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Modern-day America is full of conspiracy theories. Among them: Votes have been changed by space lasers, birds aren’t real and large corporations are injecting vaccines into over-the-counter foods.
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With his new single, Luke Bryan unintentionally found a conspiracy that’s been grossly overlooked: Honky tonks have manipulated the population with magnets.
To be clear, that is a kooky – and unfounded – proposition, but it is true that country bars have an irresistible attraction for many of their customers. That internal pull is at the heart of Bryan’s “Country Song Came On,” released by Capitol Nashville to country radio Oct. 28 via PlayMPE.
The single’s protagonist is ill-equipped to say no to the joint’s alluring features, and his plan to get a good weeknight’s sleep is derailed by the pursuit of a good time. “I’ve certainly been drawn in, no shortage of times, by the vibes of a bar, and the right songs and the right ambience,” Bryan says.
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He knows that scenario from both sides of the fence: he’s paid the cover charge as a patron, and sang cover songs on a hole-in-the-wall stage.
“From the time I was 16 years old till I got my record deal, I [played] most of my concerts in little bars and honky tonks,” Bryan says, “so I spent a good 12, 13 years playing in those environments and playing the Merle Haggard songs and the Waylon Jennings songs and the Keith Whitleys and all that. So it’s nice to find one like this that really is authentically me.”
“Country Song Came On” found its genesis in a second-floor writing room on April 18, 2022, at SMACKSongs’ Music Row headquarters in Nashville. Songwriters Neil Medley (“Made For You,” “Hung Up On You”) and Ryan Beaver (“Pretty Little Poison,” “Party Mode”) had been co-writing frequently for more than a decade, but it was the first time they worked with River House writer Dan Alley.
Once they settled on the “Country Song Came On” title, the rest of the piece unfolded naturally, as they explored a regular guy who cedes control of his evening hours to a greater power. “It’s not my fault,” Alley says with a laugh. “It’s the song’s fault, or it’s the barstool’s fault.”
Beaver toggled on acoustic guitar between a tonic chord and a two-minor, adding a seventh note into the latter triad to give it extra color. Most, though not all, of the song resides in that simple back-and-forth interplay, as they crafted a bluesy melody over the top.
“I tend to play a lot of voicings,” Beaver says. “If there’s an A-minor, I’ll play it a couple of different ways, just for it to feel fresh or new or different. An A-minor is an A-minor, but if you add a seventh, or you play that A-minor in [a different] position, it feels different, sounds different. We were probably just all entertaining ourselves, but it’s really a lesson in simplicity, going back and forth between those two chords a lot.”
They had the opening line of the chorus (“I was gonna drive by, wasn’t gonna stop”) and the payoff lines (“I wasn’t gonna drink / But then a country song came on”) and mapped out the chords and melodic progression of the first verse and chorus before filling in the rest. Even though the start of the chorus was obvious, it didn’t have a typical lift.
“That character is not going to sing a big chorus,” Medley says. “It just never felt for one second that we needed it. It just felt like this groove is going on, so why take it out of that? Let’s just continue.”
Midway through that chorus, they switched up the phrasing and melody just enough to propel it forward, and they cemented the club’s magnetism once they settled on the lyric for that passage: “Wasn’t gonna let the bar twist my arm / But I’m helpless in a honky tonk.” Bryan suggested that second line could be a title on its own. “’Helpless in a honky tonk’ – we should write that at some point,” Medley quips.
They had the bar’s band cover a George Jones hit in the second verse, and gave “Country Song” a very subtle bridge, then did a work tape to end the day. As much as they liked it, they didn’t get around to demoing “Country Song” until the fall, using a four-piece band. Alley sang lead, unintentionally copping a Blake Shelton sound. Shelton and Bryan were their leading targets once their publishers started pitching it.
“There’s a lot of space in it, [and] it’s kind of traditional, just to leave a little space and not get too many words jumbled in there,” Alley says. “That kind of leans towards the old school.”
Bryan quickly put it on hold when he heard the demo in January 2023. Producers Jeff and Jody Stevens booked a different set of studio players than in past Bryan sessions for a recording date at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios. Steel guitarist Eddie Dunlap and guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield got plenty of space to set the sonic tone.
“Due to the title, I think we thought ‘Country Song’ was going to need a lot of steel on it,” Jody says.
Philcox-Littlefield enhanced that attitude by playing a growling baritone guitar instead of the light Memphis soul licks featured in the demo. “[Bryan] wanted something country and something straight ahead,” Jeff says.
Those two musicians played the most prominent role in defining the sound, and divvying up the parts was effortless. “I’ve been recording this kind of band ever since 1993,” Jeff says. “If they’re working well together – and they almost always do – by the time the second run-through comes through, they’ve kind of got their spots figured out.”
It jelled so nicely that even after Bryan stopped singing at the 3:06 mark, the band kept grooving another 50 seconds. “We could have made that outro about half as long,” Jody says, “but I don’t think it’d be as fun.”
Bryan’s final vocal, also cut at Starstruck, was just as effortless, given the easy nature of the song. He made one important revision, replacing Jones in the lyric with “ETC” – short for Earl Thomas Conley, whose songs Bryan covered frequently when he was playing barrooms.
“If people don’t know what ETC is, they’ll get online or Google, and maybe go dive into some deep, deep, deep cuts of Earl Thomas Conley,” Bryan says.
The ETC alteration uniformly impressed the writers. “That was the moment I realized, not only does Luke love this song, but Luke really cares still, this many years into his career, about his craft and about songs,” Beaver says. “And he made it his.”
“Country Song Came On” is as magnetic as the bar it celebrates, and it debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 30, easily surviving the internal vetting process. If anyone suggests the decision to make it a single was contentious, consider it another conspiracy theory.
“Through the years, I’ve had songs that I really believed in, that not everybody believed in, and they worked out,” Bryan says. “This one’s funny, because everybody’s really on the same page and excited to see it come out.”
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard has spent the last few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here — and now, we examine the century in Taylor Swift, who took pop stardom to places we hadn’t previously thought possible. (Hear more discussion of Taylor Swift and explanation of her list ranking on our Greatest Pop Stars podcast — with her episode debuting Wednesday — and see our recently rebuilt list of the Greatest Pop Star by Year from 1981 to 2023 here.)
