Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16. Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star; she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. To chart her journey — from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties — is to follow a generation coming of age. Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small.
That’s the artist. There’s also the empire. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014. As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. There have been wobbles, most notably in 2016-17, but on the whole she has retained a command of her star image rivaled only by Beyonce and Bowie. There is no daylight. The person is the music is the brand.
Which is why, whether you’re a casual listener who bops along to the radio hits, or one of those die-hards who takes her every utterance as a modern Rosetta Stone, it’s easy to feel like you know Swift on a personal level. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. Returning to them every few years, as I have since writing this list, is a strangely melancholy experience. The passage of time hits you like a brick.
Swift also benefited from the widespread critical embrace of poptimism, to the point where she could be namedTime’s Person of the Year in 2023.If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the think pieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. I count at least fifteen stone-cold classics in her discography. Others might see more. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down.
Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it — which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” — excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. The original version of this list included covers; the updated version of 2023 removes these in the interest of concision, as well as recognition that songwriting is an essential element in Swift’s songbook. For similar reasons, the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings are not afforded their own blurbs. Finally, because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult
All 245 Taylor Swift Songs, Ranked
There are at least ten stone-cold classics in her discography.
Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16. Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star; she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. To chart her journey — from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties — is to follow a generation coming of age. Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small.
That’s the artist. There’s also the empire. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014. As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. There have been wobbles, most notably in 2016-17, but on the whole she has retained a command of her star image rivaled only by Beyonce and Bowie. There is no daylight. The person is the music is the brand.
Which is why, whether you’re a casual listener who bops along to the radio hits, or one of those die-hards who takes her every utterance as a modern Rosetta Stone, it’s easy to feel like you know Swift on a personal level. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. Returning to them every few years, as I have since writing this list, is a strangely melancholy experience. The passage of time hits you like a brick.
Swift also benefited from the widespread critical embrace of poptimism, to the point where she could be namedTime’s Person of the Year in 2023.If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the think pieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. I count at least fifteen stone-cold classics in her discography. Others might see more. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down.
Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it — which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” — excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. The original version of this list included covers; the updated version of 2023 removes these in the interest of concision, as well as recognition that songwriting is an essential element in Swift’s songbook. For similar reasons, the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings are not afforded their own blurbs. Finally, because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult millionaire.
*This list was originally published in November 2017. It has been updated to include Swift’s subsequent releases and vault tracks. Additionally, many rankings have changed to reflect the author’s evolving taste. Like another famous Pennsylvanian, this is a living document.
245. “Me!,” Lover (2019)
Most Swift songs grow with each listen. “Me!” is the exception: The more you hear it, the worse it sucks. After the Sturm und Drang of the Reputation era, “Me!” was a return to bubblegum pop, a mission statement that says “I’m through making mission statements.” While self-awareness may be Swift’s superpower, it fails her here. The attempt to reclaim a sense of youthful innocence works only by stripping out anything else that’s interesting or pleasurable about the music. Indeed, there’s something patronizing about kicking off an album full of gems like “Cornelia Street” and “Cruel Summer” with a song that makes Kidz Bop sound like In Our Time. She was seven years past “All Too Well” at this point, long enough to put away the baby food.
244. “Christmas Must Mean Something More,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007)
One of two originals on Swift’s early-career Christmas album, “Something More” is a plea to put the Christ back in Christmas. Or as she puts it: “What if happiness came in a cardboard box? / Then I think there is something we all forgot.” In the future, Swift would get better at holding onto some empathy when she was casting a critical eye at the silly things people care about; here, the vibe is judgmental in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever reread their teenage diary.
243. “Better Than Revenge,” Speak Now (2010)
A nasty little song that has not aged well. Whether a straightforward imitation of Avril Lavigne’s style or an early attempt at “Blank Space”–style self-satirization, the barbs never go beyond bratty. (As in “Look What You Made Me Do,” the revenge turns out to be the song itself, which feels hollow.) Best known now for the line about “the things she does on the mattress,” which I suspect has been cited in blog posts more times than the song was ever listened to, and has now been excised from the re-recording.
242. “Look What You Made Me Do,” Reputation (2017)
“There’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting,” Swift told New York back in 2013. “The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do.” To Swift’s credit, it took her six records to get to this point. On a conceptual level, the mission here is clear: After the Kim-Kanye feud made her the thinking person’s least-favorite pop star, this comeback single would be her grand heel turn. But the villain costume sits uneasily on Swift’s shoulders, and even worse, the songwriting just isn’t there. The verses are vacuous, the insults have no teeth, and just when the whole thing seems to be leading up to a gigantic redemptive chorus, suddenly pop! The air goes out of it and we’re left with a taunting Right Said Fred reference — the musical equivalent of pulling a Looney Tunes gag on the listener. (I do dig the gleeful “Cuz she’s dead!” though.)
