Taylor Swift: Era by Era: The Unauthorised Biography by Caroline Sullivan (Michael O’Mara Books)
You could probably fill a book with staggering Taylor Swift statistics – selling 62,000 vinyl copies of the Taylor’s Version of 1989 in its first week, taking over the Hot 100 top ten with tracks from her 2022 album Midnights, reaching one billion Spotify streams in a week with her latest Tortured Poets Department to name just three.
Author Caroline Sullivan confines herself to the odd stats bomb here and there but happily is more interested in Swift the cultural phenomenon, hard-working artist and savvy operator, and how all of these facets intersect. On the first point alone, Swift is one of those rare artists who has spawned cultural workshops, business courses and a club, Swiftogeddon, which only places Taylor tunes.
Sullivan offers a good old-fashioned meticulously researched biography. Using the Eras concept as her structure, she traces Swift’s fledging career and then devotes a chapter to each of her albums and related developments. As the record-breaking Eras tour (highest grossing of all time and still only at the halfway point) hits the UK, this is a book forged in the eye of the commercial hurricane.
Taylor Swift: Era by Era absolutely buys into the brand of Swift as a good friend and everyday feminist, who values “nice” as a quality above others – arriving at the 2009 VMAs in a horse-drawn glass coach was a rare starry move. It’s easy to be charmed by the story of Swift attending her first concert aged seven and being so sweetly treated by her idol LeAnn Rimes that she was as inspired to be kind to her own fans as to became a star in her own right.
Sullivan crams a lot into 250 pages – the achievements, the relationships, including her most enduring one with her fans, as well as her own effusive analysis of her pop smarts and impact. Of 2020 album Folklore she remarks sagely that “it wasn’t intrusive; it just provided company.” She is as much fan as she is commentator here but is still on the subs bench of Team Taylor compared to the alleged 20,000 Swifties who tracked their idol’s trans-Pacific flight home to watch current beau Travis Kelce at the Super Bowl in February.