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It’s amusing to think back on Taylor Swift at age 17, staring straight into Tim McGraw’s soul at the 2007 ACM Awards while performing her debut single – which just so happened to be named after him.
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Pitchy but spirited, plucky but deeply promising as a songwriter, it was clear that she was bursting at the seams with talent and ambition – fully capable, in theory, of reaching the greatest heights a career in the music business could offer. But the audacity she demonstrated by taking the moniker of one of country’s biggest stars, claiming it for her own release – her first-ever, at that – and serenading him with it in front of all of their peers on live television? That proved she also had the sheer nerve she’d need to actually get there.
Time and time again, that same moxie would propel the Pennsylvania native to previously inconceivable heights, her profile skyrocketing with each album as she stacked up chart records, historic sales numbers and unprecedented Recording Academy recognition. Through honoring all the traits that made her different – her sharp pen, her relatable girl-next-door awkwardness, her hopeless romanticism – and rejecting culture’s previous expectations for female artists to be overtly sexy, pliable and cool, she was able to forcefully, gravitationally bend culture to her will and become one of the world’s biggest undisputed pop stars, despite her eight-year late start in country music.
She is the only person to ever win album of the year at the Grammys four times. She has the second-most Billboard Hot 100 entries of all time (only Drake has more) and ties with Jay-Z for second-most No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 (bested only by The Beatles). She is one of the most impressive touring artists of the past quarter-century, a status that has culminated with her global Eras Tour becoming the highest-grossing trek of all time in 2023, just halfway through its run, as it repeatedly set stadium attendance records and boosted local economies in its confetti-and-friendship-bracelet-strewn wake. She’s a billionaire, the only female artist to become one predominantly through music alone. She is the most famous woman in the world.
And, with all due respect to Tim McGraw, the first thing millions of young pop fans really do think of when they hear his name is Taylor Swift.
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Swift and her fans were both young when they first saw each other, she an angel-faced teenager with corkscrew curls and lofty dreams that spilled over into both songs and MySpace posts, they a pack of mostly adolescent girls who pored over her interviews, replayed her vlogs long before “vlogging” was even a thing and started picking up guitars at higher rates to emulate their beloved heroine. The details of her origin story are now common bits of trivia — she was born Dec. 13, 1989 to Scott and Andrea Swift, raised on a Christmas tree farm in Wyomissing, and did you know her lucky number is 13? — but they used to make up the sacred web of knowledge held dear by her earliest admirers. To them, the tale of what happened next is also etched into memory like a bible passage: She moved to Nashville as a teenager to pursue a country music career, scored a publishing deal while still a student at Hendersonville High School and later got her big break when Scott Borchetta discovered her at the Bluebird Café and signed her to his infant label Big Machine Records.
In 2006, she dropped her self-titled debut LP through Big Machine and promoted it heavily, embarking on radio tours and hand-packing her own CDs into envelopes to personally send off to stations. She performed constantly — later joining Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Brad Paisley, Faith Hill and, yes, Tim McGraw as an opener on their respective country tours – and she was already demonstrating an instinctual business savvy that’s uncommon in most creatives, let alone ones who are still just 16. As an incentive for fans to buy copies of the record, for instance, she started planting hidden messages in her CD lyric booklets hinting at the real-life inspirations behind her songs, a tradition that would continue on future albums and grow more tantalizing as her subjects became more famous.
The specifics of this era feel fuzzier now that Swift has been ubiquitous for years — especially when, in 2024, modern stars find fame seemingly overnight through the lightning strike of social media virality as opposed to slowly, steadily building their fanbases over time. But her early career was much more of an old-school, brick-by-brick climb up the ranks than we often give her credit for now, fueled by the fact that on Taylor Swift, she was already composing with the skill of an experienced career songwriter who had a particular knack for connecting with young girls – because, well, she still was one herself.
Lead single “Tim McGraw” became Swift’s first entry on the Hot 100 that September, and the following year, the heart-rending “Teardrops on My Guitar” and the maniacally catchy “Our Song” also made their way up the chart. Neither of those would reach their peaks until 2008, though, when fiery breakup bangers “Should’ve Said No” and “Picture to Burn” also entered and became top 40 hits, just in time to capture everyone’s attentions ahead of the release of Fearless in November. She was a darling in the insular world of country music, earning professional recognition from the CMAs and ACMs, but she was becoming a face people recognized in pop culture, too. It was around this time that she was embraced into Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez’s Disney star ranks and briefly dated Joe Jonas, her first of several tabloid-feeding romances that would become central to the way we think and talk about her persona. People were looking – she just needed to stick the landing with her next album.
Again, the magnitude of the entire Fearless era is hard to conceptualize now that Swift has dwarfed herself so many times over the years. But in late 2008, the musician officially exploded into crossover-star status thanks to the staggering success of her sophomore album – which spent an incredible 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and sold 592,000 million copies in its first week. She dominated radio with country-pop smashes that remain classics in her discography to this day – most notably, “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me,” two top five Hot 100 hits with cinematic music videos that inspired some of the most memorable moments in her iconography — and she became the ultimate it-girl, whose face you craned your neck to see on red carpets, talk shows, magazine covers. The very first headlining trek she ever embarked on, the Fearless Tour, was through arenas, and she capped the triumphant era with a headline-grabbing album of the year win at the 2010 Grammys, at that point the youngest artist to ever do so.
The most talked-about moment from the first of Swift’s many imperial phases, though, was none of the above — but you probably already know where this is going. Like Shakespearean foils crossing paths for the first time, Kanye West fatefully thrust himself into the then-19-year-old Swift’s storyline, publicly declaring at the 2009 VMAs that she actually didn’t deserve one of the countless awards she would take home that year and leaving her shellshocked on stage in a moment that would catapult her into the international news cycle for weeks to come. Everyone from Dr. Phil to President Barack Obama had an opinion on the matter, with the latter famously declaring the rapper to be “a jacka–.”