241. “Only the Young,” Miss Americana (2020)
While it’s understandable to wish Swift would have done more during the 2016 election, the effort to affix some blame to her for Hillary Clinton’s defeat rests on flimsy foundations. The Clinton campaign was hardly lacking for celebrity endorsements, and as Swift herself has pointed out, at that moment she was as hated as she’d ever been. Any attempt to link her brand with Clinton’s likely would have rebounded to the detriment of them both. Nevertheless, whether in response to this backlash or simply to the obvious, Swift got more comfortable wading into the partisan arena during the Trump era, an evolution that takes center stage in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana. This was an admirable thing to do, even if it hasn’t always resulted in good music. As the doc’s closing number makes clear, politics remains an awkward fit creatively. Swift isn’t a natural polemicist, straining her way through clunky couplets about the “big bad man” and his “big bad clan.” Docked at least a dozen spots for the verse about school shootings, the most cringeworthy of Swift’s recent output.
All 245 Taylor Swift Songs, Ranked
There are at least ten stone-cold classics in her discography.
Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16. Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star; she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. To chart her journey — from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties — is to follow a generation coming of age. Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small.
That’s the artist. There’s also the empire. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014. As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. There have been wobbles, most notably in 2016-17, but on the whole she has retained a command of her star image rivaled only by Beyonce and Bowie. There is no daylight. The person is the music is the brand.
Which is why, whether you’re a casual listener who bops along to the radio hits, or one of those die-hards who takes her every utterance as a modern Rosetta Stone, it’s easy to feel like you know Swift on a personal level. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. Returning to them every few years, as I have since writing this list, is a strangely melancholy experience. The passage of time hits you like a brick.
Swift also benefited from the widespread critical embrace of poptimism, to the point where she could be namedTime’s Person of the Year in 2023.If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the think pieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. I count at least fifteen stone-cold classics in her discography. Others might see more. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down.
Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it — which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” — excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. The original version of this list included covers; the updated version of 2023 removes these in the interest of concision, as well as recognition that songwriting is an essential element in Swift’s songbook. For similar reasons, the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings are not afforded their own blurbs. Finally, because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult millionaire.
*This list was originally published in November 2017. It has been updated to include Swift’s subsequent releases and vault tracks. Additionally, many rankings have changed to reflect the author’s evolving taste. Like another famous Pennsylvanian, this is a living document.
245. “Me!,” Lover (2019)
Most Swift songs grow with each listen. “Me!” is the exception: The more you hear it, the worse it sucks. After the Sturm und Drang of the Reputation era, “Me!” was a return to bubblegum pop, a mission statement that says “I’m through making mission statements.” While self-awareness may be Swift’s superpower, it fails her here. The attempt to reclaim a sense of youthful innocence works only by stripping out anything else that’s interesting or pleasurable about the music. Indeed, there’s something patronizing about kicking off an album full of gems like “Cornelia Street” and “Cruel Summer” with a song that makes Kidz Bop sound like In Our Time. She was seven years past “All Too Well” at this point, long enough to put away the baby food.
244. “Christmas Must Mean Something More,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007)
One of two originals on Swift’s early-career Christmas album, “Something More” is a plea to put the Christ back in Christmas. Or as she puts it: “What if happiness came in a cardboard box? / Then I think there is something we all forgot.” In the future, Swift would get better at holding onto some empathy when she was casting a critical eye at the silly things people care about; here, the vibe is judgmental in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever reread their teenage diary.
243. “Better Than Revenge,” Speak Now (2010)
A nasty little song that has not aged well. Whether a straightforward imitation of Avril Lavigne’s style or an early attempt at “Blank Space”–style self-satirization, the barbs never go beyond bratty. (As in “Look What You Made Me Do,” the revenge turns out to be the song itself, which feels hollow.) Best known now for the line about “the things she does on the mattress,” which I suspect has been cited in blog posts more times than the song was ever listened to, and has now been excised from the re-recording.
242. “Look What You Made Me Do,” Reputation (2017)
“There’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting,” Swift told New York back in 2013. “The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do.” To Swift’s credit, it took her six records to get to this point. On a conceptual level, the mission here is clear: After the Kim-Kanye feud made her the thinking person’s least-favorite pop star, this comeback single would be her grand heel turn. But the villain costume sits uneasily on Swift’s shoulders, and even worse, the songwriting just isn’t there. The verses are vacuous, the insults have no teeth, and just when the whole thing seems to be leading up to a gigantic redemptive chorus, suddenly pop! The air goes out of it and we’re left with a taunting Right Said Fred reference — the musical equivalent of pulling a Looney Tunes gag on the listener. (I do dig the gleeful “Cuz she’s dead!” though.)
