(not so) guilty pleasure: taylor swift's lover album

I started liking Taylor Swift when I heard her iconing song You Belong With Me in one of our family CDs. In the next few years, I started hearing her more and more of her songs on the radio, and I remember thinking "Wow, I relate so much with this song(s)!" (as a lovestruck 13-year old girl at the time with middle school crushes). I remembered tweeting/posting a status on Facebook on something along the lines of: "Who needs a diary when you have Taylor Swift?"

Given that many of songs became so popular, it's not hard to imagine that her songs resonated with many other teens and young adults. Looking back, what drew me to her music is a combination of her country style (I found my tendency to like country music through Taylor) and her brutally honest, vividly imaginative lyrics.

In the light of Taylor Swift's recently released album, Lover, I want to dive deeper into why Swift is the only artist that I've followed so closely, and why I feel more invested in her work as an artist.

Her work as an artist

Lover is her seventh studio album and has very contrasting imagery and content in comparison to her preceding album, Reputation. While Reputation is dark, snake-y, pop/hip-hop-like, and full of twisted love stories, Lover is pastel pink and blue, feminine, happy, and in love.

Swift is famous to have a role in writing every single song that she performs, and to be incredibly personal with the stories she shares with the public through these songs. For example, from this album, we see references to her relationship with her British boyfriend Joe Alwyn, as well as an incredibly personal song dedicated to her mom who is battling cancer.

And I guess these are some of the main reasons why I'm so drawn to Taylor Swift's work. Each song she writes tells a story, and I find myself wondering what the lyrics may mean in the bigger context of her personal narrative. I appreciate the fact that each song is a product of her work as an artist - that she had written it, composed it, and then sang it (even with the help of others).

Somehow, Swift's work just seems different than the other pop starts who have their songs written and produced for them, and all they have to do is perform and record it with their trained vocal skills.

The same goes for her albums. Each album has its own distinct theme and symbolizes an era of her life. Reputation may have represented a dark era of her career, full of uncertainty and betrayals, but with Lover she is saying that she is now in a happier place and state of mind.

Her work as a marketer

In addition - being a Business Economics major at UCLA and an aspiring entrepreneur, I have to admire Swift's ability as a strategist and marketer. For instance, Swift always plans her album launches meticulously. In her previous album Reputation, she wiped out all of her social media channels from content, and then intrigued curious fans by uploading mysterious posts with ominous, snake-like imagery to hint on what to expect from the album.

One statement that she makes through Reputation is that her old self is "dead", a way to reinvent herself and her brand to stay relevant in the music industry and brings herself a whole new audience base. This is not unlike companies who are continuously re-inventing themselves and keeping things fresh in order to keep up with trends and customer preferences.

The difference is Swift manages to do this while still maintaining her artistic integrity - she is experimenting with new genres of music and different personas, but the stories she tells are still hers.

Swift's Lover album launch also created a lot of buzz. This time, Swift dropped all of the Lover tracks on YouTube on her launch date - precisely at midnight. Her fans went crazy about it generated a sensation.

In addition, Swift knows that one of her key differentiators in the market is the fact that again, she writes all of her songs. To consolidate this identity as a lyrical, genius songwriter even further, Swift releases voice notes and videos of her songwriting process. She cements her reputation as a songwriter through this, as well as enabling her fans to appreciate her music even more by showing the behind-the-scenes of several songs.

So - to answer my own question, why Swift?

My background in business allows me to appreciate her skills in marketing and her ability to stay evergreen in an industry where people rise and fall from fame. The more artistic part of me admires Swift's ability to eloquently express her own feelings and emotions through her songs, and have her stories resonate with so many other listeners. Isn't that, after all, what art is supposed to do?