Now, to look at the trajectory Swift was already on up until this point and still argue that the VMAs incident “made [her] famous,” as Ye would later claim, is laughable. But his protests at the show would foreshadow so many others coming for her down the line – namely, questions about her overall worthiness as an awards powerhouse, as debates raged over whether such a young (and female) performer was actually writing her own songs, or merely coasting off the contributions of her older male collaborators.
In response to those criticisms, she would pen the entirety of her 2010 follow-up album, Speak Now, without any outside lyrical help, resulting in a magical 14-track romantic dreamscape that remains a fervent fan-favorite to this day. If Fearless showcased her ability to craft hooky, accessible earworms, her third studio effort introduced her gift for penning deeply personal, woundingly emotional ballads like “Back to December,” “Dear John” and “Last Kiss,” a trade most important to the DNA of Swift’s musical genius.
Though it spent six weeks at No. 1 and helped make Swift Billboard’s then-youngest Woman of the Year, Speak Now didn’t spawn the same level of pop smashes, critical acclaim or Grammy love as its older sister did. When she made 2012’s Red, she seemed determined to make up for its lack of universality, enlisting the help of pop-music godfathers Max Martin and Shellback to push her sound up to the absolute barrier of pop, while staying just country enough to hold onto her identity and keep Big Machine happy. It worked: the deliberately cloying “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” became her first-ever No. 1 hit on the Hot 100, and with numerous top 40 smashes (“I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22” and “Begin Again,” to name a few), the project had double the capacity for hits as Fearless. Slower, more intimate tracks like “The Last Time,” “I Almost Do” and crown jewel “All Too Well” also expanded on the confessional sad-girl oeuvre she’d started with Speak Now, making Red a beautiful hodgepodge of all the best parts of both albums that crystallized what we now recognize as Swift’s greatest contributions to modern music: catchy hooks and heartbreaking ballads.
When Red also failed to take home album of the year at the Grammys, and her self-described “break my heart and I’ll write a song about you” schtick started to be met with antagonism – as Swift later explained, she became a “national lightning rod for slut-shaming” — she once again sought to level up. Breaking almost entirely away from her longtime Nashville collaborators and assembling a top 40 dream team comprised of Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder and newbie producer Jack Antonoff, the increasingly self-assured artist narrowed her focus on making an unabashed pop album that exploded with energy and shimmering ‘80s synths. She chose singles centered less on boys and more around moving to New York (which she did around that time), feuding with a frenemy (ahem, Katy Perry) and shaking off the haters. It was a colossal success by every metric. Thus began imperial phase no. 2: 1989.
Swift was downright inescapable at this point, with 1989 selling 1.29 million copies in its first week and reigning atop the Billboard 200 for 11 weeks. Her dominion was powered by an impeccable single and music video run, with “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood” all spending time at No. 1 while “Out of the Woods,” “Style” and “Wildest Dreams” held down her rule over radio and department-store speakers for years after the fact. She embarked on her first-ever stadium tour, on which she often brough out guest artists and random famous friends from her #Squad – the innerworkings of which were constantly being dissected by fans and gossip sites alike, both boosting Swift’s fame and narrowing the microscope on her body, style, decisions and personal life. She became Billboard’s first-ever two-time Woman of the Year while making history as the youngest musician to ever take home album of the year at the Grammys twice.
She was Caesar, finally ascending the throne, her ambition and tunnel vision at last giving way to more success than even she could’ve dreamed of. But she hadn’t gotten there with the amount of support and trust she’d hoped from her advisers at Big Machine, who she has insinuated dragged their feet on every step of her country departure. Meanwhile, someone else was preparing to reenter the picture, a sharp knife strapped to his Yeezys.
When public opinion tilted in Ye’s favor following the Great Phone Call Dispute of 2016, Swift responded to the chorus of voices undermining her — fellow celebrities and people behind the scenes included — by hiding away. After a year of self-imposed solitude in London, during which time she fell in love with actor Joe Alwyn, the singer re-emerged in November 2017 with Reputation, one of her most pointed creative risks to date. The dark, theatrical LP found Swift truly reclaiming her narrative and explaining her side of a controversy in detail for the first time in her career, a sharp swerve from her previous method of staying quiet and letting the public decide what she was thinking for her. She would never again be the girl in the silver gown, stunned into silence on the VMAs stage.
Taylor Swift
As soon as her six-album contract was up with Reputation, Swift split from Big Machine and signed with Republic, at the time only hinting at the reason behind her decision: “Incredibly exciting to know that I’ll own all of my master recordings that I make from now on,” she wrote on Instagram. But the signs that she’d been quietly battling her own label for years were there; with 1989, she was open about how hard she’d had to fight Borchetta to let her release a pop album, and on the Reputation Tour, a dedication to Loie Fuller, who “fought for artists to own their own work,” was shown onscreen each night.
By the time the situation exploded with the sale of Big Machine — and with it, her master recordings — to Scooter Braun in 2019, Swift had already turned in Lover. As we’d learn later in her 2020 Netflix film Miss Americana, she felt that, at 29, this project was her last chance to reach audiences on a global scale before she aged out of pop stardom. This fear seemed to lead to her releasing “Me!” — a slightly juvenile and generic pop track that documentary footage would later show she wrote not with the ambition of living up to her own pop genius, but with the quaint goal of little kids singing along — instead of the LP’s clear pop banger, future four-week No. 1 “Cruel Summer,” as its lead single. The most important part of the Lover era to Swift’s overall legacy is that she finally started using her immeasurable influence for political causes after a decade of silence, championing the LGBTQ community through “You Need to Calm Down” and endorsing Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen for U.S. senate over Republican opponent Marsha Blackburn.
But when Scootergate happened, a fire was lit under her. She issued scathing response after scathing response, making her fury abundantly clear and quickly publicizing her intention to re-record her first six albums in order to reclaim ownership of her past works. While waiting for the clock to run out on the legal barriers blocking her from doing so before November 2020 – and after the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined her plans for the continuation of the Lover era, including a limited run of performances dubbed “Lover Fest” – she surprise-dropped Folklore and Evermore. Un-muddled by months of pre-release rollout or the need for flashy singles or visual moments, the back-to-back albums reminded the general public that her true gift lies in her storytelling — and thanks in part to an understated acoustic-folk sound assisted by The National’s Aaron Dessner, they made Swift “cool” to an entire audience that had never seen her that way before. In 2021, Folklore gave her a record-tying third AOTY win at the Grammys.