241. “Only the Young,” Miss Americana (2020)
While it’s understandable to wish Swift would have done more during the 2016 election, the effort to affix some blame to her for Hillary Clinton’s defeat rests on flimsy foundations. The Clinton campaign was hardly lacking for celebrity endorsements, and as Swift herself has pointed out, at that moment she was as hated as she’d ever been. Any attempt to link her brand with Clinton’s likely would have rebounded to the detriment of them both. Nevertheless, whether in response to this backlash or simply to the obvious, Swift got more comfortable wading into the partisan arena during the Trump era, an evolution that takes center stage in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana. This was an admirable thing to do, even if it hasn’t always resulted in good music. As the doc’s closing number makes clear, politics remains an awkward fit creatively. Swift isn’t a natural polemicist, straining her way through clunky couplets about the “big bad man” and his “big bad clan.” Docked at least a dozen spots for the verse about school shootings, the most cringeworthy of Swift’s recent output.
240. “Invisible,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006)
A bonus track from the debut that plays like a proto–”You Belong With Me.” The “show you” / “know you” rhymes mark this as an early effort.
239. “You Need to Calm Down,” Lover (2019)
Unable to express themselves openly in popular art, the queer community historically has needed to operate through secret code. Since this is also Swift’s preferred method of communicating with superfans, it should come as no surprise that many of them thus convinced themselves the singer was implanting in her lyrics and music videos veiled references to her own Sapphic desires. Like ancient Christians expecting the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, the Gaylors may be destined never to experience the glorious day they’ve been waiting for, though they have the cold comfort of this Lover single, where Swift came out as an LGBTQ ally and buried the hatchet with Katy Perry, all at the same time. Besides being politically incoherent — was Tweeting at 7 a.m. really the thing that was bad about Donald Trump? — its slangy jabs felt dated even at the moment of release, as did the slight West Indian accents in the chorus. Coming hot on the heels of “Me!” this track did not get the Lover era off to the strongest of starts. As with Reputation, the real gems would emerge on the album proper.
238. “Crazier,” Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack (2009)
When approached by the filmmakers about contributing a song to the Hannah Montana movie, Swift sent in this track, seemingly a holdover from the Fearless sessions. In an admirable bit of dedication, she also showed up to play it in the film’s climax. It’s kind of a snooze.
237. “Change,” Fearless (2008)
A bit of paint-by-numbers inspiration that apparently did its job of spurring the 2008 U.S. Olympic team to greatness. They won 36 gold medals!
236. “A Place in This World,” Taylor Swift (2006)
Swift’s version of “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” this one feels like it missed its chance to be the theme tune for an ABC Family show.
235. “SuperStar,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008)
This bonus track is a relic of an unfamiliar time when Swift could conceivably be the less-famous person in a relationship.
234. “Beautiful Ghosts,” Cats soundtrack (2019)
Swift’s first foray into musical-theater writing is less embarrassing than the movie but still far too self-pitying to sit through more than once. Ever the dutiful student, Swift follows all the parameters of the assignment, yet moves like rhyming wanted with wanted come off as rookie mistakes.
233. “We Were Happy,” Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (2021)
There’s a thin line between timeless and basic, and this “from the vault” track stays on the wrong side.
232. “Highway Don’t Care,” Tim McGraw’s Two Lanes of Freedom (2013)
After joining Big Machine, McGraw gave Swift an “and” credit here as a professional courtesy. Though her backing vocals are very pleasant, this is 100 percent a Tim McGraw song.
231. “Don’t You,” Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (2021)
A mid-tempo breakup song from the vault that never achieves liftoff, though Jack Antonoff’s production at least gives it an alluring shape.
230. “A Perfectly Good Heart,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006)
A pleading breakup song with one killer turn of phrase and not much else.
229. “Better Man,” Red (Taylor’s Version) (2021)
Swift’s vault tracks often feel like drafts for ideas that would be more fully sketched out in her official tracks — and never more so than on this one, whose opening notes are reminiscent of the beginning of “I Almost Do.”
228. “Cold As You,” Taylor Swift (2006)
A dead-serious breakup song that proved the teenage Swift could produce barbs sharper than most adults: “You come away with a great little story / Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.” Jesus.
227. “The Outside,” Taylor Swift (2006)
If you thought you felt weird judging songs by a high-schooler, here’s one by an actual sixth-grader. “The Outside” was the second song Swift ever wrote, and though the lyrics edge into self-pity at times, this is still probably the best song written by a 12-year-old since Mozart’s “Symphony No. 7 in D Major.”
226. “The Alchemy,” The Tortured Poets Department (2024)
Finally, Travis Kelce gets his own “London Boy.”
225. “Dear Reader,” Midnights (3am Edition) (2022)
An ambient vibe that floats around without ever achieving much.
