As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014.
The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small. Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. To chart her journey - from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties - is to follow a generation coming of age. Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. It didn’t matter.Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16. Don’s singing abilities stretched so many of our boundaries. You’re not going to find that track on a Crosby, Stills & Nash record or Beach Boys record. We did a big Philly-type production with strings - definitely not country-rock. He could stand out there all alone and just wail. I sent for some sheet music so I could learn some of those songs, and I started creating my own musical ideas with that Philly influence. As Frey wrote in the liner notes to The Very Best Of The Eagles, “I loved all the records coming out of Philadelphia at that time. Perhaps the most left-field departure of them all was “Wasted Time,” a song where co-writers Glenn Frey and Don Henley dared to display their blue-eyed soul.
The album found room for the sinewy mid-tempo groove of the title track, the crunching rock of “Victim Of Love” and “Life In The Fast Lane,” and the epic sweep of “The Last Resort.” But the addition of Joe Walsh on guitar allowed the band to spread its wings, so to speak, on Hotel California.
Early hits like “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise” and “The Best Of My Love” certainly fit the bill. Up to that point in their career, it would have been fair to lump the band within the genre of country-tinged soft rock.
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