The first piece of imperial phase no. 3 fell into place that April. With the unveiling of her Fearless (Taylor’s Version) re-recording, Swift took her first steps on an escalator that, at the close of the quarter-century, is still going up, sharing a near-exact replica of the album that made her a household name with the additions of never-released songs she wrote and recorded more than 15 years prior. Following that same formula each time, the re-records have only ramped up in cultural significance as they’ve progressed; Red (Taylor’s Version) spawned history’s longest song to go No. 1 with fans’ beloved “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”; Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) outsold its predecessor by 138k units in its first week; and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) became the first re-record to outsell its original counterpart, blowing the already staggering first-week numbers of 2014’s 1989 out of the water with 1.36 million.
The beauty of the re-recordings was that they both allowed longtime fans to relive some of their best memories with Swift while giving newer fans – or simply outsiders who weren’t paying much attention the first time these albums rolled around – a second chance at experiencing her most quintessential eras in real time. But arguably the most shocking part of the process was the fact that, in between the Taylor’s Versions, she was still recording original music. She dropped Midnights in 2022, moving a jaw-dropping 1.58 million first-week units and spawning her longest-running No. 1 hit with “Anti-Hero” — the most honest she’s ever been in her music about her personal demons and incomprehensible station in life — while making chart history, as the first artist to ever simultaneously occupy the entire top 10 of the Hot 100, not to mention winning a record-setting fourth AOTY Grammy.
By the time she embarked on her global Eras Tour, interest in her body of work — old songs and brand new — had never been higher, and like the mirror ball she is, Swift has rewarded fans for it every night on the road with more than three hours’ worth of over-the-top scream-your-face-off catharsis, each show an homage to the painstaking career she’s built, brick by brick, one beautiful, messy era at a time. The unprecedented scale of the tour aligns with the absolutely unfathomable reach she’s achieved in 2023 and onward, her victory lap only continuing with the introductions of boyfriend Travis Kelce to the fairytale – through which she’s also captivated the NFL, proving that no major institution is off limits for her to take over — and the release of 12-week Billboard 200-topper The Tortured Poets Department. The dense 31-track blockbuster LP is second only to Adele’s 25 in highest first-week sales of all time (2.6 million) and has once again swept nominations in every major Grammy category for Swift in 2025, including what could be a record-extending album of the year.
Last year, she was Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2023, making her the only artist to ever win the title in three separate years (following 2015 and 2021), but the run she’s had in the past biennium isn’t just the grandest of her own career; it’s also possibly the most extraordinary cultural supremacy any of us have ever seen one artist accomplish in our lives. Her decisions, whereabouts and opinions are all considered public domain – you’re out of the loop if you haven’t seen what she wore to the latest Kansas City Chiefs game – and there is no reason to believe that if she dropped another album tomorrow, it wouldn’t invariably end up spending more weeks at No. 1 on the charts than even Tortured Poets, because when hasn’t she been able to top herself? Nothing is out of the realm of possibility for her.
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All of this to say, the star is still outdoing herself, still beating her own unbeatable feats, still forging ahead in the same uncharted direction when most others would’ve long since burned out or jumped ship to alternative career paths – all of which, it shouldn’t go without saying, is exceedingly rare for someone nearly 20 long years into their career. She is venerated by the greats who came before her, from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — who declared that Swift’s mega-popularity is the closest phenomenon to Beatlemania he’s ever seen – to Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton and Carole King. At just 34 years old, her catalog has inspired college courses all over the world that treat her written word with the same level of analysis as Wordsworth, and her business innovations – be it the album variations she’s been experimenting with since 1989’s collectible Polaroid sets, her negotiations with Spotify and Apple Music for fairer streaming rates or the playbook she’s still writing on how to re-release old music to new blockbuster returns – will continue to have reverberations throughout the industry, for longer than we can probably even currently imagine.
For all these reasons and so many more, she is Billboard’s No. 2 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st century, blowing past countless other accomplished hitmakers and icons. The fact that controversy will likely tear through the internet over her being just one small space below No. 1 is just another testament to her power, but regardless, her placement shouldn’t leave Swifties upset for too long — especially considering how much later in the millennium she got her start, both in the genre and music in general. In a way, Swift has always been like pop’s most curious tourist, never quite feeling like she’d always belonged there, more so trying on the things she liked best about the territory and sticking to her own guns for the rest. Instead of coming up and thriving naturally within the bounds of what we understand pop to be then and now, she rewrote the genre in her own image and, in doing so, charted a new course for crossover success that countless other confessional singer-songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Gracie Abrams have since benefitted from.
That’s a lot more than tween Taylor bargained for when she wrote on her first album that she was “just a girl, trying to find a place in this world.” And if what her history has told us remains true, she’s still just getting started.
Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — find our accompanying podcast deep dives and ranking explanations here — and be sure to check back next Tuesday (Dec. 3) as we unveil our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the Century so far!
THE LIST SO FAR:
Honorable Mentions
25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele9. Ariana Grande8. Justin Bieber7. Kanye West6. Britney Spears5. Lady Gaga4. Drake3. Rihanna2. Taylor Swift
“It’s been very difficult, especially for me, to develop a sense of self-worth that is not attached to one’s career, because we’re taught we are what we do,” Don Henley told Billboard in 1994. “But it must be done at some point, and it generally comes later in life.”
On the Nov. 26, 1994-dated Billboard 200, the Eagles’ reunion album Hell Freezes Over sizzled in at No. 1 with 267,000 copies sold, according to Luminate.
The set, which led for two weeks, marking the Eagles’ fifth Billboard 200 No. 1, returned the band to the chart’s summit after a break of nearly 15 years. The group logged its first four leaders consecutively in 1975-79: One of These Nights, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, Hotel California and The Long Run. The best-of set is the top-selling album of all time, according to the RIAA, with 38 million certified units.
