What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Pop Music

I swear I didn't know she was gonna drop a new album.

Pop music is weird. Or, I mean, it's not, it's pretty normal, but music theory is bad at explaining it because we're so focused on notes and chords that we miss out on what makes a great pop song so special. Can we do better? Sure! But how? Well, one possible approach would be to build some new models that actually incorporate pop production, and fortunately for us, Dr. Asaf Peres has already done that, and to understand how it works, I want to talk about one of my favorite pop albums of all time: Taylor Swift's 1989.

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Susan Jones
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) So… funny story. While I was making this video, Taylor Swift announced and then released another album. Out of nowhere. I haven't listened to it yet because it literally came out last night and I've been working, but I'm excited to check it out. This was a complete coincidence: If I'd intended this to be a tie-in from the beginning I probably would've focused more on her work in the intro, but still. Pretty cool.

2) On the prechorus in Style, I decided while filming to add chords 'cause there wasn't really a melody to hang my notation on, but I didn't have time to transcribe it myself so I just googled a transcription and used those chords and boy were they wrong. They should be Emi-A, not Dmi-Emi. Should've done a bit more due diligence on that to actually make sure they were, like, accurate, or at least to check a couple other transcriptions to see if they were consistent, but I was in a hurry, skipped that step, and got burned for it. I'll try not to let that happen again.

3) Oh, and while we're on that, the second note in the Bad Blood verse should be E, not G. That one was just a typographical error.

4) I should note that, while the set-up and climax are structurally pretty straightforward, it can still be useful to look at the absolute energy levels they mark out, and especially the differences between the two. If the climax is just a little bigger than the set-up, that's gonna sound fairly smooth, whereas if it's a huge leap you'll have a more dramatic arc. So when I say the build-up is the most interesting function, I don't mean it's the *only* interesting function.

5) To maximize the chances that this video doesn't get caught by automatic copyright bots that don't understand fair use, all clips are limited to 6 seconds or less. I made sure to include enough musical context to identify the points I was making, but that did force me to do some awkward cuts sometimes. Sorry, blame overzealous record labels.

[ShutItKyle]

"We're music theorists, we can do whatever we want."

[Hundeputzmunter]

The video itself built toward a climax by discussing Shake It Off last

[Activemeasures]

The pop producers are perfectionists. The fractal analogy is pretty spot on. They seem to start with a global stucture, then progressively zoom into smaller and smaller sections until the session is a maze of automation and articulation. Making a simple chord progression evolve is a skill. If pop was easy to make, everyone would do it.

[brightenight]

Can we give this guy an award for dealing with 10, 000 copyright claims just so we could hear the original music instead of a midi version.

[ekisoderqvist]

So refreshing AND fascinating/educational to see a video like this. During my university studies of classical music and one year studying music production people would laugh everytime I tried to bring up Taylor Swift's music in any serious context. She deserves a lot more credit than she gets for sure.

[CallowaySchmidt]

Awesome video man!! I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift and I say that as a die hard indie/alternative rock/ classic rock/ and hip hop fan. Her songs are amazing. I"m for sure a swifty.

[evelynminer]

The brief mention in this video makes me want a video about the structuring and arrangement of albums as a whole

[NekogamiKun]

It's interesting how in Pop music, the Producer almost becomes more important than the individual Musicians who get their names on the album.

[gregorymitchell]

I'm surprised that you didn't mention Welcome To New York as a song whose verses and chorus are pretty much on the same sonic level, and the climax is really just the outro.

[barakasalumu]

This was really interesting to me. Before this video I'd never really heard of "sonic function" as a theoretical approach to analyzing pop music. Thanks for this!

[launder]

I'm loving this thing that you and Adam neely are doing a lot lately, showing how well done are pop songs (or rap, for that matter). I'm tired of music snobs saying that "only classical and jazz are really art" or any sh** like that, and having strong, well-grounded arguments like these is really nice!

[a.claudiasilva]

This Love, Style, Clean, Wildest Dreams and Out of the Woods are some of the best songs from 1989 - and really 80's inspired.

[Charles-In-Charge]

Taylor has come to 12Tone!!! I’ve been waiting for this day

[scottyvalero]

Tonal ambiguity is my theory. It lets your brain fill in the missing information

[JurgMudveins]

Blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne, comments for the algorithm!

Also in before copyright takedown by overzealous bots

[IsabellaLembo]

I love the fact that the video is 13 minutes long, her favorite number 🙌❤️ loved the video! Thank you!

[mariaclaire]

i just want to let you know that taylor and her team does not send copyright strike especially to small content creators unless the content is malicious. It would be her old record label/ scooter braun

[Tesseract_King]

YES thank you for giving I Know Places the props it deserves. Best song on the album (or IMHO tied with Clean, but that's partially just because I'm a huge Imogen Heap fan)

[viviangalleher]

You're probably gonna do really well on this video. One, your videos are all super amazing. and two, she just released an album today so I think a lot of people will have taylor swift related things in their youtube recommendations