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Taylor Swift · S5 E1
Red
The album that isn't quite country and isn't quite pop. Called a mess in 2012. Called a masterpiece now.
In early 2012, Taylor Swift walks into a Stockholm studio and sits down across from Max Martin, the producer behind Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. He has no interest in making a country record.
"Everything Has Changed" -- Taylor Swift ft. Ed Sheeran, official music video (2013). Two children meet on a school playground and fall for each other in miniature. Red is the album where Taylor opens the door to outside collaborators for the first time, and this gentle duet with Ed Sheeran is what that openness sounds like.
Everything Has Changed
Taylor and Ed Sheeran co-write this track over a single afternoon, and the production stays deliberately sparse: acoustic guitars, light percussion, two voices trading lines like a conversation between people still learning each other's rhythms. They rarely harmonize. Instead they hand off phrases, one picking up where the other leaves off. On an album where half the tracks are built by Swedish pop architects, this one is handmade and warm.
Two Albums Stitched Together
Red is not one record. Nathan Chapman produces the Nashville half, with country songs that follow naturally from Speak Now. Max Martin and Shellback produce the pop half, and those tracks sound like a completely different artist. Critics in 2012 call the album "unfocused." A decade later, the split personality is exactly what makes it beloved.
TAP TO REVEAL: How fast did Taylor write her first ever number one hit?
Red was released on October 22, 2012. How many copies did it sell in its first week?
State of Grace (Taylor's Version)
The album opener, and it sounds like nothing Taylor has ever released: crashing drums, layered electric guitars, a wall of sound that owes more to U2 than to Nashville. It is the first thing you hear on Red, and it announces in the opening bars that the rules have changed.
The new sound has a muse. Taylor meets Jake Gyllenhaal in October 2010, and the three months that follow will produce half of Red, one famous scarf, and a ten-minute song she is not yet allowed to release.
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