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Following The Long Run, the Eagles – then comprising Henley, fellow co-founder Glenn Frey, Don Felder, Timothy B. Schmit and Joe Walsh – parted (acrimoniously enough, famously, to eventually inspire the wry Hell Freezes Over album title). They combined for seven top 40-charting solo albums on the Billboard 200 in between The Long Run and Hell Freezes Over, including Henley’s 1989 top 10 The End of the Innocence. Frey tallied two Billboard Hot 100 top 10s in that span – the No. 2-peaking anthems “The Heat Is On” and “You Belong to the City,” both in 1985 – while Henley notched five top 10s, reaching a No. 3 best with “Dirty Laundry” in 1982.
The group’s reformation was sparked in part by the five members’ appearance in Travis Tritt’s video for his version of the Eagles’ 1972 classic “Take It Easy.” The remake, from 1993’s Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles, hit No. 21 on Hot Country Songs in March 1994, after the set had run up a 13-week reign on Top Country Albums.
Hell Freezes Over introduced four new Eagles songs, mixed with 10 of the group’s ‘70s favorites and Henley’s The End of the Innocence single “New York Minute” performed live on MTV in April 1994. “For the record, we never broke up … we just took a 14-year vacation,” Frey winked during the set.
All four new tracks reached Billboard songs charts: first single “Get Over It,” with Henley on lead vocals, hit No. 4 on Mainstream Rock Airplay and No. 31 on the Hot 100; “Love Will Keep Us Alive” (Schmit) crowned Adult Contemporary for three weeks; “Learn To Be Still” (Henley) rose to No. 15 on AC; and “The Girl From Yesterday” (Frey) reached No. 58 on Hot Country Songs.
In Henley’s 1994 interview with Billboard, he predicted that the Eagles’ reunion would be temporary. “We’ve grown in different directions now, as people should,” he mused, “and so we’ll finish our obligations and go our separate ways again.” He added with a chuckle, “And frankly, I’m looking forward to that.”
Still, the band continued to add to its legacy, and catalog, including the top five AC hits “Hole in the World” in 2003 and “No More Cloudy Days” in 2005. In 2007, the Eagles released Long Road Out of Eden, their first album of all-new material since The Long Run. Led by the AC top 10 and top 25 Hot Country Songs hit “How Long,” Long Road Out of Eden launched as the Eagles’ sixth and most recent Billboard 200 No. 1, moving 711,000 copies in its first week, the best frame for an album by the band since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991.
Following Frey’s passing in 2016, the Eagles have remained a touring force, with his son Deacon and longtime country hitmaker Vince Gill since having become staples of their lineup in concert. As announced today (Nov. 26), four more shows have been added to the Eagles’ residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, extending its run, which began Sept. 20, through April 12, 2025.
Dating to the Eagles’ 1994 reunion, they have earned $1.5 billion in concert grosses and sold 11.6 million tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore. Their The Long Goodbye Tour, which began in September 2023, has grossed $138.1 million and sold 486,000 tickets over its first 40 shows. Their Sphere residency has grossed $42.2 million and sold 131,000 tickets over its first eight shows.
Adele is celebrating the end of her two-year Las Vegas residency with some commemorative keepsakes. The singer announced in an Instagram post on Tuesday (Nov. 26) that she is offering fans who made it to the Weekends With Adele extravaganza — as well as those who didn’t — a live album with a special bit of fairy dust from the series.
“To commemorate the ending of my residency in Las Vegas, I’m making a limited edition vinyl box set featuring the entire live setlist, a photo book, and even confetti from the show,” the singer wrote alongside an animation showing off the colorful box that features a grand piano on the front and opens up to reveal some spectacular photos of the show, as well as a full-color 56-page book and three 180g LPs.
The $349 box recorded during the 100-show residency at the Colosseum in Caesars Palace features two hours of music across 21 tracks, including such beloved hits as “Hello,” “Easy On Me,” “Rumor Has It,” “Skyfall,” “Set Fire to the Rain,” “Someone Like You” and “Rolling in the Deep,” among others; the estimated shipping date for the box is February 2025.
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And that’s not all. The singer is also selling some holiday-appropriate merch that includes a new card game called, naturally, “Love Is a Game,” that comes in a handsome burgundy box. The “conversation cards” inside include such topics as “Let’s Begin,” “When We Were Young” and “Who Am Eye?” with question including “Who do you love fighting with?” and “A time when you were wrong about yourself.”
Her web store is also stocked with a $15 Adele ceramic Christmas tree ornament featuring a vintage-looking pic of the singer in profile and a drawstring pouch, as well as an $85 green crewneck sweatshirt with a bedazzled “A” logo on the front, matching $80 green holiday sweatpants and a $90 black Adele hoodie.
Earlier in the day the singer reminisced about her “adventure” in Las Vegas during the run of twice-a-weekend shows that kicked off in November 2022 and wound down on Saturday. “Las Vegas you’ve been so good to me,” she wrote. “This residency went on to mirror what 30 was about – lost and broken to healed and thriving! Seems so fitting in the end.”
Adele has not said what she will do next, but the singer who typically takes extended breaks between albums has previously hinted at plans to temporarily step away from music, saying she’s prepared to take a “big break after this.”
Check out Adele’s preview of the box set and her holiday gear below.
As audiences continue holding space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” Wicked star Cynthia Erivo is making sure that they understand the intention of her green-skinned heroine. On Tuesday (Nov. 26), Erivo spoke with Variety about the creation of her version of the iconic character, saying that she wanted her Elphaba to be intrinsically similar […]
Drake shocked the music industryon Monday (Nov. 25) when he accused his label, Univeral Music Group, and Spotify in a court filing of artificially inflating the popularity of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
Drake’s Frozen Moments LLC alleges in the filing that the two parties conducted an “illegal scheme” that involved paid bots and other methods to “pump up” Lamar’s track that viciously disses him and accuses him of pedophilia, among other claims. UMG has denied the allegations, calling them “offensive and untrue” in a statement to Billboard. (Spotify declined to comment.)
