Story highlights
Swift's new album is out Monday
Billboard declared it her "best work"
Kelly Clarkson covered "Shake It Off" at her concert
Happy Taylor Swift album release day!
It may not be your thing, but the legions of the Swifties have been eagerly awaiting “1989.” Some of them downloaded a track of silence just to get their TS fix.
With her first purely pop album, Swift is winning raves. Billboard’s Jem Aswad declared the album “Swift’s best work – a sophisticated pop tour de force that deserves to be as popular commercially as with Robyn-worshipping bloggers; an album that finds Swift meeting Katy (Perry) and Miley (Cyrus) and Pink on their home turf and staring them down.”
“1989” is being closely watched to see whether it can help pull the music industry out of its slump: No single artist has been able to pull off a platinum album this year.
Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield writes in his review that “Swift has already written enough great songs for two or three careers. ‘Red,’ from 2012, was her ‘Purple Rain,’ a sprawling I-am-the-cosmos epic with disco banjos and piano ballads and dubstep drops.
“Deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic, ’1989’ sounds exactly like Taylor Swift, even when it sounds like nothing she’s ever tried before,” Sheffield adds. “And yes, she takes it to extremes. Are you surprised? This is Taylor Swift, remember? Extremes are where she starts out.”
Swift also has some high-profile fans.
A video of superstar Kelly Clarkson covering the new album’s first single, “Shake It Off,” in concert was posted on YouTube over the weekend.
“Seriously, everyone gives Taylor a hard time, but she can write a hook,” Clarkson said. “I’m just saying.”
