Can Taylor Swift sing?

A critic responds to a question reviewers tend to ignore or downplay

Promotion for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour / DisneyPlus

Taylor Swift is “the last of the monocultural pop icons,” the British music critic Michael Hann wrote recently. All generations have heard of her, the way they’d heard of Elvis. Her reputation transcends “Reputation” and other albums that helped to make her famous.

Swift is the rare singer-songwriter who might credibly claim to be “more popular than Jesus,” as John Lennon said of the Beatles. She’s the only woman named a Time magazine “Person of the Year” twice, and her Eras Tour was the first tour to gross more than $1 billion.

Achievements like those may help to explain why, as Hann noted, there’s “something that rarely gets mentioned in the reviews: her singing.”

Swift’s voice tends to get second billing to the fervor of her fans, the “Swifties,” and how they express it in the swapping of beaded friendship bracelets and other acts of devotion. Or it’s upstaged by her romance with the Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce and the homemade Pop-Tarts she’s baked for him for breakfast.

So how well does Swift sing?

Hann, a former music editor of the Guardian, wrote after hearing her at Wembley Stadium in London in June:

“Swift is no Aretha Franklin; her voice does not leap octaves or convey unbridled passion. It’s a nice, clear unremarkable instrument. It’s how she uses it that is brilliant. Her phrasing, always, is very precise and particular, in a way that sounds less like singing than talking. She has tics—in her modulation and delivery—that make her sound conversational, which she emphasizes with lyrics that aren’t meant to be read like poetry but to be heard like chatter. I think that’s why the songs hit home: they seem less like songs to her fans than girly, gossipy exchanges.

“The lyrics, too, encourage that. Swift presents as a nice girl, but her lyrics are often not so. They are vengeful and angry. But she’s some sort of alchemist who converts rage into joy.”

Has all of it made Swift “more popular than Jesus” or the Beatles?

The New York Times investigated in a story that compared the tour revenue, platinum albums, and more of stars including Swift, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen. You can see the results in “How Big Is Taylor Swift? As big as the Beatles? Michael Jackson? Beyoncé? We crunched the numbers.”

Jan is an award-winning critic and journalist in the American South who has written for many major print and online media. You might also like another of her stories for The Media Circus on Jansplaining, “The Lost Art of the Hatchet Job.”