By April Henrist, MA
When Pitchfork reviewed Taylor Swift's reputation album (2017), it opened by discussing celebrity feuds, Kanye West, politics, and Swift's carefully crafted public image crumbling. Hundreds of words later, readers knew a great deal about the viral cultural context surrounding the album but remarkably little about the music itself. Aside from a few passing remarks, there was almost no discussion of what the album actually sounds like or how its musical choices shape its meaning (Cox, 2017). Pitchfork was only one of many big publications reviewing in such fashion (Gompertz, 2017; Sheffield, 2017), and Swift’s treatment certainly isn’t unique in the industry (Horn, 2021; Mapes, 2016; Petrides, 2017; Willman, 2020). Popular music criticism has become remarkably good at discussing everything around music, while the music itself often remains in the background (Jones, 2002; Gorman, 2001; Frith, Straw, & Street, 2001).
That observation became the starting point for my Master's thesis “Resounding the Narrative: A Musical Analysis of Taylor Swift’s reputation Album as a Case Study for a More Qualitative Approach to Popular Music Criticism”. Rather than focusing on the lyrics or the events of reputation, I wanted to know what happens when we begin with the music itself. How does the album's sound contribute to the story it tells? And what might these different approaches to album criticism reveal about the way we write and think about popular music more broadly?
To answer these questions, I analysed all fifteen songs on reputation using close listening and close reading (Blum, 1993; Moore, 2003; Synikin & Winant, 2025). Close reading is a literary technique where you pay careful attention to text, in this case lyrics, to understand how its specific words, structure, and formal elements create meaning. Similarly, close listening pays attention to how musical elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, production, timbre, and vocal delivery contribute to a song’s meaning. Each chapter focused on one song, bringing these musical and lyrical elements together. Rather than treating the music as decoration for the lyrics, I approached it as an active part of the storytelling. The result was a simple but important insight: many of the album’s central themes are communicated just as much through sound as through words.
The opening track and single, "...Ready For It?" illustrates this particularly well.
On first listen, the song appears to confirm everything audiences expected from the reputation era. It opens with what feels like a wall of sound: booming bass, distorted synthesizers, and a confrontational, fast-paced vocal delivery. Harmonically, the verses centre on E minor, reinforcing a sense of tension and aggression. If listeners arrived expecting an album about revenge and vendettas, the opening seems to deliver exactly that.
Then the chorus begins. Instead of becoming bigger, as pop choruses almost always do, the music unexpectedly retreats. The dense production quiets, Swift's voice turns softer, and her vocals open up in range as well as in pace. On top of that, the song shifts from E minor in the verses to its relative major, G major in the chorus. Most listeners will never consciously identify this modulation, nor do they need to. What they do hear is a sudden sonic and emotional shift. The song no longer feels closed off and combative. It feels open, hopeful, even vulnerable.
This musical contrast fundamentally reshapes the song's narrative. Lyrically, the verses introduce the public Taylor Swift: the larger-than-life figure who had spent the previous year at the centre of celebrity feuds and media spectacle. She presents herself almost as a character who fully embraces the villainous role she has been assigned. The chorus, however, reveals someone entirely different. Here, Swift sings about escape, intimacy, and the uncertainty it can bring. Rather than doubling down on the nefarious facade, she paints a picture of how she feels and loves in secret, when the outside noise is cancelled out.
What makes "...Ready For It?" so compelling is that this division is not communicated solely through the lyrics. The music itself performs the split. The change from E minor to G major along with conscious choices in production, melody and cadence drive a movement away from public spectacle into private emotion. Even the listener's expectations are manipulated. Just when the song appears to embrace the aggressive sonic world established in the verses, it unexpectedly reveals something far more intimate beneath the surface. In other words, the song does not simply tell us that there are two versions of Taylor Swift, it allows us to hear them.
Swift reinforces this duality visually in the accompanying music video, in which two versions of herself confront one another: a dark-clad character sporting heavily eyeliner and a lighter vulnerable figure without clothes imprisoned behind glass. Eventually the ‘light' Swift prevails, defeating her demons. Read together, the lyrics, harmony, production, and visual imagery all point towards the same central idea. There are two Swifts: the one the world thinks her to be, and the one she truly is.
While "...Ready For It?" provides the clearest example of this interaction between music and lyrics to convey narrative, it is far from unique. Throughout reputation, musical choices repeatedly do narrative work alongside the lyrics, demonstrating that the album's story cannot be fully understood by reading its words alone. Listening closely reveals a level of storytelling that is easy to overlook when criticism focuses primarily on celebrity, biography, or lyricism.
None of this means that context, biography, or cultural criticism are unimportant. On the contrary, they remain essential to understanding popular music and help frame analysis. But they should complement listening rather than replace it. Music is not simply a backdrop for lyrics; it communicates through harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture, and countless other musical choices that shape how listeners experience a song.
At a time when popular music is one of the most widely consumed forms of culture, this matters beyond academia. When criticism focuses almost exclusively on celebrity, biography, or cultural controversy, we risk overlooking the very medium through which artists communicate. Learning to listen more carefully enriches not only academic research but also music journalism and public conversations about music. It encourages critics to explain how musical choices create meaning rather than merely what songs might be about, while giving audiences new ways of understanding and engaging with the music they already love.
About the author
April Henrist obtained a master's degree in Art Sciences, majoring in musicology from Ghent University in 2025. She is currently a PhD student at Ghent University on a one-year research grant (BOF) under Prof. Dr. Francis Maes. Her PhD project focusses on Narrative Creation through Music, Lyrics and Persona in Contemporary Dutch-language Pop Music.
Contact information: april.henrist@ugent.be / aprilhenrist@gmail.com
Short bibliography
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