Is This a Good Time For Taylor Swift to Return to Country Music?

For the past two years I've been on a righteous quest to remind the world that Taylor Swift was a country singer three years ago.  Everyone wants to believe that she emerged fully formed as a glamorous pop star like Athena (and Kanye thinks it was from his enormous head) but I remember the other Taylor.  The girl with the bedazzled cheek and a six-string.  Recently Swift got caught in a white lie and found herself in some mildly hot water.  It's entirely possible for her to bounce back from this and continue her life as one of several queens of pop, but I think she would be better off moving forward by turning around, going back to the small pond in which she was once the biggest fish.  I've argued before that Taylor Swift should eventually return to country music but there may never be a better time than now.

First, let's recap Swift's career up to this point.  Her very first single was 2006's "Tim McGraw."  That's the title.  Her very first song was named after Nashville superstar Tim McGraw and was about McGraw's music reminding Swift and her ex of each other whenever they hear it.  "Tim McGraw" performed pretty well on the charts but her next single "Teardrops on My Guitar" was her true breakthrough.  It peaked at number two on Billboard Country and seven on Billboard Pop.  (I remember it being much bigger than that due to the passion it inspired in the female population of my rural high school.)  Those early songs from Swift's self-titled debut set the precedent for the six years that followed.  She made songs that were perhaps more pop than country but still more country than anything by the parade of tight-jeaned douche boys pandering their keyword crammed escapism that was going on at the same time and continues to this day.

Then, in 2012 Swift released her fourth album Red, the ultimate experiment in country-pop with dense production and touches of dubstep (it was 2012).  Of course, that was followed by 1989, Swift's first 100% pop album that is frankly a masterpiece.  I don't have a single bad word to say about the album itself but I also can't help but feel betrayed on behalf of her former genre, a community which inherently prizes conservative values including loyalty (and prizes Conservative values because it's Convenient).  I'm not one to stand in the way of someone's artistic growth but I have to wonder if that growth had to be in an obviously more profitable direction.  There was a time when that would have been called "selling out."

Now, less than two years after Swift gained all those new fans with a more polished style and persona her adoring public has turned on her and the discrepancy between the two Taylor's is to blame.  In April of this year Kanye West released a song with the line "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous," referencing the infamous incident when West interrupted Swift's acceptance speech on the national stage of the VMA's.  West claimed that Swift personally approved the line before its release, a claim that Swift's camp resolutely denied.  Last Sunday West's wife Kim Kardashian posted a Snapchat video of West on the phone with Swift in which she can be heard giving her unequivocal permission.  In the beginning Swift sounds enthusiastic but as it goes on it sounds like she doesn't approve at all of the implication that she owes her career to hip-hop's douchiest genius or that she owes him sex for it.  It sounds like she's just too afraid of conflict so she tries harder and harder to justify her initial consent.  Despite all the megastar bravado the sweet, sensitive country girl was too nice to start a fight.  Then, after the song came out the pop star returned and fought against the attack on her image through lies and deception.  For a few days before the Republican National Convention really heated up, the once universally beloved Taylor Swift became social media's villain of the week.

Interestingly, Kim's video begins with a stark reminder of Swift's past.  Apparently, her phone number still has a Nashville area code.  Maybe it's a sign that she should go back.  Instead of riding it out and continuing as a popstar I would like to see Taylor Swift return to her roots and then go deeper.  This is the perfect time for it because country music itself is going backwards in the best possible way.  Artists like Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, and Sturgill Simpson are leading the genre in the direction of a renaissance by making more traditional, stripped down country music instead of the flashy arena pop-rock that has dominated Nashville for years.  I'm talking about a Taylor Swift alt-country album.  The genre is fit to burst with creativity in the coming years.  When Swift was working on 1989 no one would have guessed that Simpson was about to become a superstar on the back of a cosmic spiritual concept album.

All due respect to Max Martin but if Swift dropped him in favor of Dave Cobb, the producer of Stapleton's Traveler and  Simpson's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the results could be really fascinating.  Swift moved to Nashville to become a country star when she was 14 then devoted ten of her 26 years to the genre.  If Taylor Swift thinks that's more than enough time to give to the style and audience that actually did make her famous then I certainly can't argue, but if she wants to have a Pure Country moment and sing about the "heartland," if she wants to be part of what could be a historic artistic movement, well, I would wager that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian won't be at the CMA's any time soon.