Stevie Nicks on Taylor Swift

The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters

New York Times

More than 250 music insiders and six New York Times critics weighed in on who defines the new American songbook. Here, in an unranked list, are the artists they chose.

She has never stopped chasing that initial Nashville impulse — a four-ish-minute distillation of the biggest feelings imaginable, threaded through a melody that won’t leave you alone. Sometimes she brings country phrasings to electro-pop, or pop rigor to indie rock; she might let her rhymes and verses go shaggy or bring a bridge back like a chorus. Such are the perks of having mastered the form early, while amassing the cultural capital to remake pop in her image.

Pop stars are not supposed to last this long or create this much. The Beatles’ entire creative output happened, essentially, in eight years. But Swift’s durability — 12 studio albums and hundreds of songs over two decades — has given us an unprecedented combination of musical auteurism and commercial success.

Her later work often explores the tension between the two. She has a campy kiss-off register for tart bon mots — “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die,” she chirps on the fake-bubbly “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” But on the dream-pop opus “Mirrorball,” it’s all earnest reflection from the top of the mountain: “I can change everything about me to fit in.”

Swift’s latest run of dominance, the stretch that has given her two more Grammys for album of the year (and four in total, a record), began with that surprise pandemic one-two flutter of “Folklore” and its sister album “Evermore.” Simultaneously, Swift was painstakingly recreating four of her earlier albums to own them outright. Collective fervor around the “Taylor’s Version” albums sent a 10-minute director’s cut rendition of a nearly decade-old breakup ballad, “All Too Well,” to No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 2021, simply because so many listeners wanted to hear even more of a track that made them feel bruised, abandoned and devastated.

Swift has done as much as anyone in modern popular music history to advance the idea of the song — its construction and impact, its tensions and limitations — as an important art form. But she has also done it while foregrounding the agency and emotional lives of young women, and as a result has become probably the most pored-over writer — or at least up there with J.K. Rowling and the pope — of the 21st century in any medium.

— Joe Coscarelli

Stevie Nicks on Taylor Swift

You ask about her brilliance
I can only say ~
If only I had — written it …
For me, this song will always live ~
In my heart
“You’re on your own kid —
You always have been … ”

I feel that her song is generational. I think it’s all of her relationships written into one song — a little bit of this, a little bit of that — and dropped into my lap. Over time, I have dropped in my own great loves to stand in her story, and it makes me cry for both of us — what we lost, what we learned and how we survived. That is how a great songwriter reaches into people’s hearts and connects with them. All that beauty and tragedy and life’s lessons have led her down this path of unstoppable creativity; she just doesn’t stop, and that is what has turned her into this beautiful young woman who makes magic with everything she touches.

P.S. Yes, this is the song that reconnected Taylor and I. The title of the song is something Christine would have said to me after she passed away — and I felt it came through Taylor. It helped me a lot to let her go ~

And brought me a new friend. …

— Stevie Nicks is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.