The legal procedure — and the second action against UMG that Drake filed Tuesday (Nov. 26) — essentially reignited the flame for the Kendrick and Drake beef, as fans continued to bicker back and forth on social media over his legal maneuvers. “Drake Stan’s acting like Drake suing in order to fight the good fight against capitalism is soooooo funny bro LMFAOOOOOOO,” one person tweeted.
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7PM in Brooklyn co-host Kazeem Famuyide took a different approach while examining the industry as a whole. “Kendrick: F the whole industry. Drake: F the whole industry. Cole: F the whole industry. Fans: actually, I’m on the industry’s side here,” he added.
Kendrick: F the whole industry. Drake: F the whole industry. Cole: F the whole industry. Fans: actually, I’m on the industry’s side here. pic.twitter.com/l96ouJWN8P— Kazeem Famuyide 🇳🇬 🍎 (@Kazeem) November 26, 2024
No Jumper‘s Adam22 agreed this could have major implications on the music industry. “Anyone acting like Drake is just a bad loser hasn’t read this s–t yet,” he tweeted. “If half of this gets proven, Drake will look like a hero for exposing the corrupt music industry.”
Former NFL star Arian Foster took a different approach and jokingly compared Drake’s legal action to this being his version of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
“One thing that’s funny to me about Drake suing his label is I’ve never seen so many fans be on the label’s side before lmao,” another fan chimed in. “This the first time where the artist isn’t automatically right to the public.”
In its statement to Billboard, UMG noted: “We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear.”
Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” proved to be the knockout blow in his feud with Drake, and has remained a cultural staple as one of the biggest songs of the year. The Mustard-produced diss track topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a pair of weeks and hasn’t departed from the top 20 since its arrival in May.
Find more fan reactions to Drake’s legal actions below.
Drake the type of nigga you find in hide & go seek and then he cry and say he wasn’t even playing 😭😭😭 Fuck was you in the dryer for???— I LOVE YOU, PINK!🦋 (@Pinkthepimp) November 25, 2024
Drake reporting Kendrick to the HR department is crazy work— DDOT. (@DDotOmen) November 26, 2024
Drake trolled and begged for Kendrick to get in the ring and got his ass handed to him now he went back in the house and dialed 911— Trav (@travaunt) November 25, 2024
(This list is a project that Billboard initially published in 2018, and which we’ve updated in some form every year since. In honor of our associated Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century list finally nearing its conclusion — we’re publishing our No. 2 essay today (Nov. 26), with No. 1 coming next Tuesday (Dec. 3) — we’re republishing the project, now updated until 2023, and in a more easily navigated form. Check it out here and come back next week for both the reveal of our No. 1 Greatest Pop Star of the 21st Century, and then the week after as we begin rolling out our picks for the Greatest Pop Star of 2024!)
Pop stardom is, in many ways, a competitive sport. Not one that demands a lone winner as justification for the whole enterprise, exactly, but one that still entrances those of us watching from the sidelines to see who’ll come out on top. Who’s No. 1 this week? Who outsold who? Who’s playing the biggest venues? Who’s racking up Grammys, BBMAs, VMAs? Listeners can love and admire their artists of choice without them winning these many mini-battles — but when they do, it provides the same rush as a home-team victory, since it still provides some measure of that most important validation in fandom: Our fav is better than your fav.
Now, we here at Billboard obviously play no small part in the declaration of these victors, as success on our charts has long been one of the biggest measures by which pop stardom is sized and graded. But we also know that while chart success is an essential factor, pop stardom carries too many intangibles to be judged solely on any combination of numerical calculations. It’s not just hit singles and best-selling albums: It’s music videos, it’s live performances, it’s image, it’s headlines and controversy and cultural impact and overall ubiquity. It’s the answer to the question, “Could you have lived through this year without having an opinion on this artist?”
Of course, it’s a far more subjective assessment than simply which team scored more points by the final buzzer. But it’s a discussion that has long been ongoing for rappers, and now something our staffers and most trusted contributors have been working on for many months to bring it to the pop world — with our list of the greatest pop stars from each year since 1981.
Now, understand that when we say “pop star,” we’re not just meaning solo artists in the classic triple-threat, top 40 dead-center mold of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Those two artists appear, of course, as do many of their most obvious acolytes. But we define “pop star” broadly enough for it to also encompass rappers and singer-songwriters, rock bands and R&B groups. As long as they were impactful and wide-reaching enough to have a profound impact on that vague concept we know as the mainstream — and even more amorphously, the culture — they’re up for consideration here.
Why 1981 as a starting point? Well, gotta start somewhere, and ‘81 was the year that forever changed modern stardom, with the premiere of MTV cementing the music video as an elemental factor in pop iconicity. Though its true impact on the top 40 landscape wouldn’t really be felt for a couple years after its debut, videos forever changed the scale of pop stardom, making the biggest artists three-dimensional figures, as present in our lives as our favorite sitcom stars and talk show hosts, if not more so. The new competitive landscape of MTV rotation forced them to think bigger, to try harder — and from Janet to Alanis to Rihanna to Drake, it’s impossible to envision the past 40-plus years of pop stardom without its impact.
And what does “greatest” mean, exactly? Well, it’s not exactly “most popular,” though that’s certainly a large part of it. And it’s definitely not our personal favorites, strictly speaking — we love these artists, but this wasn’t the place for any of us to stump for our Should Be Bigger pet causes. Mostly, we’re looking for the pop star that best defines each year; the one whose impact was most deeply felt across the most spaces. How much of the year the artist is active for also matters: For instance, Taylor Swift might have released 1989 in 2014, but the album didn’t drop until October — so she’s more likely to be in play for 2015, when the set spun off most of its hit singles and videos and she spent most of the year on her victory lap world tour.
Of course, our perception of pop stardom is unavoidably colored by personal experience — and our decidedly North American perspective — and you might very well see some of our picks and think that based on your own memories, we couldn’t be more wrong. Totally fair: We’ve done the best we could with the objective stats and the emotional reactions we all have, but several of these come down to coin-flip situations where we had to just sigh and go with our gut. To acknowledge some of the artists we passed over, though, we’ve also included some honorable mentions for each year — along with awarding rookie of the year (for emerging pop stars then still new to the mainstream) and comeback of the year (for veteran stars who had their first big year in a while) distinctions for each year.
