It hasn’t even been a year since Taylor Swift's “Eras tour” became the highest-grossing concert tour ever, raking in more than $2 billion after 149 shows over 21 months. But the singer isn’t resting on her laurels — her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is releasing Oct. 3, along with a “release party” film in theatres.
Throw in her recent , and you could be forgiven for thinking Swift is running the risk of overexposure. But according to a music expert at the 懂色帝, her celebrity is beside the point, and the key to understanding her phenomenal popularity lies in keeping the spotlight where it belongs: on her music.
, a musicologist and musician at , makes that case in a delving into the songcraft behind Swift’s 2014 chart-topper, “Shake It Off.” Here are three reasons he thinks she has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — except maybe her own.
1. The songs sound simple, but there’s more than meets the ear.
Carpenter, who teaches a , says he focused on “Shake It Off” because both the lyrics and the melody sound so deceptively simple.
“About half of my research is focused on European classical music of the early 20th century, which is about as serious as you can get,” he says. “The other half is popular music. I sometimes start the class by analyzing two songs: “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, and ‘Shake It Off.’” They’re both played so much that people just assume it’s junk on the radio. But I'm curious about how these songs work, because they clearly work. How are they built that they can bear so much listening? You can pull apart big symphonies and piano sonatas, but there’s a real question as to whether there’s enough meat on the bones of a pop song to make it worth your while.”
With “Shake It Off,” Carpenter notes the song is just three chords that never change, and the lyrics have “little in the way of poetry. It’s almost like a greeting card, with very simple rhyme schemes. She’s not aiming at anything deep. There are no great revelations about her love life, no grand statements about heartbreak or loss. So I was curious about how you make a song like that work.”
The answer, he says, is in the layering of the music and the words. “There’s a systematic approach to how the song gets thicker and intensifies. It’s a compositional strategy that pulls you through the song. If the song began and ended in the same way, or it just maintained the same sort of level, it wouldn’t be engaging to the ear. But it builds and builds in a very subtle and sophisticated way.”
2. She makes it look easy.
Amid the mega-production of the Eras tour, Swift’s breezy stage banter and stripped-down acoustic mini-sets made it all seem intimate and easy. But as Carpenter notes, it’s an illusion Swift has achieved through single-minded devotion as a singer-songwriter — a bit like a certain hockey player who rose to fame by being the greatest at what he did.
“Growing up watching Wayne Gretzky, there's an effortlessness to it, the unbelievable fluidity and intuitiveness. But it's underwritten by a lifetime of grinding and practice.”
Similarly, the carefree attitude Swift expresses in ”Shake It Off” through the light, sing-along lyrics and music has a counterpoint in the “carefully constructed” production, Carpenter says.
“When you get down to that level of analysis, the proportions are perfect. That’s a choice of composition. We’re going to make a perfectly proportioned song to put out a message of ‘just don't think about it, just shrug off the haters and just have fun and sing along.’ Maybe that’s the genius, that in some songs these two things work together in perfect counterpoint.”
3. She invites you into her world — but only so far.
In his article, Carpenter is quick to point out that he is “neither a Swiftie nor a detractor,” but he hasn’t failed to notice her double-edged relationship with her legions of fans.
“You have Taylor Swift who everybody is interested in as a person and who people of different ages want to know about, and she has this persona as a songwriter to say ‘I want to share with you the intimacies of my life and I want to invite you in’ — to a point,” he says.
“But we have to recognize, without being cynical, that this is a massive corporate enterprise. So a song like ‘Shake It Off’ is walking a line between two versions of Taylor Swift. There is the one who is inviting you into her life. And then there is the one who is creating very sophisticated, very sellable pop music.”
Carpenter likens some of Swift’s songs to impressionist paintings, with words and music combining to invite listeners into “this kind of blurry moment in time, a particular emotional climate.” He also points out that Swift structures her songs so it’s easier for fans to “step into that picture” — something comedian Charlene Kay parodies in her musical bit about the “” behind the tunes.
“It makes it very easy to become a participant in the song, to be invited into this,” Carpenter says. “Here's a moment in time where I’m with this guy. I know he’s trouble, but we're crazy about each other. And what can you do? I mean, who is not going to be drawn into that world?”