U of A professor dissects popularity of Taylor Swift’s music

Music expert Alexander Carpenter dissects Taylor Swift’s lyrics and star power following the release of her new album.

On the day of the release of Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, University of Alberta music professor Alexander Carpenter spoke to CTV Your Morning Edmonton’s Kent Morrison about what makes the pop star’s music so irresistible.

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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: You’ve written about Taylor Swift’s song “Shake it Off” because of its structure. It seems simple to the ear, but it’s not. Can you explain that?

Alexander Carpenter: I taught it yesterday, actually. In part because of all of the Taylor Swift songs, and a lot of the interest in Taylor Swift, it has to do with these songs that are more emotionally compelling and more emotionally substantive, maybe. And “Shake it Off,” for all of its qualities, doesn’t really invite analysis. It seems very simple on the surface.

I use it as a way to introduce the idea of pop analysis to my students. They’re very skeptical about it. But the interesting thing about “Shake it Off,” and why I’m interested in doing pop music analysis at all, is that songs are sonic things. So as a musician, as a musicologist, I’m interested in the bones. Taking it apart and figuring out how they work. So you’re right. “Shake it Off” on its surface is very simple. There’s almost nothing to it. But as you dig into it, you discover that it’s quite complex.

KM: What is the complexity of a song like that?

AC: I started looking at it from the premise of: how does this song even work at all? How is it even a song? It has three chords, it has a very short drum loop. It’s not particularly melodious, but it is a total ear worm. It stayed on; it charted high.

I discovered one of the ways that this song works is through this very sophisticated layering. It starts very thin, and it gets thicker, (is) the simplest way to say. It has a very clever built-in momentum that catches the listener and pulls them along.

KM: You’ve compared her performance to that of Wayne Gretzky. Why is that?

AC: On the one hand, there is this seeming effortlessness. Wayne Gretzky as a player was intuitive, and everything seemed quite effortless. And then, of course, there’s, along with that, there’s the awareness that this is years and years and years of grinding, and a deep, deep awareness of the game.

And so, like Taylor Swift, these elements work together. I use sometimes the musical metaphor of counterpoint. So counterpoint is when you have two independent melodic lines. They’re independent, and yet they also have to work together. So in the case of some of these Taylor Swift songs, it is this relative simplicity that makes the song very accessible. And then there’s the complexity that is deeper. And these two are, they’re happening simultaneously.