Here's how Taylor Swift's prolific run of albums stacks up against the all-time greats
Taylor Swift is on a tear.
On Friday, the pop superstar is set to release her new album, "Midnights," which she's described as "a journey through terrors and sweet dreams" that features 13 tracks including a duet with Lana Del Rey. The LP will be the fourth set of new songs she's dropped since 2019, when "Lover" came out and was quickly followed by a pair of 2020 albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore," that the singer recorded during the COVID pandemic; last year she added to the pile with the first two installments, "Fearless (Taylor's Version)" and "Red (Taylor's Version)," in her plan to rerecord the six albums that partially slipped out of her control when her old record label changed hands. Each of these projects debuted at No. 1; "Folklore" topped many critics' best-of-2020 lists, while "Red's" 10-minute version of "All Too Well" set the take-o-sphere ablaze.
Swift's combination of prolificacy and commercial success is exceedingly rare these days, when the lucrative payoff of a global arena or stadium tour offers little incentive to shorten the life of a hit album by issuing another one too soon. (Without COVID's disruption of live music, it's unlikely that Swift would've returned to the studio when she did.) But this kind of hot hand is not unheard of in musical history: Just look at some of the great singer-songwriters of the 1970s, which is the creative model that Swift appears to be operating by at the moment.
A half-century ago, the LP became the dominant mode of pop expression, in part because it offered musicians a
