is comfortably the highest-grossing live tour of all time, by a margin so wide that the second-place tour (Coldplay's Music of the Spheres) trails by nearly a billion.
In August 2024 three shows in Vienna were cancelled by Austrian counter-terrorism authorities, who had identified and disrupted a planned attack on the venue. Taylor flew home. The cancellation announcement was made the morning of the first show. The Austrian operation was credited by US officials as having prevented mass casualties.
The Eras Tour Concert Film, released in cinemas in October 2023, grossed over $260 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing concert film ever made.
In December 2023 Time magazine named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year. She was the first solely-musical artist ever to receive the title. She was thirty-four.
In October 2023, before that, she had attended a Kansas City Chiefs game. A tight end called Travis Kelce had been to one of her Chicago Eras shows that summer; he had brought a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it intending to give it to her at the meet-and-greet; he had not got close enough. They began dating in autumn 2023. In August 2025 they would announce their engagement.
The Eras Tour ended on 8 December 2024, with a final show at BC Place in Vancouver, after twenty-one months and 149 performances. The total audience across the run was estimated at over ten million people in person.
The Tortured Poets Department
In February 2024 Taylor won Album of the Year at the Grammys, becoming the first artist ever to win the prize four times. In her acceptance speech, on the broadcast, she announced a new album: The Tortured Poets Department, due in April. It was the first time a major artist had ever announced a new album live during an Album of the Year acceptance speech. She had been holding the secret for months.
The Tortured Poets Department came out on 19 April 2024. Two hours later, with no warning, a second album appeared called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. It doubled the track count from sixteen to thirty-one. The thirty-one-song collection was, in effect, two albums for the price of one. Critics were properly split. Some called it her most psychologically intricate work to date. Others called it overlong and overwrought. Both camps reviewed it within twenty-four hours of release. The album sold 2.6 million copies in the United States in its first week, the highest first-week sales figure of any album in the decade.
The album's lyrical content was largely interpreted, by fans and critics alike, as documenting the end of her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, with brief reference to a short-lived rebound with Matty Healy of The 1975. The track "Florida!!!" features Florence Welch, of Florence + the Machine, on guest vocals. It is, in case the title doesn't make it clear, a song about the state of Florida. Aaron Dessner co-produced fourteen tracks on the album, his largest contribution to a Swift record to date.
Coming home
On 30 May 2025, Taylor published a letter on her website to her fans. She wrote that she had purchased the master recordings, music videos, concert films, album art, photography and all unreleased songs from her first six albums from Shamrock Holdings. The figure was not officially disclosed but was reported at various points to be somewhere around $360 million. Every piece of music she had ever recorded was now, for the first time since she was fifteen years old, hers.
The letter explained, in plain language, why she had been willing to re-record her old albums in the first place: she had not, until that letter, believed she would ever get the originals back. The Shamrock deal had been the offer she had stopped negotiating with in 2020, when she discovered that Scooter Braun would continue to benefit from her catalogue under the terms they were proposing. After the re-recordings had run their course, Shamrock had returned with a different set of terms. She had taken the deal.
The letter included the suggestion, without committing to it, that the Reputation re-recording she had been working on was unlikely to be released. The reason given was that Reputation the original album captures something so specific to the moment that created it that recreating it in the studio nearly a decade later did not feel right. Whether or not Reputation (Taylor's Version) eventually appears is, as of 2026, still an open question.
Five months after the letter, in October 2025, Taylor released a new album called The Life of a Showgirl. It was made in Stockholm during off-nights on the European leg of the Eras Tour, with Max Martin and Shellback, the team behind 1989 and Red. Twelve tracks. The album was, in tone, a deliberate return to pure pop after the dense literary mode of folklore, evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department. One of its tracks, "Father Figure", was widely reported to be directed at Scott Borchetta. She had named her first label boss in a song, fifteen years after he had signed her at fourteen.
The Life of a Showgirl became the best-selling vinyl record in the UK in 2025, selling around 147,000 copies on the format alone. The total UK vinyl market that year was approximately 7.6 million records across every artist in every genre. One album, by one artist, accounted for almost two per cent of every record sold on vinyl in Britain. Fearless, her breakthrough album from 2008, would have considered that an entire career. She did it in one calendar year, in one country, with an album made on the off-nights of a tour that had already finished.
What it took
Taylor Swift is thirty-six years old at the time of writing. Her family no longer owns the Christmas tree farm in Cumru Township, the property changed hands many years ago, and the current owners continue to grow Fraser firs and Douglas firs and sell them by the truckload, in much the same way the Swifts did when Taylor was a small child collecting praying mantis pods. Sometimes fans drive past. There is no plaque.
The contract she signed at fifteen has been unwound, by stages, over the twenty years it took to do it: opt out of RCA's development deal at thirteen, leave Big Machine for Republic on own-your-masters terms at twenty-nine, refuse the Shamrock deal at thirty, re-record four albums between thirty-one and thirty-four, and finally, at thirty-five, buy back what had always been hers in the first place.
The catalogue she now owns runs to eleven original studio albums, four re-recordings, two live films, and several thousand songs across released material and the vaulted unreleased material that has been seeping out in small batches since 2021. The Eras Tour grossed more money in twenty-one months than most countries spend on cultural policy in a decade. The radio tour she did at sixteen with her mother and a stack of CDs visited two hundred stations. The Sony/ATV publishing deal she signed at fifteen made her the youngest staff writer in the company's history.
It is tempting, particularly at this length, to try to put a bow on the story. Taylor Swift would presumably tell you, with some politeness, not to. The thing about a career built entirely on labour is that the labour doesn't stop, the bow doesn't get tied, and the next album is already being written somewhere. The radio tours are over. The Christmas tree farm is gone. The masters are back. There is no plaque. There is, presumably, another album coming.