Read on below to find our essays attempting to justify our picks for each year — along with a handful of sidebar discussions that we couldn’t get to in our primary pieces — and feel free to let us know how we did your favorite artist wrong. Do try to remember, though: In pop music as in sports, there’s always next year.
1981: Blondie
Image Credit: Illustration by Heston Godby; Getty Images
11/26/2024
See how Billboard ranks every song on the new LP.
11/26/2024
Drake has launched a second bombshell legal action against Universal Music Group over Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” accusing the music giant of defamation and claiming it could have halted the release of a song “falsely accusing him of being a sex offender.”
A day after filing an action in New York accusing UMG of illegally boosting Lamar’s track with payments to Spotify, Drake’s company leveled similar claims in Texas court regarding radio giant iHeartRadio. The new filing, filed late Monday and made public on Tuesday, claims UMG “funneled payments” to iHeart as part of a “pay-to-play scheme” to promote the song on radio.
But the filing also offers key new details about Drake’s grievances toward UMG, the label where he has spent his entire career. In it, he says UMG knew that Kendrick’s song “falsely” accused him of being a “certified pedophile” and “predator” but chose to release it anyway.
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“UMG … could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed,” Drake’s lawyers write. “But UMG chose to do the opposite. UMG designed, financed and then executed a plan to turn ‘Not Like Us’ into a viral mega-hit with the intent of using the spectacle of harm to Drake and his businesses to drive consumer hysteria and, of course, massive revenues. That plan succeeded, likely beyond UMG’s wildest expectations.”
Like the New York filing on Monday, the new petition isn’t quite a lawsuit. Instead, it’s so-called pre-action filing aimed taking depositions from key figures at UMG and iHeart in order to obtain more information that might support Drake’s accusations in a future lawsuit.
In seeking that information, Drake’s lawyers say they already have enough evidence to pursue a “claim for defamation” against UMG, but that they might also tack on claims of civil fraud and racketeering based on what they discover from the depositions.
UMG and iHeartRadio did not immediately return requests for comment on the new filing. Lamar is not named as a respondent in the filing and is not legally accused of any wrongdoing.
Universal Music Group responded to yesterday’s filing with a statement provided to Billboard. “The suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue,” the company said. “We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear.”
Like Monday’s bombshell petition, the new filing in Texas is another remarkable escalation in the high-profile beef between the two stars, which saw Drake and Lamar exchange stinging diss tracks over a period of months earlier this year. Such beefs happen frequently in the world of hip-hop, but few thought either side would file legal actions over the insults.
It also represents a deepening of the rift between Drake and UMG, where the star has spent his entire career — first through signing a deal with Lil Wayne’s Young Money imprint, which was distributed by Republic Records, then by signing directly to Republic. Lamar, too, has spent his entire career associated with UMG and is currently signed to a licensing deal with Interscope.
In Tuesday’s new petition, Drake essentially accused the music giant of using illegal means to unfairly prioritize one of its artists over the other.
“Before it approved the release of the song, UMG knew that the song itself, as well as its accompanying album art and music video, attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake, by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders and committing other criminal sexual acts,” his lawyers write.
For the 2021 update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard counted down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2021. At No. 1. we remember the year in Taylor Swift — who rewrote industry rules and had one of the most impactful years of her storied pop career without even releasing an entirely new album. Find a full essay about her 2021 below, and find our Greatest Pop Star picks for every year up to present day here.
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“You guys turned a hard thing into a very, very wonderful experience,” Taylor Swift told an audience of diehard fans at a November screening of her All Too Well short film at New York City’s AMC Lincoln Square theater. Before unveiling the self-directed companion piece to the 10-minute version of the fan favorite epic of the same name, featured on the re-recorded Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift expressed gratitude to a group of supporters that helped turn a non-single breakup track from her original 2012 album into a signature song worthy of expanding past the double-digit minute mark. “All Too Well” could have been little more than a personally revealing footnote to her career, Swift pointed out; instead, the fans identified its intimate power, championed it, and ultimately revived it, to create one of the most eagerly anticipated revisited songs in pop history. “All of this is happening,” Swift told her audience, “because you made this happen.”
Well, yes and no. Swift is correct that the fandom that gathered around “All Too Well” — a long-form songwriting feat, with some of the most evocative lyricism of Swift’s career — in the nine years since its original release helped clear the path for “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” as a capital-E Event stretching beyond the Swifties into the mainstream. Yet she deserves a ton of credit herself: No other popular artist harnessed that type of fan energy with as much passion and imagination in 2021 as Swift, across albums and platforms, on projects that challenged the modern music industry while still succeeding wildly within it.
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2021:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Comeback of the Year: Willow | Rookie of the Year: Olivia Rodrigo | No. 10: Bad Bunny | No. 9: Dua Lipa | No. 8: Justin Bieber | No. 7: Drake | No. 6: BTS | No. 5: The Weeknd | No. 4: Doja Cat | No. 3: Adele | No. 2: Lil Nas X
Swift began 2021 still riding high from a triumphant 2020 – a year she reasonably could have taken off, having delivered her Lover album in August 2019 and watched her planned Lover Fest stadium shows fall victim to the pandemic the following year. Instead, Swift fell down a musical rabbit hole that yielded two full albums and, in hindsight, catered perfectly to her songwriting strengths. The first one, Folklore scored the largest debut week for an album in 2020 upon its July release, and companion piece Evermore earned the fifth-largest in December, both ending 2020 and starting 2021 atop the Billboard 200 albums chart.
With Evermore, Swift continued the sonic reinvention kick-started by Folklore, an unexpected alt-folk exploration recorded in secret during quarantine with indie vets like The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Evermore would go on to spend three total weeks atop the Billboard 200 in 2021. Meanwhile, its hushed, woodsy single “Willow,” which launched atop the Hot 100 in December alongside the album release, grew into a radio success in the spring, ascending to No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Pop Airplay chart in April.
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Before that, however, Swift won another album of the year trophy. At the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in March, Folklore took home the top prize — the third of Swift’s career, following wins for Fearless at the 2010 ceremony and 1989 in 2016. Not only did the win help Swift enter the record books, as the fourth artist overall and only woman with three album of the year wins (following Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon), the accomplishment was also a bit of personal validation after Swift’s two previous albums, 2017’s Reputation and 2019’s Lover, were not even nominated in the top category. Once again, Swift thanked the fans, this time for embracing the artistic swerve of her 2020 output: “You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created,” she said in her acceptance speech, “and we can’t tell you how honored we are forever by this.”
One month later, Swift returned to that first album of the year winner of hers. In April, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) kicked off the behemoth endeavor of re-recording her first six studio albums. Announced in 2019, the project followed the acquisition of Swift’s master recordings by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, as a way for her to essentially reclaim ownership over the period of her career that made her a household name. What could have been an industry curiosity based around a rights dispute instead played out like a widescreen revisit to a pivotal era of Swift’s career, as hits like “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story” were lovingly re-created, and previously unreleased tracks from the Fearless recording sessions were finally unveiled as “From The Vault” treasures.
The amount of care that Swift put into Fearless (Taylor’s Version) turned the 26-track set into a must-hear remake of the diamond-certified original, and fans embraced it as such. The full-length became the first re-recorded version of a previous No. 1 album to top the Billboard 200 albums chart upon its release, with the biggest debut week of 2021 at the time with 291,000 equivalent album units, according to MRC Data.
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It wasn’t the only way that Swift’s towering legacy cast a shadow over the first half of 2021, either. In between the April release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and the June announcement that Red (Taylor’s Version) would be the next re-recorded album to arrive in November, Swift proved a key influence, and contributor, to another artist’s year-defining album. Pop singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo hasn’t been shy about her love of Swift’s music over the course of her breakout year, name-checking the superstar as a sonic and spiritual guide when “Drivers License” was released back in January, and receiving an Instagram shout-out from Swift during the debut single’s quick ascent.
Rodrigo’s debut album Sour took the adoration even further upon its May release: the heart-wrenching piano ballad “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” borrowed from Swift’s own heart-wrenching piano ballad, 2017’s “New Year’s Day,” resulting in Swift and Jack Antonoff being listed as writers on the track. Two months after the album’s release, Rodrigo also added Swift, Antonoff and Annie Clark as co-writers to the post-breakup reflection “Deja Vu” due to the bridge’s similarities to Swift’s own complex-romance remembrance, 2019’s “Cruel Summer.” Rodrigo is pop’s rookie of the year with 2021’s biggest breakthrough album — which Swift gets some of the credit for, in ways both figurative and literal.
Delays in the vinyl shipping of Evermore pushed the album back to the top of the Billboard 200 when the record was finally sent out to fans in June, displacing Sour at No. 1 for a nice bit of teacher-student pop interplay. Swift stayed active all summer, guesting on two songs on How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, the latest album from Dessner’s Big Red Machine project — a charming continuation of the Folklore/Evermore era of gentle songwriting and rustic textures — and tossing out the Taylor’s Version re-recording of 1989’s “Wildest Dreams” to have a little fun with an unexpected viral moment the song was enjoying on TikTok.
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But by then, the 1989 era wasn’t the one fans were anxiously awaiting to revisit. If Red (Taylor’s Version) had simply matched Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in terms of fanfare and listenership, Swift’s year would have still been pretty spectacular. Instead, her second re-recorded album wildly outpaced its predecessor in nearly every way, turning the release of “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” into a cultural sensation — The short film! The remarkable SNL performance! The new lyrical allusions that launched a thousand Jake Gyllenhaal jokes! — and another chart-topper for Swift. With its November debut atop the Hot 100, “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” also became the longest No. 1 in the chart’s history — in the age of TikTok virality and dwindling attention spans, no less.
The expanded “All Too Well” wasn’t the only new revelation from the set, which also boasted new collaborations with Phoebe Bridgers, Ed Sheeran and Chris Stapleton on old “From The Vault” tracks; the Stapleton team-up, “I Bet You Think About Me,” has been getting airplay on Swift’s old stomping grounds of country radio. In the end, Red (Taylor’s Version) drove as much conversation as any of Swift’s recent all-new studio albums, and scored a blockbuster debut, with 605,000 first-week equivalent album units moved — good for the third-best debut week of 2021 with, it bears repeating, the majority of its songs released nearly a decade earlier.
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Even without a proper new album in 2021, Swift sent three separate projects to the top spot of the Billboard 200 during the calendar year — the first female artist to accomplish that feat in the chart’s 65-year history. And in November, one final domino fell for Swift’s re-recordings project when iHeartRadio announced that it would now only be playing Taylor’s Versions of her older hits from each album as they rolled out – after streaming platforms had already given them prominent placement on main pages and major playlists. In addition to the impressive sales of her re-recorded albums, the reactions from the streaming and radio worlds underline the widespread acceptance that these new recordings have replaced the classic versions as the ones listeners will be digesting and caring about moving forward.
As Swift enters 2022, she once again has the chance to make history: Evermore is nominated for the album of the year Grammy, and a victory at the Jan. 31 ceremony would make her the most celebrated artist in the 64-year history of the category. While other popular artists are rightfully celebrating award nominations and chart achievements, Swift can do both, while also credibly changing the way artists can approach creative ownership and sonic shifts. If Swift changed the game in the mid-2010s when pivoting from country to pop, playing it top 40’s way and earning the splashiest commercial wins of her career, including the distinction of also being Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2015, the past year found her rejecting the game entirely and drawing up her own rules. Now, she has the power to pull any sound she wants into her mainstream orbit, or make any industry institution reckon with her impact. She could release a 20-minute version of a song on her next re-recorded album, and you’d be foolish to bet against it becoming a hit.
Taylor Swift is making the type of moves within and outside of her music that elevate an artist from superstar to legend. Those moves are often very hard to execute, but no one who had been paying attention was the least bit surprised when she stuck each landing. Wind in her hair, Swift is here, and making it look all too easy.
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2022 here, or head back to the full list of every Greatest Pop Star from 1981-present here.)